Crime in Progress

by Glenn Simpson;Peter Fritsch;

  The session yielded an important bit of intelligence for Fusion. FBI agents surprised Steele by asking him what he knew about Trump adviser George Papadopoulos. Nothing, it turned out; none of Steele’s sources had ever reported on him. Steele inferred that Papadopoulos was somehow important within the overall inquiry, but they didn’t say exactly why they thought that, only that they had additional source reporting to back that up. (Downer’s name wouldn’t surface until much later, and the FBI didn’t share it with Steele.)

  This was important information in its own right, suggesting that there was an active Bureau investigation that relied on sources other than Steele. It was also a sign of the FBI’s regard for Steele that it would query him regarding such an important lead.

  Steele passed that important tidbit on to Simpson, who found it reassuring: The FBI had developed information that independently corroborated Steele’s own reporting, and they seemed to trust him enough to run it by him.

  “My understanding was that [the FBI] believed Chris at this point…because they had other intelligence…and that one of those pieces of intelligence was a human source from inside the Trump Organization,” Simpson later told congressional investigators.

  When Steele briefed him on what had happened at the meeting, Simpson reacted with alarm. “This is starting to scare the shit out of me,” he told Steele. Once again, he felt like they were in way over their heads. There was now more reason to suspect an active conspiracy between the Russians and the Trump campaign.

  Fusion knew a bit about Papadopoulos. Research analyst Berkowitz had already determined that he had made up or inflated virtually every detail of his résumé. He was like Carter Page: an overeager, gullible wannabe with access to the hierarchy of the Trump campaign. In other words, another ideal mark for Russian intelligence. What Fusion couldn’t work out was why the FBI might be interested in Papadopoulos, but what they did understand now was that Steele’s reporting was looking a lot more reliable.

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  By the time Clinton and Trump faced off in their first debate, on September 26, virtually everyone in the national security community believed that Russia had hacked the DNC. But the Obama administration’s stubborn silence on the matter gave Trump the space to declare that no one really knew who had hacked his opponents. “She’s saying Russia, Russia, Russia, but I don’t—maybe it was,” Trump told debate moderator Lester Holt. “I mean, it could be Russia, but it could also be China. It could also be lots of other people. It could also be somebody sitting on their bed that weighs four hundred pounds, okay?”

  Any doubt about the identity of the culprit—at least in the real world—was soon to be removed once and for all. At about 3:30 P.M. on October 7, the Obama administration put out a statement timed to dominate the evening news cycle. “The U.S. Intelligence Community (USIC) is confident that the Russian Government directed the recent compromises of e-mails from US persons and institutions, including from US political organizations. The recent disclosures…are intended to interfere with the US election process.”

  Three and a half months after Steele’s first memo raising the alarm over Russia’s efforts to interfere in the November election, the U.S. government had finally stepped up and raised its own alarm, with just a month left before Election Day. The statement was notable for its lack of comment from the White House or the president, who was still worried about being seen as tipping the scales or playing politics. It was also immediately drowned out by other news.

  Barely a half hour after that statement hit the wires, the Post dropped a bombshell. Trump had been caught on an Access Hollywood videotape boasting about being so famous he could hit on married women and grab them by the genitals. There was no doubt that it was Trump’s voice, and the campaign didn’t deny it, writing off the remarks as “locker room banter.” Here was a presidential nominee boasting about assaulting women. It would have been death to any other candidate. Even Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan were forced to express their disgust. “It is over,” Fritsch declared confidently to a friend. “Trump is done.” Simpson popped open a celebratory beer.

  But the day’s insane news cycle hadn’t yet come to an end. Minutes later, WikiLeaks released the trove of emails Russia had pilfered from Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta’s account. The emails themselves were largely anodyne. Good Beltway dish, to be sure, and unflattering to both Clinton and her staffers, but hardly the kind of stuff that would hold back the Access Hollywood tsunami. Still, the impeccable timing wasn’t lost on Fusion. Outside forces were doing what they could to trample on a story doing damage to Trump. The Russians were riding to Trump’s rescue.

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  By the third week of October, most polls still had Hillary Clinton winning by 7 points—not a blowout, but at least outside of the margin of error.

  That edge was about to be destroyed.

  The last four days of October would see a series of events that, taken together, amounted to the mother of all October surprises and inflicted what political insiders and many outside experts would later describe as a mortal blow to the Clinton campaign.

  Barely a month earlier, FBI Director Comey had batted aside congressional queries over whether the FBI was investigating Trump campaign ties to Russia. “Our standard is we do not confirm or deny the existence of investigations,” Comey told the House Judiciary Committee, “except in certain exceptional circumstances.”

  Comey would soon abandon that standard. An FBI investigation of former New York congressman Anthony Weiner’s sexually explicit texts with an underage girl had found that his laptop contained work emails belonging to his wife, a close Clinton aide named Huma Abedin. Agents in New York alerted FBI headquarters about the Weiner laptop find and said those emails might constitute new evidence that needed to be analyzed.

