Copyright © 2019 by Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
RANDOM HOUSE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
Hardback ISBN 9780593134153
Ebook ISBN 9780593134160
randomhousebooks.com
Cover design and illustration: Carlos Beltrán
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Preface
Chapter One: “I Think We Have a Problem”
Chapter Two: Project Bangor
Chapter Three: The Charlatan
Chapter Four: The Fixer
Chapter Five: New Client
Chapter Six: Calling Agent Steele
Chapter Seven: Say Something
Chapter Eight: Breakfast at the Mayflower
Chapter Nine: Hail Mary Time
Chapter Ten: “Courage, Folks”
Chapter Eleven: “I Need to Know If Any of This Is True”
Chapter Twelve: “You Are Gonna Get People Killed”
Chapter Thirteen: “Can You Call Me Please?”
Chapter Fourteen: A Senator Attacks
Chapter Fifteen: Natalia
Chapter Sixteen: Captain America
Chapter Seventeen: “What I’m Going to Do to You…”
Chapter Eighteen: Waiting for Mueller
Epilogue
Dedication
Acknowledgments
A Note on Sources
Endnotes
Selected Bibliography
About the Authors
This book was made possible by Donald Trump and his supporters in Congress. For more than two years, they pursued multiple legal avenues to pry into the private client work of Fusion GPS, even as they labored to hide the Trump campaign’s dealings with Russia. Their baseless allegations about Fusion’s work, which at their core attacked the constitutional right to free speech, ultimately forced the firm and some of its clients to provide documents and testimony about its research efforts—information Fusion would have otherwise been contractually obligated to keep confidential. Congress’s assault on Fusion provided the firm with an unexpected opportunity to tell the true story of its investigations into Trump and its work with Christopher Steele.
The surest sign the dam was about to burst came in the form of an encrypted call, on the afternoon of January 4, 2017, from a number in the 646 area code. A New York cellphone. Glenn Simpson and his business partner at Fusion GPS, Peter Fritsch, had been getting their share of blind calls since Donald Trump’s election.
The inauguration was just weeks away, and reporters from all the major media outlets were desperate to catch up on a story many had fumbled or simply ignored: how to explain the bizarre relationship between Trump and Russia.
By then, Simpson and Fritsch were deep into that story. Few outside of a small group of journalists and lawyers knew of their work during the campaign, but word had started seeping out after Trump’s upset victory. Their Washington-based research firm had been digging into Trump’s ties to criminal elements in the United States and Russia since September 2015. Month after month the project had grown in scope, starting with a review of his business record and expanding to a full excavation of his many dubious real estate projects, from Panama to Azerbaijan. Fusion worked with a global network of sources and subcontractors to examine Trump’s dealings with an array of oligarchs and convicted criminals from the former Soviet Union as well as his decades of mysterious trips to Russia in pursuit of real estate deals that never got off the ground.
Fritsch swiped his phone to answer. “Hello, Peter?” a voice said. “This is Carl Bernstein.” The legendary former Washington Post Watergate reporter was now working with CNN. He had something urgent to discuss. Bernstein was polite and affable, far from the aggressive, take-no-prisoners reporter Fritsch imagined from All the President’s Men.
After exchanging a few pleasantries, Bernstein said he wanted to discuss some information he came across that suggested Trump might be entangled with Russian president Vladimir Putin in ways virtually no one knew or even suspected. If true, Bernstein said, this was a situation as dire as Watergate—maybe more so. He was also eager to get to a former British spy working at a company based in London called Orbis. He asked if Fritsch could help put him in touch.
Fritsch, a former Wall Street Journal reporter and editor, fished a bit, trying to figure out how Bernstein had known to call Fusion. Hardly one to give up a source, Bernstein made vague reference to mutual friends. “I’m pretty sure what I’m hearing is more than just rumor,” he said.
Then he got to the point. He had heard some documents existed that painted an alarming portrait of the ways in which Russia may have compromised the incoming president. Could Fritsch help flesh out his understanding, off the record? Could he help him get in contact with the ex-spy who had produced the documents? Fritsch answered in general terms that, yes, Trump’s relationship with Russia was important, but he begged off any deeper discussion. At least for now.
After hanging up, Fritsch called Simpson on an encrypted line. Simpson was wrapping up a year-end holiday in Mexico. “Hey, I think we have a problem,” Fritsch said. “I think Carl Bernstein may have Chris’s reports.”
Chris was Christopher Steele, a former intelligence officer with Britain’s MI6 who once served in Moscow and went on to run the spy service’s Russia desk. A highly respected but low-profile Russia expert, Steele was about to become famous in ways he never expected. “Ugh,” Simpson said. “That’s not good.”
