While it would have seemed to be in their self-interest for Trump’s Republican opponents to jump on the Post report, by mid-autumn of 2015 a sort of game-theory dynamic had begun to develop in the seventeen-person GOP primary field. The campaigns were beginning to realize they needed to unload on Trump, but no one wanted to go first, for fear of drawing his withering return fire. Nor did Trump’s opponents want to earn the ire of his fervent followers. The result: The issue of Trump’s relationship to organized crime never really made it to voters in a way that stuck.
Another dynamic was at play that would blunt the effectiveness of the Trump research project all the way through to Election Day 2016 and help pave his path to the presidency. Unlike most previous presidential candidates, Trump had a level of celebrity that meant he was already known to the vast majority of Americans. Some knew him as a buffoonish New York real estate developer with a history of splashy divorces and casino bankruptcies. Others knew him as the cocky billionaire boss on The Apprentice. But the point was that everyone knew him, or at least thought they knew him.
As a result, media outlets either steered away from the usual string of meet-the-candidate revelations that could rock the public’s view of an up-and-comer, or, when they did do pieces about Trump’s mob ties or his business failures, the coverage had a desultory tone and seemed to evaporate on contact. Trump’s unusual ability to make noise and respond to attacks with immediate counterattacks also deflected attention and blunted the impact—as the Democrats, the Washington press corps, and the public later came to see during his presidency.
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Another set of lawsuits turned up by Fusion’s researchers revealed still more questions about what Trump and his properties were really worth. These were protests filed by the Trump Organization against various local tax authorities. Trump, who had claimed in his presidential candidate forms that all of his projects were fabulously successful and incredibly valuable, insisted in his tax lawsuits that his properties barely made any profits and were practically worthless.
“Trump is either lying in his tax filings or lying on his federal candidate disclosure forms,” Simpson said in a note to team Bangor.
Deepening the mystery was the disconnect between Trump’s business failures and the huge sums of money flowing through his projects. No project illustrated that more vividly than the Trump SoHo development involving Felix Sater and Bayrock. A lawsuit filed in New York federal court that Fusion retrieved alleged that Bayrock and other developers that did business with Trump and Sater had been involved in laundering hundreds of millions of dollars in hot money from the Central Asian nation of Kazakhstan, a remote, corruption-riddled dictatorship sandwiched between Russia and China.
The new allegations indicated that there was something not just sleazy but possibly criminal about Trump’s partners in the deal.
Simpson recognized some of the players involved from his days covering financial fraud at The Wall Street Journal. The laundered money, like a lot of laundered money, was flowing into New York real estate projects, with American partners. For a cash-starved developer, money in need of washing was a godsend.
“Sounds like we are onto something,” Simpson said to the team. “Yeah, Trump’s the perfect host for parasites looking to launder money,” Fritsch replied. The emerging theory of the case was that Trump’s repeated bankruptcies had left him unable to raise money from banks and ordinary investors, so he’d replaced them with illicit sources of foreign cash. The theory grew out of prior Fusion money-laundering investigations, including one in which the proceeds of suspected narcotics trafficking and political corruption in Latin America landed in South Florida condominium projects.
Bayrock appeared to have links to powerful Russian interests. By the end of October, Fusion had acquired a set of court documents filed by a former Bayrock executive that alleged that $50 million had flowed into Bayrock from a shadowy financial firm in Iceland called the FL Group—an arrangement orchestrated by Sater. According to the court complaint, all the other Bayrock executives knew was that the company had chosen the firm as an investor because an unnamed oligarch behind it was in favor with the Kremlin at the time. Who could that be? Did the $50 million go to Trump? At a minimum, there was little question that Trump benefited from the capital injection, which records showed was earmarked by Bayrock for several of his projects. FL Group folded shortly afterwards, amid Iceland’s financial meltdown, leaving little solid information behind. Even today, after the company’s bankruptcy and countless Bayrock lawsuits, no one has been able to figure out who is behind the FL Group.
Trump would continue to deny familiarity with Sater all through the fall and early winter. Only much later, in 2018, would it emerge that the Trump Organization had been secretly pushing ahead all along with a proposed Trump Tower in Moscow—a 100-story skyscraper with 250 luxury condos, at least 150 hotel rooms, and a “Spa by Ivanka Trump.” Handling that deal was Sater and Trump’s own right-hand man, a onetime personal-injury lawyer and New York taxi entrepreneur named Michael Cohen. Trump had hired Cohen in 2007 to act as his in-house enforcer against all antagonists, be they reporters or business rivals. Cohen, through his wife’s family, also had ties to the former Soviet Union and had mixed with Sater in New York’s circles of émigrés. On October 13, 2015, Sater forwarded a letter to Cohen signifying their intent to go ahead with the Moscow deal, which Trump reportedly signed two weeks later.
The Russia coincidences continued to pile up. On October 29, Trump’s primary remaining bank lender—Deutsche Bank—announced it was setting aside $1.3 billion to cover legal expenses related to global allegations that it had laundered billions of dollars in dirty money from Russia in a complex case unrelated to Trump.
