Simpson and Fritsch met with a number of other journalists in Philadelphia during the convention as well. Chief among them was Post investigative reporter Tom Hamburger. The three were all Journal alums and friends. Simpson and Hamburger had spent years together in the Washington bureau. Hamburger was, and is, among the most seasoned, hardworking, and honorable reporters in the business. Simpson and Fritsch trusted him completely.
Hamburger, like every other reporter in Philadelphia, was wrestling with multiple reporting threads all at the same time. The WikiLeaks dump had forced every publication to devote multiple reporters to dig through the cache of emails. The Russia element was beginning to snap into focus, and Hamburger was eager to learn all he could. But he didn’t have a lot of time; he was busy trying to match a Times story reporting that U.S. intelligence officials had concluded that Russian military intelligence was behind the DNC hack.
Still, knowing he could be trusted, Simpson decided to tell Hamburger about the Steele work on a promise that he would keep it mum. Simpson laid out the basic allegations in the first Steele report. He mentioned the alleged golden shower episode at the Ritz-Carlton but played down its significance. Hamburger reacted with shock. The information, Simpson told him, had been collected by a “senior former Western intelligence official.” Hamburger was intrigued. “Can I talk to him?” he asked. “Probably not, not now anyway,” Simpson told him. “But tuck that away for future reference.”
While Simpson briefed Hamburger, Fritsch headed back to Washington. He was sitting in the 30th Street train station watching actress Susan Sarandon sign autographs when he got a call from an old friend who knew Carter Page from his years as a journalist in Moscow. “Carter is a climber who never really got anywhere,” the friend said. “He’d be a perfect target for Russian intelligence.” He said Page had been particularly interested in pursuing deals in the energy business. Interesting, Fritsch thought, in the context of Steele’s report of Page’s clandestine meeting with oil giant Rosneft in which the Russians allegedly dangled energy deals in return for lifting economic sanctions against Russia if Trump won the election.
* * *
—
The next day, Trump gave a press conference in Florida in which he trashed assessments that put the blame for the DNC hacks squarely on Russia. He then made his now famous plea. “I will tell you this: Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the thirty thousand emails that are missing,” he said of the Clinton emails that had been lost from a private server she had kept at home while secretary of state, a supposed security breach that was a favorite far-right bugaboo. “I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.”
Five hours later, federal investigators would later reveal, hackers for Russia’s military intelligence service, the GRU, launched at least fifteen spear-phishing attempts on Clinton’s personal office email accounts.
Here was a candidate for president encouraging a hostile foreign power to commit espionage. Fritsch called Steele.
“Did you see what Trump just said?” Fritsch asked.
“Fucking hell,” Steele replied.
Steele was becoming increasingly agitated by the accelerating revelations tying Trump to Russia. But this was too much. It had been nearly a month since his meeting in London with the FBI and he hadn’t heard anything. He wanted to come to Washington to confer.
He also had a few other meetings on his agenda.
* Steele and Burrows have vowed to never reveal the source’s identity. That anonymity “is a bit of a shame, really,” Steele later told friends. “This is a remarkable person with a remarkable story who deserves a medal for service to the West.”
It was a sultry Friday in late July, topping ninety degrees, when Christopher Steele slipped back into Washington on a hastily arranged two-day trip. He had come to confer with Fusion and meet some of his closest contacts in government. The city was dead: It seemed everyone was at the conventions, on the hustings campaigning, or at the beach.
Steele was now sitting on fresh intel that there was a growing nervousness in the Kremlin that the political fallout from Putin’s efforts to help Trump was, as his report filed the next day said, “spiralling out of control.” Pundits and the press were now all over Russia and the DNC hack. The executive summary on Steele’s newest memo said it all: “Extreme nervousness among TRUMP’s associates as a result of negative media attention/accusations. Russians meanwhile keen to cool situation and maintain ‘plausible deniability’ of existing/ongoing pro-TRUMP and anti-CLINTON operations.”
