Who's the mole in the Trump camp?

The dossier – compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele – makes an allegation that there was a “conspiracy of cooperation” between Russian agents and the Trump campaign, and the president has frequently scorned it since its publication last January.

[...]

According to Simpson, Steele “severed his relationship with the FBI” after the New York Times published a story in late October 2016 that said agents had not found “any conclusive or direct link between Mr Trump and the Russian government”.

Steele was concerned “that the FBI was being manipulated for political ends by the Trump people and that we didn’t really understand what was going on”.

[...]

Elsewhere in his 312-page testimony, Simpson told the senators that “an internal Trump campaign source” or “a human source from inside the Trump organization” had reported his or her concerns to the FBI.

  Guardian

And there's been lots of speculation about who that person might be. Many have decided it must be George Papadopoulos, but that can't be true if Simpson is correct in this assumption:

“I think it was a voluntary source, someone who was concerned about the same concerns we had. It was someone who decided to pick up the phone and report something.”

Papadopoulos was busted by the FBI and took a plea deal. He didn't voluntarily report anything to them. His revelation of the collusion came in a drunken night with an Australian diplomat.

It seems that the need now to protect whoever "picked up the phone" has taken on great importance.

[A] person close to the matter suggested Simpson had got some details wrong about the human source during his evidence session in August and was actually alluding to the role of George Papadopoulos, the Trump campaign foreign policy adviser, who shared knowledge of the Russian hacking of Democratic party emails with an Australian diplomat.

THAT, I feel quite certain, is bullshit. Simpson was very careful and precise in his testimony, saying outright when he couldn't reveal something.

Essentially what he told me was they had other intelligence about this matter from an internal Trump campaign source and that — that they — my understanding was that they believed Chris at this point — that they believed Chris’s information might be credible because they had other intelligence that indicated the same thing and one of those pieces of intelligence was a human source from inside the Trump organization.

Asked if he knew who that source was, Simpson declined to answer, though he did explain a bit more about what Steele told him. (Note that this is Simpson conveying what Steele says he was told by his FBI source in Rome.)

” . . . I think it was a voluntary source, someone who was concerned about the same concerns we had,” Simpson explained. “It was someone like us who decided to pick up the phone and report something.”

  WaPo

The topic of this other person begins on page 175 of Simpson's testimony:

Again, on page 195:

People are going to be digging now to find out who this person is. Which could, I suppose, speed things up.

As for Steele himself...

He was reportedly interviewed by investigators last year, though the comments have not been made public.

Mr Steele went into hiding a year ago when he was revealed as the author of a document detailing salacious allegations about Mr Trump, which was circulating before the election.

  UK Telegraph

In his testimony, Simpson repeatedly praised Steele, his skills and his reliability, pointing out that the former British intelligence officer was the “lead Russianist at MI6” who was “extremely well regarded”.

He described Steele, who he said he hired in May or June of 2016, as “basically a boy scout”.

“He worked for the government for a very long time. He lives a very modest, quiet life, and this is his specialty,” Simpson said.

“We got along very well because my speciality is public information. So he was comfortable working with me and I was comfortable working with him and, you know, we’ve both been around a lot of criminal investigations and national security stuff.”

Simpson said that while he and his colleagues at Fusion focused on the analysis of documents, Steele’s strength was his personal contacts to sources in Moscow and the Trump camp, drawing on his intelligence background. He said that at the time Steele was hired, the alleged Trump links to the Kremlin were an open secret in Moscow.

“The thing that people forget about what was going on in June of 2016 was that no one was really focused on sort of this question of whether Donald Trump had a relationship with the Kremlin. So, you know, when Chris started asking around in Moscow about this the information was sitting there. It wasn’t a giant secret,” Simpson said.

“People were talking about it freely. It was only later that it became a subject of great controversy and people clammed up, and at that time the whole issue of the hacking was also, you know, not really focused on Russia. So these things eventually converged into, you know, a major issue, but at the time it wasn’t one.”

  Guardian

Grassley and fellow Republican Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina took the unusual step Friday of asking Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein to investigate former British spy Christopher Steele, the author of the report filled with allegations that are unverified and in some cases salacious.

[...]

Joshua Levy, a lawyer for Fusion GPS, [...] questioned the referral.

“After a year of investigations into Donald Trump’s ties to Russia, the only person Republicans seek to accuse of wrongdoing is one who reported on these matters to law enforcement in the first place,” Levy said. “Publicizing a criminal referral based on classified information raises serious questions about whether this letter is nothing more than another attempt to discredit government sources, in the midst of an ongoing criminal investigation.”

  Bloomberg

I think that's pretty obvious and suggest Senators Grassley and Graham be investigated.

Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, the top Democrat on the Judiciary panel, ripped the move in an emailed statement, saying neither she nor other Democrats were consulted.

“I think this referral is unfortunate as it’s clearly another effort to deflect attention from what should be the committee’s top priority: determining whether there was collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia to influence the election and whether there was subsequent obstruction of justice,” she said.

And then, she did the right thing and released Simpson's testimony.

UPDATE:

Natasha Bertrand of Business Insider says she's been told the source Simpson is talking about is the Australian diplomat who went to US officials about Papadopoulos' drunken admissions, but he wouldn't have been someone either  "inside the Trump organization" or campaign.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE:

Fusion is now saying Simpson "mischaracterized" the so-called mole in the Trump campaign.  They're saying the other person is actually the Australian diplomat Papadopoulos spilled the beans to.  That could be true, and it could be a cover.  Simpson's testimony was given before the Australian angle was public knowledge, and it wasn't in the Steele dossier, so it's not even certain that Simpson knew about the Australian when he gave his testimony.

We'll find out when Mueller is done.