  So on October 28, eleven days before the election, Comey sent a letter to congressional leaders saying there was new information that obligated the FBI to effectively reopen the Clinton email probe, with no predicted end in sight. Republicans leaked the letter instantly, causing an uproar among both Democrats and Republicans, for very different reasons.

  A boisterous crowd at a Trump rally that evening in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, burst into chants of “Lock her up, lock her up!” Democrats were furious. Some saw the hidden hand of Trump lawyer Rudolph Giuliani, who presumably had friends in the New York FBI office and only two days earlier had told Fox News that Trump had “a surprise or two you’re going to hear about in the next two days.” Senator Harry Reid accused Comey, a Republican, of springing an October surprise on Clinton while sitting on “explosive information about close ties and coordination between Donald Trump, his top advisers, and the Russian government.”

  The reaction from across the Atlantic was one of sheer apoplexy. Steele recalls being at a pet store buying crickets for his family’s pet lizard when he heard the news. He called both Fritsch and Simpson separately, complaining that he’d been misled. The Fusion partners had assured him the FBI wouldn’t do anything big in the last weeks before an election, and now Comey had weighed in to inflict damage on the Clinton campaign. And Comey had said absolutely nothing about what Steele knew was an ongoing FBI investigation of the Trump campaign. “Unconscionable,” Steele said. “Treasonous, really.” He was so fed up he didn’t even bother to call Gaeta in Rome to ask him what was going on.

  The Fusion partners were also alarmed. They weren’t sure what Comey was up to, but it sure seemed like he was putting his thumb on the scale. “They are going to cover up the Russia investigation, aren’t they?” Simpson said. Fritsch sometimes looked sideways at Simpson’s conspiratorial musings. Not this time. Comey’s bombshell prompted the Fusion partners to decide they needed to do what they could to expose the FBI’s probe of Trump and Russia.

  It was Hail Mary time.

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&
nbsp; Steele and the Fusion partners exchanged a flurry of calls over the weekend and entertained a variety of options, including bringing Steele back to the United States to speak publicly about his findings and dealings with the FBI. Perhaps a press conference on the steps of the Capitol? That was quickly ruled out as too silly and likely to backfire.

  No, the best route was to find a reporter who trusted Fusion and who just might have the aggressiveness to write a story this explosive in the final days of a presidential campaign. David Corn, the Washington correspondent for Mother Jones, fit the bill. He was an old acquaintance of Simpson’s and occasionally reached out to him for news leads.

  After the Comey letter was released, it occurred to Simpson that Corn was an espionage buff who’d written a well-researched biography of a notorious former CIA official. He would be capable of evaluating Steele and his information much more quickly than a typical political reporter. Simpson texted him and suggested they meet.

  That weekend, Corn and Simpson met at the Pain Quotidien off Dupont Circle. Simpson described the contents of the dossier and then, when they were done eating, walked Corn back to the Fusion office and, later, let him review a copy. “This is crazy stuff,” said Corn. “But how am I supposed to know if any of it is true?” Simpson explained that it had come from MI6’s former lead Russianist. Corn lobbied to speak with the author as soon as possible.

  The next day, October 31, Simpson arranged a three-way Skype conversation with Steele and Corn, something Steele was reluctant to do. The ground rules were the same: You could quote him as a former senior intelligence official, but you could not identify Steele’s name or nationality. In short order, Corn satisfied himself that Steele was the real thing and that the authorities were indeed taking his information seriously. Hours later, Corn went online with his story: “A Veteran Spy Has Given the FBI Information Alleging a Russian Operation to Cultivate Donald Trump.”

  That story would cause the FBI to cut Steele loose as a source. Gaeta called Steele after the story ran, and the two exchanged sharp words. Steele said he had been led to believe the story wouldn’t be explicit about his relationship with the FBI, adding angrily that “any misstep by Orbis or Fusion pales in comparison to what Comey did in disclosing the Hillary investigation.”

  Referring to Steele by the acronym CHS (confidential human source), the FBI typed up a form FD-1040a, titled “SOURCE CLOSING COMMUNICATION.” Steele had “confirmed to an outside third party” that he had a confidential relationship with the FBI. That relationship now appeared to be over.

  At this point, Steele didn’t really care. Nor did Fusion. Comey had demonstrated bad faith in publicly reviving the FBI’s investigation of the Clinton email server while burying an investigation of Russia’s attempts to compromise a presidential candidate. “The public absolutely needs to be made aware of this information,” Steele said.

  Corn’s story caused a minor stir, which was disappointing but not terribly surprising. Another potentially impactful story was posted by Slate barely a half hour later, at 5:36 P.M., written by Washington journalist Franklin Foer.

  Foer recounted the efforts of some of the country’s most renowned computer scientists to analyze Internet traffic they’d stumbled on linking a computer server sitting in Trump Tower with a politically connected bank in Moscow. The headline, “Was a Trump Server Communicating with Russia?,” was a bit equivocal, but the facts were intriguing, at the least. According to Slate, the servers appeared to be specially configured to communicate with each other, the equivalent of a hotline.