Three weeks had gone by since Steele’s meeting with Gaeta, and there was no sign that anyone in the U.S. government was doing anything with his information. At the meeting in London, Gaeta had told Steele he didn’t want to receive copies of Steele’s reports, because the material was so explosive, and he needed to take instructions from his superiors. There was little doubt a report like Steele’s would give heartburn to people inside the FBI in the heat of a presidential election. Steele understood that sensitivity but had a hard time understanding why no one had followed up yet. To Steele, this was an emergency that needed to be dealt with swiftly. Trump, now the Republican nominee, was due to get his first classified briefing in a matter of days.
Fusion’s original deal with Orbis was a one-month engagement to end in July. Simpson asked Steele to extend that into the fall at a minimum. Simpson also wanted to brief Steele on all the other information Fusion had accumulated over the previous nine months. Steele had seen little of that work. Fusion also needed to discuss in person how to continue gathering information safely and transmit it securely back and forth across the Atlantic.
While in Washington, Steele and an Orbis colleague added another event to their schedule. Unbeknownst to Fusion, Steele had arranged to have breakfast at the Mayflower Hotel the next morning, a Saturday, with Bruce Ohr, a senior official in the Justice Department’s Criminal Division. In addition to being old colleagues who had dealt with each other in government in the 2000s, Steele and Ohr had recently worked together on a National Security Council project to cultivate Russian oligarchs as sources of intelligence about Putin.
Over the years, Steele had become personal friends with Ohr and his wife, Nellie, and exchanged Christmas cards with them.
Bruce Ohr, a native of Oak Ridge, Tennessee, was the epitome of a top-level, low-profile bureaucrat with an elite education and an intellectual bent. His father and mother were immigrants who came to the United States after the Korean War. His father worked as a scientist at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the U.S. Energy Department’s largest nuclear research facility, for twenty-two years. Ohr himself earned a degree in physics from Harvard before deciding to go to Harvard Law School and joining the Justice Department. A genial and unassuming man, he had spent virtually his entire professional life pursuing some of the world’s worst criminals.
“If you are in town it would be good to meet up, perhaps for breakfast tomorrow morn?” Steele wrote Ohr, offering no hint that it would be anything but a friendly get-together. “Happy to see Nellie too if she’s up for it.”
An expert in Russian language and history, Nellie Ohr had met Steele years earlier, during a stint working as a CIA analyst. A Harvard graduate like her husband, she was the farthest thing from a lefty partisan warrior. Nellie was a specialist in the rural history of Stalinism; her 428-page doctoral dissertation at Stanford was titled “Collective Farms and the Russian Peasant Society, 1933–1937: The Stabilization of the Kolkhoz Order.” While they came across as quiet and reserved, the Ohrs were stone-cold realists when it came to Russia. As Nellie put it later in congressional testimony, “I view myself as part of a community of people who are interested in Russia, and Chris Steele was part of that community.”
Steele was vaguely aware that Nellie had done some Russian media research for Fusion, while Nellie had no idea that Steele was also working for
Fusion. But the breakfast would come to dog the Ohrs’ careers once congressional Republicans learned of it.
Once settled in at a quiet table at the Edgar Bar & Kitchen—named for FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover—Steele eased into some of his recent findings. He described to the Ohrs how the former head of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service, the SVR, had told a source that the Kremlin “had Donald Trump over a barrel.” Steele also recounted his information about Page’s meetings earlier that month with Sechin, and Manafort’s business dealings with Deripaska.
After recounting some recent intelligence Orbis had received about the FSB’s role in rigging doping tests in sporting competitions, Steele said he’d already provided his first two reports on the Russia-Trump ties to FBI agent Gaeta, whom Bruce Ohr knew from working together for many years on Russian cases. Simpson, he added, could provide the Justice Department with the others he’d filed.
