Crime in Progress

by Glenn Simpson;Peter Fritsch;

  Steele added that his team had identified a U.S.-based Russian American in the Trump orbit. This person purported to know a good deal about Trump’s activities in Russia and the Kremlin’s alleged support for the Trump campaign, and was prone to talking about it with others outside his circle. His role in the events of 2016 remains underappreciated, even today. His name was Sergei Millian, though he has had others.

  Millian had popped up in Nellie Ohr’s early reporting in November 2015 for his ties to Trump, but Fusion had yet to research him in depth. Within days of Steele telling Fusion his name, researchers at the firm began digging deeper into Millian, a self-promoter whose record suggested a background entirely consistent with that of some sort of state intelligence asset. A linguist by training, Millian was the head of an obscure trade group with a grandiose name, the Russian American Chamber of Commerce in the U.S.A. He had changed his name at some point in the 2000s from Siarhei Kukuts, around the time one of his associates got into legal trouble. Millian was from Belarus, a small neighboring Russian satellite state sometimes adopted as a cover for Russian operatives seeking to distance themselves from Russia proper.

  Just two months earlier, Millian had boasted of his business ties to Trump and extolled Trump’s virtues in an interview with a Russian-government-controlled “news” outlet, RIA Novosti, that Putin converted to a Kremlin propaganda outlet in 2013. The article carried a photo of Millian and Trump along with the billionaire real estate developer Jorge Pérez. Dozens of other articles regurgitated the interview across other Russian-government-controlled press outlets under headlines such as “President Trump Is Capable of Saving Ukraine and Coming to Agreement with Moscow.”

  Millian claimed to be working with Trump’s fixer, Michael Cohen, on a variety of real estate projects. He displayed knowledge of other projects as well, including bits of information that, while public, were not well known, such as the identity of Trump’s main partner in the Trump SoHo project. He also seemed to be familiar with the status of Trump’s real estate ambitions in Russia and even claimed that he had helped Trump study the Moscow real estate market. Trump, he added, was “keeping Moscow in his sights and is waiting for an appropriate time” to launch a new project there. In retrospect, Millian’s cryptic statement about “keeping Moscow in his sights” was eerily on target. At the same time Millian was making these comments, Trump and Cohen were in the thick of a secret project to build a giant new tower in Moscow.

  It went without saying that Steele, when he met with the FBI, would be asked where his information came from and who had engaged him. Fusion expected Steele to disclose the little he then knew about his clients—that they were working for some Democrats opposed to Trump. But he would not be able to tell them that the ultimate clients were the Democratic National Committee and Hillary for America, because he didn’t know that yet.

  That was a big reason Fusion raised no objection to Steele going to the FBI and felt no burning need to loop Elias in on his plans. The less politics entered into Steele’s discussions with the FBI, the better.

  Steele, like all contractors, had signed a strict nondisclosure agreement with Fusion. But his intel had created an exceptional situation. As Simpson would tell Senate investigators a year later, “This was not considered by me to be part of the work that we were doing….This was like, you know, you’re driving to work and you see something happen and you call 911.”

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  At the end of June, Steele reached out to Michael Gaeta, the veteran FBI agent he had worked with to blow the whistle on corruption in the global governing body for soccer, FIFA. Gaeta was one of the Bureau’s most knowledgeable experts on Russian organized crime and understood the nexus between the Kremlin and the Mafia. He had even had some tangential dealings with Trump’s world; for years, he had pursued a notorious Russian gangster known as Taiwanchik who ran his operations out of Trump Tower in New York. It was Gaeta’s pursuit of Taiwanchik that first led him to Steele in 2010. Gaeta was now working at the U.S. embassy in Rome as the Bureau’s legal attaché to the Italian police and security services.

  Gaeta showed up in London on Tuesday, July 5. In a meeting with Steele and Burrows at the Orbis offices, near Victoria Station, Steele briefed Gaeta on both his findings and sources for his early reporting to Fusion. Gaeta reacted much the way Simpson and Fritsch had—“flabbergasted,” as Steele later put it—and remarked that such matters were far above his pay grade. He thanked them for the information and said he would pass word up the ladder.