  The institution in question, Alfa Bank, was known to Fusion. Its owners were billionaire oligarchs close to Putin. One owner, Petr Aven, would later testify to special counsel Robert Mueller that he “met on a quarterly basis with Putin, including…shortly after the U.S. presidential election.” Aven made clear that he took his orders from the Kremlin: As the Mueller report later stated, “Aven said that he took these meetings seriously and understood that any suggestions or critiques that Putin made during these meetings were implicit directives, and that there would be consequences for Aven if he did not follow through.”*

  Foer’s story lit up Twitter. It was a complicated but deeply reported tale with authoritative sourcing. At a minimum, it called for further investigation. The Clinton campaign jumped on it instantly, taking to Twitter. They had hoped the big boys would follow up and rebalance the scales, post-Comey.

  Fritsch knew the story would cause heartburn for other reporters in town, particularly at the Times and the Post. Both publications had been chasing the Alfa story, but Fusion had heard that senior editors had killed the stories as too sensitive late in the campaign, over the strenuous objections of reporters. The Times’s Eric Lichtblau, in particular, was rumored to be furious with Times executive editor Dean Baquet for spiking a story he’d been working on for months on the supposed Alfa-Trump connection.

  Fusion’s partners were then shocked when, at 9:14 that evening, the Times posted a story that stomped on both Corn’s and Foer’s pieces. The headline basically declared as dead an investigation the Times had never reported on in the first place: “Investigating Donald Trump, FBI Sees No Clear Link to Russia.” Sources told the Times that “none of the investigations so far have found any conclusive or direct link between Mr. Trump and the Russian government.” And Russian hacking was simply aimed at disrupting the election, “rather than electing Mr. Trump,” the story said. The piece also took pains to dismiss Slate’s server story, saying that FBI officials “even chased a lead—which they ultimately came to doubt—about a possible secret channel of email communication from the Trump Organization to a Russian bank.”

  That was that, then. Nothing to see here. Some cable networks decided to nix segments following up on the Corn and Foer stories. Even before anyone had reported on an ongoing FBI investigation of the Republican nominee’s ties to Russia, the Times had deemed it moot. It was a journalistic travesty and led to a stunned and glum Halloween for the Fusion team.

  And yet, news of intricate interactions between the Trump team and various Russians kept piling up. The next day, Financial Times Moscow reporter Catherine Belton posted a story that confirmed that Fusion was not the first to question Sergei Millian’s possible ties to the Kremlin. Reporting that “questions are mounting over whether Mr. Millian was one of a number of people who could have acted as intermediaries to build ties between Moscow and Mr. Trump,” Belton wrote that Millian had a history of arranging for Russian government officials to visit the United States, purportedly to discuss trade deals. She wrote that the Russian intelligence services had a history of using trade promotion as a front for intelligence operations.

  Most surprising, Belton reported, “Mr. Millian came on to the FBI’s radar after he participated in a 2011 trip to Moscow for 50 U.S. businessmen and offered to organize further trips.” The trips, she added, had come up in the course of a major FBI espionage investigation into the Washington, D.C., branch of a Russian government cultural organization suspected of acting as a front for Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service, the SVR. The whole thing was run out of the Russia House, a bar and restaurant just a block from Fusion’s Washington offices.

  It was too late. In the wake of the devastating Times article, the Financial Times could have shown Millian ferrying love letters between Putin and Trump and still not made any impact.

  Months later, after the dossier was published, the Times’s public editor wrote an eye-popping column taking the paper to task for being “too timid in its decisions not to publish the material it had” about the FBI investigation of Trump and the server issue. The column even disclosed that “the F.B.I. was so serious about its investigation into the server that it asked The Times to delay publication.” The public editor was fired not long afterwards. Later, FBI general counsel James Baker told congressional investigators that the order to step on the Times’s Alfa story had come from t
he very top, and likely involved both Comey and McCabe.

  Inside the Times, the Halloween Special (as Simpson later called it) generated incredible acrimony. Lichtblau was angry Baquet had gutted his story. Baquet suspected that Lichtblau had dished to the public editor about the Times’s lack of courage. That suspicion prompted Baquet to flame Lichtblau in an email. “Eric, I hope your colleagues tear you a new asshole,” for publicly airing an internal dispute over coverage decisions. Later, Baquet told his staff, “You may find me less open, less willing to invite debate, the next time we have a hard decision to make.” Lichtblau would later leave the Times.

  The FBI’s probe of the Clinton emails on Weiner’s laptop would, in the end, turn up nothing new. But the damage had been done. Months later, polling guru Nate Silver would declare flatly, “Hillary Clinton would probably be president if FBI Director James Comey had not sent a letter to Congress on Oct. 28.”

  But Comey did do that. And he did nothing to warn the American public of the FBI’s deep concerns regarding possible illicit dealings between the government of the Russian Federation and the campaign of the Republican nominee for president of the United States. In fact, the FBI went out of its way to do the opposite, helping turn the Times story on the FBI investigating Trump’s Russia ties into a piece that suggested there was nothing there.

  For Simpson and Fritsch, it really did feel like a conspiracy, with a hidden hand guiding Trump into the presidency.