Bruce Ohr, who knew that Steele had been a paid informant for the FBI and had provided “actionable” information about the Russians to the FBI and made significant contributions to criminal cases, was stunned. Steele hadn’t given him any hint that the breakfast agenda was anything more than another collegial catch-up session. “So I think I was in a little bit of shock at that point,” he recalled later.
For most of the breakfast, Nellie Ohr simply sat and listened. But in the course of the discussion, Steele mentioned that he was working with Fusion. Nellie would later call this an “aha moment”—Fusion had never told her of its work with Steele. It appears that Bruce Ohr also first learned at that breakfast that Steele was working for Fusion. Nellie said nothing about her work with Fusion.
Later that afternoon, four members of the Fusion team sat down with Steele and his associate over lunch at the Dupont Circle Hotel. They wanted to discuss various aspects of the investigation and protocols for exchanging information through encrypted channels. In retrospect, it was an odd choice of venue: Nine months earlier, the Kremlin’s former propaganda chief Mikhail Lesin had been found dead of blunt force trauma in the hotel’s penthouse suite. The coroner said it was a drunken accident, but Steele had provided the FBI with a report from his own sources claiming that Lesin had been beaten to death by Russian thugs in a murky Kremlin dispute over graft. It was later revealed that Lesin’s hotel bill was being covered by the Justice Department, with whom he had been scheduled to meet the next day.
The talk of Lesin’s mysterious demise in the heart of downtown Washington prompted them to reflect on the increasing gravity of their own situation. “It’s getting pretty terrifying, isn’t it?” said Steele. If Trump really was having secret dealings with the Kremlin, he said, people in the West whom the Kremlin considered to be enemies, such as Steele, should no longer assume they were welcome—or secure—in the United States. “If this guy wins, I may never be able to come to America while he’s in office,” he said grimly.
Late that afternoon, Steele and his colleague went to Simpson’s house to kill some time before their flight back to London. Sitting around a backyard goldfish pond, Steele recounted his breakfast with the Ohrs. Simpson was surprised to learn that Nellie had been there. Simpson decided to bring him into the loop about her work. Simpson explained Nellie’s role doing Russian-language research for Fusion and some of her discoveries about Sergei Millian and other Russians close to Trump. Steele was pleasantly surprised to learn she was on the team. He held Nellie in high regard.
Waiting to board his overnight flight back to London that evening at Dulles International Airport, Steele penned one of his ritual thank-you notes to the Ohrs. “Great to see you and Nellie this morning Bruce. Let’s keep in touch on the substantive issue/s. Glenn is happy to speak to you on this if it would help.”
* * *
—
Steele didn’t know it at the time of his breakfast with the Ohrs, but the FBI had already woken up to connections between the Russians and the Trump campaign and started to dig into its files on Manafort and Page, both of whom the FBI knew had engaged in curious dealings with Russians for years. The FBI had already received the Papadopoulos intelligence from the Australian ambassador through the U.S. embassy in London. Steele was putting the spurs to a horse that was already running.
Indeed, as Steele was sweating it out in Simpson’s backyard, FBI counterespionage chief Peter Strzok sent this text to his colleague and lover Lisa Page, a top FBI lawyer: “Hey if you discussed new case with [FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe] would appreciate any input/guidance before we talk to Bill [Priestap, Strzok’s boss] at 3.”
Strzok had been tasked with following up on the tip from the Australians. A major new counterespionage case was under way. The timing of that text indicates that Strzok’s “new case” likely was not a result of the Ohrs’ breakfast that morning with Steele at the Mayflower Hotel.
Based on Bruce Ohr’s testimony and other records, however, it could only have been several days, at most a week, before Ohr passed the substance of his discussions with Steele along to McCabe, Page, and Strzok.
This chronology would become important later, when Trump and his allies in Congress tried to trash the FBI’s Russia investigation as an invention of Steele, Fusion, and the Clinton campaign. The FBI’s Lisa Page later said that the agents working the Trump-Russia investigation hadn’t seen Steele’s reports until mid- to late September, but it’s clear that Ohr began providing the FBI with information he’d gleaned from Steele at the Mayflower breakfast shortly afterward.