After delving into Trump’s Russia dealings for nearly nine months, Fusion had hired Steele in May 2016 to supplement its research. By then, Fusion had many reasons to harbor suspicions about the Trump campaign. Months earlier, they had uncovered court filings in Virginia seeming to show that Trump’s campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, owed tens of millions of dollars to Oleg Deripaska, a Russian oligarch who wanted his money back and had close ties to Putin. Simpson and Fritsch had also gotten wind of a closely guarded secret: The FBI suspected that the Russian government had hacked into the computer system of the Democratic National Committee. Fusion began to wonder if these events were related.
Steele’s task was to tap his Russian source network to answer some nagging questions arising from the information on Trump that Fusion had already gathered: Why had Trump made so many trips to Russia over the years, without ever getting a single development project off the ground? Why did so many threads in the Trump story lead to Moscow and figures close to Putin? And why was Trump so smitten with Putin, who seemed fond of Trump in return?
Simpson had spent fifteen years in Washington and Europe as a Wall Street Journal investigative reporter, focusing much of his work on the emerging scourge of transnational crime. To his surprise, some of the characters from the ex–Soviet Union who surfaced in the initial phase of Fusion’s investigation of Trump were people he had written about a decade earlier while investigating Russian corruption and organized crime for the Journal, stories Fritsch had edited while the two worked in Brussels.
Simpson wasn’t completely surprised by the news of the Bernstein call. He told Fritsch that he had recently heard from a friend at The Washington Post that Fred Hiatt, the pa
per’s editorial page editor, was talking about some sensational memoranda that sounded a lot like Steele’s work.
Someone was leaking—that was clear. This had the potential to be a big problem.
The Steele reports—soon to be known as “the dossier”—were field intelligence from one of the West’s most senior Russia watchers. The memos he produced were never meant to be viewed outside of a tiny circle of people, much less shared with the public. In unredacted form, the reports could expose Steele’s sources and jeopardize lives. Steele took great care to mask those sources in his reports to Fusion. Still, the information clearly came from people with extraordinary access in Russia, and Russian intelligence could figure out who they were and track them down. Those sources included a number of people inside Russia and field operatives outside the country who needed protecting at all costs. Unredacted memos flying around among the Washington press corps risked exposing people to real danger.
Given the control Fusion had maintained over the memos, there was only one likely suspect for the leak: David Kramer, a longtime adviser to Republican senator John McCain.
At Steele’s urging, Simpson had provided a set of the memos to Kramer a few weeks after the election. This was done for the sole purpose of passing them to McCain, who would then provide them to the head of the FBI. Steele had been secretly working with FBI agents for months, trying to sound the alarm, while Simpson had provided updates to a longtime contact at the Justice Department. Still, the feds seemed to be slow on the uptake, and Steele, Simpson, and Fritsch were concerned that the information was not getting through to the top brass. An alarmed McCain had promised to fix that.
Senator McCain, still many months from a dire brain cancer diagnosis, wanted to put a copy of Steele’s memos in front of FBI Director James Comey—a decision his friend and fellow Republican senator Lindsey Graham encouraged. McCain wanted to know if the FBI was doing anything about credible information from a trusted ex–intelligence official in the U.K. that a hostile foreign power might have influence over the U.S. president-elect.
Simpson agreed to entrust Kramer with a copy of the Steele memos, for McCain’s eyes only, because he knew that Kramer’s dislike of Putin ran deep. While still a reporter, Simpson had turned to Kramer as a source a decade earlier for stories on Russia’s growing political influence in Washington. But Kramer’s alarm was so acute that he could easily do something rash. Lately, he had been telling associates that he still hoped to find a way—any way—to stop Trump from being inaugurated. He thought that exposing Trump’s Russia ties might just be the answer. How he planned to do that was unclear.
Kramer’s theory was about to be tested.
* * *
—
The story blew open at 5:10 P.M. on the afternoon of January 10, 2017, in a live broadcast by CNN that revealed just how far up the chain the Steele reporting had traveled. Above the chyron “INTEL CHIEFS PRESENTED TRUMP WITH CLAIMS OF RUSSIAN EFFORTS TO COMPROMISE HIM,” a phalanx of three top CNN correspondents, plus Carl Bernstein, announced that senior intelligence officials had appended a two-page synopsis of some disturbing information to a classified briefing presented to both President Obama and President-elect Trump.
Jim Sciutto, CNN’s longtime national security correspondent, delivered the overview: “Classified documents on Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election,” he said, had been presented to Obama and Trump. And those documents reportedly included “allegations that Russian operatives claimed to have compromising personal and financial information about Mr. Trump.”
And then, for the first time, he spoke of what would become known as the dossier, saying the allegations were based on memos “compiled by a former British intelligence operative whose past work U.S. intelligence officials consider credible.” Barely a year earlier, Steele’s information had played a role in the U.S. government’s successful prosecution of corruption inside FIFA, soccer’s worldwide governing body. He had U.S. and British government contacts at the highest levels. CNN said the information had been commissioned by an unnamed political research outfit.
