How do you defend the indefensible? Start with Axios. The news outfit founded by former Politico mainstay Mike Allen has a front-page feature by Steve LeVine that attempts to defend and rehabilitate Fusion GPS, the group that produced the phony Trump dossier. In the piece, Levine recasts the notorious smear outfit as just a group of smart investigative reporters turned gumshoes.  Axios portrays their principals, Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch, as intelligent, ultra-competent, and rather incredibly, only in their line of business "with no motive apart from the thrill of the chase." (Which is to say they take anyone's dollars.) They are seriously savvy at finding extremely hard-to-locate — and even more difficult to understand and contextualize — documents and other intelligence on globally powerful people and organizations. People who know what they are talking about want to speak with them, in large part because they understand that —...(Read Full Article)