  Steele told Simpson that he gave the information to a contact at the FBI, whom he didn’t identify.

  Neither Fusion nor Orbis knew exactly what Gaeta did with Steele’s information, but James Comey later revealed that the FBI had in fact opened an investigation into the Trump campaign’s possible coordination with Russia a few weeks later. As it happened, Steele met with Gaeta the day Director Comey announced an end to the FBI’s Clinton email inquiry, declining to charge her but saying her conduct had been “extremely careless”—an unusual rebuke of a politician from an FBI director.

  Unbeknownst to Steele or Fusion, the FBI was also getting word of possible Russian coordination with the Trump campaign from a separate track. In the wake of the hacking revelations, Australia’s then-top diplomat in the U.K., Alexander Downer, reported to his own government a May 2016 meeting he’d had with Trump campaign foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos in which Papadopoulos claimed Russia had compromising information on Clinton. After tense internal discussions about how to proceed, the Australians decided to share that information with U.S. investigators. The FBI then flew two agents to London to get the details of the conversation from Downer. This meeting, unknown to the outside world at the time, would later become another element in the bitter partisan feud over the origins of the FBI’s inquiry into Russian meddling in the 2016 election. Republicans would come to insist it was Steele’s dossier, which they saw as a political hit piece, that sparked the inquiry, while Democrats (and the FBI) asserted that the real trigger was a chatty junior Trump adviser running his mouth over drinks in London.

  On July 7, two days after Steele and Gaeta met, another Trump foreign policy adviser engaged in an odd form of outreach to Moscow that would also soon catch the FBI’s attention. Carter Page delivered an address at the city’s New Economic School—a privilege that had been extended to Barack Obama in 2009 when he was a sitting U.S. president. Page was, to put it mildly, a highly unusual choice for such an honor. He was a virtual unknown in the field of international relations who had a brief and undistinguished career as an investment banker. It was a shock when Trump revealed to The Washington Post in March 2016 that Page was part of his foreign policy brain trust. His only previous stint in politics had been a minor role with McCain’s failed presidential bid in 2008.

  Page’s rambling talk seemed to channel the talking points of the Kremlin, surprising Russia watchers in the foreign policy establishment and echoing remarks he had made the previous month praising Putin at a closed-door foreign policy roundtable at Blair House, across the street from the White House, for visiting Indian prime minister Narendra Modi. “Washington and other Western capitals have impeded potential progress through their often hypocritical focus on ideas such as democratization, inequality, corruption, and regime change,” Page said in his remarks in Moscow. Those words must have been music to the ears of many Russians in attendance.

  Political observers reacted with increasing suspicion toward Page. One Washington Post columnist noted that Page “has close ties to Gazprom, the Russian energy company under Putin’s thumb.” Russia hawks also later pointed to the speech as the moment when they became truly alarmed. “It scares me,” McCain adviser David Kramer told the Post, foreshadowing the concern that would cause him to take dramatic action at year end.

  A subsequent Steele memo, landing just as the Republican convention was getting under way
in Cleveland in mid-July, reported that Page had met on the sidelines of his Moscow visit with a close Putin adviser, Igor Sechin, who was currently under U.S. sanctions. The memo said the two had discussed a quid pro quo: If a Trump administration was prepared to drop Ukraine-related sanctions, Russia had energy deals and dirt on Clinton to offer in return.

  Suddenly there seemed to be a wave of Russia-related news that pointed to a close relationship between the Kremlin and the Trump camp. Political conventions are notoriously news-free zones. Yet revelations coming out of the Republican gathering exacerbated the growing fear inside Fusion and Orbis that there was something nefarious going on.