Simpson and Fritsch and their team of researchers stood rapt in front of the big-screen TV in their Dupont Circle office, a fifteen minute walk up Connecticut Avenue from the White House. “The intel chiefs briefed Obama on Chris’s memos?” Fritsch said. “That is beyond big.”
What the CNN report didn’t note was something Simpson and Fritsch knew from their experience as journalists: There is no way “opposition research” or field intelligence from a private foreign source reaches the desk of the president of the United States without senior officials in the U.S. government ascribing at least some credibility to those findings.
For Fusion, news of the leak caused alarm because of the potential risk to Steele’s sources. But it also provided a validation of the research. For months, Simpson, Fritsch, and Steele had all tried, in different ways, to discreetly point reporters and authorities to a growing body of information indicating that Trump had a litany of troubling ties to Russia—with only limited success. Now, it seemed, some of that information had shot to the highest levels of the federal government.
If Trump was truly beholden to Putin, or susceptible to being manipulated by him, the implications were chilling. Just as scary, both houses of Congress were under the control of a Republican Party that now seemed ready to put all its chips on Trump. The possible consequences of Trump’s unchecked friendliness toward Putin included the lifting of sanctions on Russia, the weakening or even demise of NATO, the spread of Russian-style corruption and kleptocracy to the West, and, more immediately for Fusion, the threat of retaliation from an incoming regime eager to even the score against its critics and whistleblowers.
As the CNN panel dissected what this all might mean, Bernstein and his colleagues appeared to do their best to walk a fine line: balancing the public’s right to know with the need to protect sources involved in ongoing matters of national security. Where had this shocking information come from? moderator Jake Tapper wondered. The protection Bernstein offered was pretty thin.
“It came from a former British MI6 intelligence agent who was hired by a political research—opposition research—firm in Washington who was doing work about Donald Trump for both Republican and Democratic candidates opposed to Trump,” he said.
Bernstein and CNN didn’t name Steele or Fusion, but they certainly sprinkled some bread crumbs that could easily lead to their doors. And because neither Fusion nor Orbis had given the memos to CNN, the network had no obligation to grant them the kind of blanket anonymity that The Washington Post had bestowed upon Deep Throat during Watergate.
The CNN scoop was so explosive and authoritative in its sourcing that Simpson and Fritsch knew it would set off a fevered chase among competitors to not only match the story but advance it. What details in the “dossier” could be verified? Who was the former spy? What was the research firm that had hired him, and who had paid for it all? Not only would the media and the government relentlessly pursue the truth about Trump’s ties to Russia, they would also hunt down his accusers.
Simpson, Fritsch, and Steele, who were all accustomed to working behind the scenes, had ventured into treacherous territory. They had done the work under contract with a law firm paid by Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee. That law firm technically “owned” the work product, including the Steele reports. But the discovery of so many hair-raising allegations of a conspiracy between the Kremlin and the Trump campaign to swing an election was “potentially a crime in progress,” as Simpson later testified, a possible national security emergency that needed to be reported immediately to the authorities. Put simply, they had become gravely concerned that a hostile foreign adversary had compromised the incoming president.
As the post-9/11 mantra went: If you see something, say something.
Soon after the CNN report broke, S
impson and Fritsch called Steele by their preferred communication method, an encrypted voice application. Steele, whose view of U.S. politics and media could be surprisingly naive, was shocked but also elated by the story. Surely now, he reckoned, the U.S. government would do something to stop Trump from taking office. Right? Simpson and Fritsch said that was unlikely. They warned him that their names were now all but sure to come out. Being exposed as whistleblowers on the incoming leader of the free world would be bad, but tolerable, they concluded. The most important thing was to protect the underlying sources. They agreed to say nothing and hope the focus remained on Trump and Russia, at least initially, and not on the mysterious messengers.
That hope would prove to be short-lived.
* * *
—
Disaster struck at 6:20 P.M., barely an hour after the first CNN report aired. BuzzFeed, a website known for promoting viral Internet content but with bigger journalistic ambitions, published Steele’s reports to Fusion virtually unredacted. The seventeen reports the firm had received over seven months were embedded in a BuzzFeed report that made repeated reference to their “unverified” nature and stated, inaccurately, that “the documents have circulated for months and acquired a kind of legendary status among journalists, lawmakers and intelligence officials who have seen them.”
Within hours, hundreds of thousands of readers were devouring the dossier, and its highlights clogged Twitter. The dossier’s shocking main thesis—that the Russians had significant leverage over Trump and had worked alongside his election team to enhance his odds in November—was soon swamped by its raciest allegation: that Russian spies had videotaped Trump in 2013 enjoying a “golden shower” show of prostitutes urinating on the bed in a Moscow hotel suite once occupied by President and Michelle Obama.
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