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By November, as Trump rose in polls and the client approved additional months of work, it was clear that the questions about Trump, particularly his ties to the former Soviet Union, merited far deeper investigation. At the time, this wasn’t an obvious line of inquiry; it would be months before Russia’s cyberattacks on the Democrats became known and a year before its manipulation of social media came to light. Fusion was now taking the story where the research led, much as journalists do.
As luck would have it, some highly qualified help appeared at a critical juncture. In October 2015, Simpson received an unsolicited query from a distant acquaintance, a former Central Intelligence Agency analyst named Nellie Ohr.
Simpson and Ohr had first met in 2010 at a two-day private symposium sponsored by the National Institute of Justice—the research arm of the U.S. Justice Department—on the growth of international organized crime. Since then, her résumé had grown even more impressive. She had an undergraduate degree from Harvard in Russian history and literature and an MA and PhD from Stanford in Russian history. Between 2008 and 2014 she had worked for “various US government clients” on “developments in Russia, Central Asia, and Ukraine, focusing on politics, cyber issues, business, crime, corruption, and other areas.”
Nellie Ohr was at the 2010 conference with her husband, Bruce Ohr, who at the time was chief of the Organized Crime and Racketeering Section of the Justice Department. Attending the conference were a smattering of other academics and intelligence and law enforcement officials, part of a group tasked with assessing the state of knowledge about international organized crime and coming up with some recommendations for addressing this growing scourge.
Nellie Ohr had recently seen a reference to Fusion in an August 27 New York Times story about the firm’s work for Planned Parenthood. Fusion had worked to expose the digital manipulation of abortion clinic sting videos secretly recorded by an anti-abortion-rights group called the Center for Medical Progress. In an email, Ohr noted that she had admired Simpson’s investigative work on Russian corruption when he was at the Journal. She noted her “extensive experience as a Eurasia analyst and multi
lingual researcher” and said she specialized in “profiling individuals and companies, both legitimate and criminal…to disentangle their relationships—especially any possible ties with the Russian military or special services or with Eurasian crime groups.” Might Fusion, she asked, have “any projects in the Russia/Eurasia field that could use my skills, experience and passion for research?”
Fusion first hired Ohr in October to research the use of Bitcoin by Russian criminals.
A month later, it asked her to assist Fusion in looking into Trump’s ties to Russia. She came back swiftly with a pitch to do an extensive search of all Russian-language online sources for mentions of Trump’s business connections in Russia and Central Asia. In addition, she would dig into Trump’s ties to a number of his associates, including Sater.
Fusion hired Ohr for a month of work, renewable by mutual agreement. It was a decision that fit perfectly with Fusion’s practice to seek and hire the best experts in the field to execute specialized research. Ohr could not have been a better candidate. She was a fluent Russian speaker who knew well the universe of questionable characters from the former Soviet sphere who had entered the Trump orbit, and she was highly trained in open-source collection.
The hiring of Nellie Ohr made perfect sense for Project Bangor, but it would later help fuel an elaborate right-wing conspiracy theory. In this version of events, the effort to research and understand Trump’s curious interactions with the Russian underworld was actually a nefarious liberal plot—reaching from the Clinton campaign to career officials and Nellie’s husband at the Justice Department—to undermine the future Trump presidency. A presidency not even Donald Trump himself thought would happen.
With the bombast of P. T. Barnum, Trump on the stump promoted a mythical image of himself as a self-made, ultrapatriotic, owned-by-no-one tycoon. Many of his most fervent Republican supporters were middle- and working-class voters attracted to his apparent business success, his hard-line positions on immigration, and his frequent denunciations of American companies that moved manufacturing jobs overseas.
As tantalizing as the Russia leads seemed, Russia wasn’t yet Fusion’s overriding focus—not in these early months. The myriad leads on that front were piling up, to be sure, but the first order of business was to better understand the man’s hypocrisies and failures—and the multiple myths he used to disguise his flaws. These were the things they believed would ultimately matter most to voters.
The more Fusion dug into Trump, the more he appeared to fit the textbook definition of a charlatan. Here was a supposed business genius whose career was littered with bankruptcies and failures. A purported multibillionaire who was almost certainly worth a fraction of what he claimed. A supposed self-made entrepreneur whose wealth actually sprang from an accident of birth. An immigrant basher who employed countless immigrants—and was even married to one. A “Buy American” proponent whose own clothing line was made in Mexico. A proud straight-talker with a long history of prevarication and outright fabrications—including under oath.
It was Fusion’s job to catalog all these contradictions, exaggerations, and utter lies into research reports with clear documentation. In commercial engagements, these reports would be solely for the client, but in political campaigns their purpose can be threefold: to expose an opponent’s vulnerabilities, provide source material for the media, and feed attack ads. A typical Fusion memo was essentially a lengthy treatise on a single subject, covered in fine detail and meticulously sourced. These products provided clients with a smorgasbord of material, to be deployed any way they pleased. Fusion also made many of its findings available to interested reporters as background material that could be confirmed and expanded with their own reporting.