  No sooner had the festivities begun on July 18 than Washington Post columnist Josh Rogin—who had been among the first to question Trump’s weirdly consistent embrace of Putin back in March—reported that the Trump campaign had quietly intervened to gut the party’s policy platform on Ukraine, removing a call for the provision of weapons to rebels fighting Russian aggression in the country. The move was a total break with GOP policy orthodoxy and notable for being the only position in the party platform that the Trump campaign sought to change. In pushing for the change, Rogin wrote, the Trump camp was “contradicting the view of almost all Republican foreign policy leaders in Washington.”

  This development pointed to the work of political mercenary Paul Manafort, Simpson and Fritsch suspected, and was likely a sop to the Kremlin.

  That same day, Yahoo News reporter Michael Isikoff, whom Simpson had encouraged to investigate the Trump campaign’s Russia ties, interviewed Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, a Trump adviser later to be named his first national security adviser, at the convention and asked him why he had agreed to sit next to Putin at an event the previous December celebrating the tenth anniversary of Russian state television network RT, a blatant Kremlin propaganda arm. Flustered, Flynn denied having been paid by Russia to speak at the event. That turned out to be a lie.

  The constant drip, drip, drip of Trump campaign moves favorable to Russia—combined with Russia’s hacking efforts and ever more frightening details coming from Steele’s memos—led Simpson and Fritsch to conclude that they were on to something big, if not yet fully understood. The flurry of events suggested that their research needed to look even harder at the intersection of Trump and Russia, almost to the exclusion of all else. The Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia was due to begin July 25, and it seemed all but certain the Russians would look to make more mischief there.

  Sure enough, on July 22, three days before the Democratic convention, WikiLeaks released thousands of DNC emails that were later determined to have been stolen by Russian hacking groups linked to Russian intelligence. The dump was designed to create maximum havoc, and political reporters dutifully covered it with not much thought as to its source or purpose. The juiciest emails were the ones that showed the party brass’s preference for Clinton over Bernie Sanders of Vermont. Sanders backers, convinced of a DNC plot to sabotage their candidate, were up in arms. Protests broke out decrying a rigged convention. The news dominated coverage in the days leading up to the convention, and two days later forced the resignation of DNC chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz just as the party’s gathering was about to begin.

  Suddenly, the whispers of a Russian interference campaign to boost Trump began playing out under klieg lights on the evening news.

  “Experts are telling us that Russian state actors broke into the DNC, stole these emails, and other experts are now saying that the Russians are releasing these emails for the purpose of actually helping Donald Trump,” Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook told CNN’s Jake Tapper in the wake of Wasserman Schultz’s resignation. At the time, such comments were widely dismissed as Clinton spin.

  Trump responded via Twitter early the next morning: “The new joke in town is that Russia leaked the disastrous DNC emails, which should never have been written (stupid), because Putin likes me.”

  This was no joke. It was time for a new plan of action.

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  For many months, Simpson and Fritsch had quietly assisted the media with its inquiries into Trump. Fusion’s offices had become something of a public reading room for journalists who wanted to know more about Manafort, Sater, and others in Trump’s orbit. Other reporters wanted Trump’s bankruptcy records or the U.K. filings that showed his Scottish golf courses bleeding money. Berkowitz, by now a human encyclopedia of Trump facts, had become a go-to resource for news organizations now playing catch-up on a candidate they hadn’t taken seriously.

  Before now, Fusion’s role with the media had been largely passive: Reporters they knew came to Fusion looking for background information or documents, which they provided. They had a big head start and were so steeped in the material that they were an easy stop for reporters looking to truncate the reporting process with meticulously sourced research they could flesh out and confirm as they pleased on their own. None of this included the information streaming in from Steele.

  Much as Steele believed he needed to blow the whistle with his peers, Simpson and Fritsch thought it was now time to become more active with the media, the people they knew best.