On Sunday, July 31, Steele arrived back in England, hoping Ohr would get the higher-ups at the FBI to take an interest in his information. What Steele didn’t know was that Strzok was in his office at the FBI that same day, assigning a case name to the probe that would soon morph into the Trump-Russia investigation. He called it “Crossfire Hurricane.” “And damn this feels momentous,” he texted Lisa Page that evening, shortly before midnight.
Immediately after opening the case, Strzok and another FBI agent headed to London to interview Downer, who recounted Papadopoulos’s claims for the agents. This meeting occurred outside normal diplomatic channels, to keep the inquiry quiet at the height of the campaign.
Sometime in this period—he couldn’t remember precisely when—Bruce Ohr reported his conversation with Steele to McCabe at his FBI office. Lisa Page, McCabe’s counsel, was there. Suddenly there was a lot of talk about Trump and Russia at the top of the FBI.
* * *
—
While Steele continued to plug away with his contacts in Russia and to communicate on his own with U.S. officials, Simpson and Fritsch were managing their own sprawling Trump-Russia investigation.
One priority was learning more about one of the key intermediaries between Trump and the Russians whom Steele had identified, Sergei Millian. The more Fusion pulled at his story, the odder it seemed. Address records linked him to a Soviet émigré in Florida who was the head of something called the Spiritual Diplomacy Foundation and claimed to be a religious refugee, but also said he had gone back to Russia in 1991 to conduct prayers in the Kremlin and at KGB headquarters.
Fusion’s research into property records showed that many of the Trump-branded properties Millian claimed to be pushing on Russian investors were located in New York and three huge condo towers north of Miami Beach in a community called Sunny Isles Beach, a.k.a. “Little Moscow.” Like Brighton Beach in Brooklyn, the area has been known to the FBI since the mid-2000s as ground zero for the Russian Mafia. That’s where Fusion decided to dedicate considerable research muscle.
A look inside those buildings revealed some interesting characters. One Sunny Isles investor, Vladimir Popovyan, was a former colonel in the Russian army. Roman Sinyavsky, a realtor who had worked with Trump, was one of the first brokers to gain access to Sunny Isles in 2002. The Russian version of Sinyavsky’s website said that his clients included Russian businessmen, athletes, and performers; Sinyavsky’s website
displayed photos of him with various VIPs and offered a hint at who might have bought Trump or Sinyavsky properties.
Social media and newspaper clips suggested that Millian was something of a self-promoter who was chatty with the press. Fusion doesn’t usually interview people, so Simpson decided to alert a major television news network about Millian’s ties to Trump to see if it could get Millian on camera. Simpson reached ABC News producer Matthew Mosk, a friend and former Post reporter, and described what Fusion had learned about Millian’s work with the Trump Organization, making no mention of Steele. The Trump-Russia theme was hot, and Mosk saw the potential news value. On July 29, Millian sat down with veteran correspondent Brian Ross at ABC News for an on-camera interview with Millian.
The “Trump team,” Millian explained in his Russian-inflected English, “realized that we have lots of connection with Russian investors….And they needed my assistance, yes, to sell properties and some of the assets to Russian investors.” He estimated that, “overall, Trump has done significant business with Russians. And the level of business amounts to hundreds of millions of dollars that he received as a result of interaction with Russian businessmen.”
Ross pressed on. “So he likes Russia because there’s money to be made there?”
“He likes Russia because he likes beautiful Russian ladies,” Millian replied with a smirk. He also predicted that Trump “has a lot of other tricks up his sleeve” to use against Clinton.
As the interview seemed to be winding down, Ross asked Millian about his multiple names and other oddities in his background. “Because some people,” Ross said, “wonder whether you are working for the Russian government secretly.” Millian insisted he was not a spy, saying he was merely a real estate guy who happened to be politically connected in Russia and kept his friends in the Kremlin informed about American politics.
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