The issue that most neatly seemed to capture the hypocrisy at the heart of Trump’s xenophobic campaign was immigration. From the first, Trump had staked his presidential hopes on stoking voter anxieties about immigration. But that also made the issue his greatest liability if it could be shown that he didn’t practice what he preached: Voters tend to dislike hypocrites even more than liars and cheaters. So Fusion set its drilling rig atop Trump’s record as an employer, knowing that both the construction and hospitality industries are rife with undocumented immigrants. Sure enough, Trump’s record revealed him to be a longtime, avid, and quite deliberate bulk consumer of illegal immigrant labor. “He likes illegals and criminals for his workforce because he can pay them under the table,” Simpson said in a note to the team. “That’s a foundation of his success as a developer—his costs are lower because he cheats.”
Trump viciously bashed immigrants, but it was immigrants—many hired illegally—who built his tall towers, fed his country club members, mowed his lawns, and cleaned his hotel rooms. You could sum it up another way: Donald Trump hated immigrants…unless they worked for him.
Trump also had a long record of recruiting workers from abroad and importing them to the United States. Fusion collected Labor Department records showing the Trump Organization had sponsored at least 1,494 foreign worker visas since 2000. His Palm Beach estate and private club, Mar-a-Lago, was the largest of his properties to import immigrant labor, with at least 872 visas to its name. Fusion wasn’t the only one to come across this data. Reuters published its own report that ran in numerous publications, but Trump’s Republican rivals and many other media organizations took little notice.
Like many big developers, Trump hired “illegals” despite his recent adoption of inflammatory rhetoric against the practice of employing them. A Trump Taj Mahal casino worker was arrested in October 2012 for being an undocumented immigrant. More recently, workers at two Trump projects—the hotel at the Old Post Office Pavilion, in D.C., and the Trump SoHo in New York City—admitted to reporters that they were undocumented. Later reporting, well after his election, found that nearly all of his U.S. facilities relied heavily on undocumented workers.
With the first primaries just months away, Republican voters barely knew of these hypocrisies. Fusion’s job was to supply the research that could change that.
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No building captured the hypocrisy of Trump’s immigration stance like his signature Trump Tower, on New York’s Fifth Avenue. The building embodied Trump’s gilt-encrusted image of glamour and success, which is why he used its lobby as the backdrop for his showy campaign launch on June 16, 2015. But the story of its construction was, from the outset, a tale of illicit labor practices that could be reconstructed in detail.
As was well documented in multiple court cases, construction began in 1980, sneaking around zoning laws blocking high-rises with the addition of a five-story atrium fronting Fifth Avenue, offered originally as a public passageway, that immediately became a commercial space. Trump had moved swiftly to demolish the famed Bonwit Teller building, using a company previously known for its window washing. Much of the hazardous work was done by a team of some two hundred non-union Polish workers, who earned less than unionized workers, slept at the work site, and became known as the “Polish Brigade.”
These illegal labor practices had ended up in court when union members discovered that Trump and his contractor, Kaszycki & Sons, weren’t making required payments to union insurance and pension funds. Union members sued both Kaszycki and Trump. They alleged that Trump knowingly used illegal immigrants because he was short of cash and desperate to meet deadlines required by his lenders.
Fusion dug up Trump’s testimony in the case from federal court archives. The court record showed that Trump engaged in numerous evasions, some of them outright laughable. Asked if he was familiar with the phrase “working off the books,” Trump replied, “I don’t believe so, no…I have not heard that phrase, I am not familiar with it.” Presented with a business certificate bearing his own signature, Trump claimed not to know what it was. Even though the building was the signature project designed to put him on the map in New York real estate,
Trump claimed he rarely visited the site himself. He said he had no recollection of expressing satisfaction with his Polish workers or reading local news coverage of their alleged exploitation. In all, he claimed some forty-eight times that he couldn’t remember important details of the long-running controversy.
Fusion’s researchers, reviewing the case files some twenty-five years later, were astonished at the audacity of Trump’s fabrications. His own longtime business associate Danny Sullivan, a mob-linked labor consultant, testified that Trump “knew about the undocumented workers.” The court ultimately endorsed Sullivan’s version of events, with a federal judge saying in 1991, “There is strong evidence of tacit agreement by the parties (Kaszycki…and the Trump defendants) to employ the Polish workers.”
While the Trump Tower case was old, it suggested a comfort with inexpensive illegal labor that Trump would have a hard time squaring with his campaign rhetoric. It was also easy to envision the story in a devastating attack ad. More recent reporting showed that Trump’s use of illegal immigrants in his building projects continued up through 2015. The Washington Post found that illegal immigrants were among the construction workers refurbishing the Trump International Hotel in Washington. In that case, the Trump Organization placed the onus for checking the workers’ employment status on Bovis Lend Lease, the project’s contractor. That was not a particularly strong defense, since Bovis and the Trump Organization had a long-standing business relationship, and Bovis also allegedly recruited foreign labor for hazardous duty on the Trump SoHo project.
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