  The combination of the work on the Trump team’s odd affinity for Russia, Steele’s reporting, and now the WikiLeaks dump was starting to persuade Simpson and Fritsch that the country might in fact be in the middle of a Russian active measures campaign—the kind of vicious dirty tricks operation pioneered by the KGB during the days of the Soviet Union. As one major network television reporter put it to Fritsch in an email with the subject line “Russia” on Sunday afternoon, July 24, in the wake of the WikiLeaks release: “OMG. Can we talk tomorrow? U warned me.”

  On July 25, Simpson and Fritsch decided to make an impromptu trip to Philadelphia, where the political and media elite were gathered for the Democratic convention. They wanted to have some discreet conversations with a few reporters to let them know they might be able to help with stories about Trump, particularly on Russia. Under the circumstances, many reporters would be looking into whether the Russians were really behind the WikiLeaks dump.

  Upon arrival at Amtrak’s 30th Street Station in Philadelphia, they grabbed a cab to a hotel near Rittenhouse Square. Waiting for them there, tucked in a small, round booth at the back of the lobby restaurant, were two of the most powerful editors in American journalism: Times executive editor Dean Baquet and his deputy in charge of investigative projects, Matthew Purdy. The paper had done some solid work on Trump in recent months but had yet to fully get out of bed when it came to the Russia angle.

  Simpson knew Purdy a bit from investigative reporting conferences, and they would grab an occasional cup of coffee when Simpson was in New York. Simpson had reached out to him a few days earlier with a simple offer: He and Fritsch would be in Philly for the convention and knew a lot about Trump’s fascination with Russia. Care to get together to hear more? Simpson said. Sure, Purdy wrote back, asking if he could bring his boss along. No problem, Simpson said.

  The group exchanged pleasantries and chatted about mutual friends from Baquet’s time at the Los Angeles Times. They then established the ground rules for the conversation. Everything Simpson and Fritsch said would be off the record. Baquet and Purdy agreed. Over the next ninety minutes the Fusion partners laid out everything they knew about Trump’s ongoing flirtation with Putin’s Russia—a version of the rundown they had given Elias months earlier. They parsed Trump’s real estate developments and his ties to Russian organized crime. They explained how Russian money had given Trump a crucial boost coming out of bankruptcy. They laid out what they knew about Manafort’s ties to Russia and his work in Ukraine on behalf of Yanukovych. They left behind no documents. Nor did they mention or discuss Steele’s dossier—or even inform the Times that they were working with him.

  The editors took handwritten notes and said their reporters would look into a
number of angles Simpson and Fritsch had highlighted. The next morning, Simpson sent Purdy the public files from the court in Virginia detailing Deripaska’s allegations against Manafort and the Russian billionaire’s efforts to track Manafort down: Manafort had stood on the stage during Trump’s acceptance of the Republican nomination, but two years earlier Virginia court records suggested he was in hiding from Deripaska. The editors asked for a follow-up meeting the next morning.

  When they got together again, Simpson gave Purdy more about the Trump campaign’s Russian connections. Purdy said he would put Simpson in touch with Mike McIntire, one of the paper’s best investigative reporters, and that one of their best Russia reporters was already on the case: former Moscow bureau chief Steven Lee Myers, who had relocated to Washington.

  They discussed how one might go about reporting the Manafort story and the likelihood that there would be information available in Ukraine from the pro-Western political coalition that took power in 2014. Simpson said there was a lot of bitterness toward Manafort in Kiev for his work propping up the corrupt Yanukovych. Purdy said they were sending one of their best Moscow-based reporters to ask around in Kiev and he’d make sure they reached out to the people involved in investigating Yanukovych’s thievery. Later that day, Berkowitz sent Purdy pages of court documents outlining Manafort’s work for Yanukovych and his business dealings with Russian oligarch and Putin favorite Oleg Deripaska. The Times published its first big story on Manafort’s activities in Ukraine on July 31: “How Paul Manafort Wielded Power in Ukraine Before Advising Donald Trump.” But it was datelined out of Washington and short on specifics about Manafort’s financial machinations. Still, the Times had planted its flag. Anyone with information about Manafort’s dealings in Ukraine knew whom to call.