Crime in Progress

by Glenn Simpson;Peter Fritsch;

  Eventually, though, the Russians appeared to have tilted toward the Republicans. There were circumstantial reasons to believe that top figures in the Republican Party—not just the Trump campaign leadership—were well aware that the Russians favored their party. There were credible news reports that top congressional leaders, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, had been warned by the Intelligence Community about Russian cyberattacks on Democrats as far back as 2015, Simpson said.*2

  Russia’s ambitions also appeared to go beyond the United States. Simpson said Fusion’s research indicated that the Russians were conducting similar operations in Europe to destabilize the European Union and may have made comparable efforts in the U.K. to sway the Brexit referendum. Steele had made similar observations to Kramer based on the work Orbis did in early 2016, Project Charlemagne. That reporting examined Russian interference in the domestic politics of France, Italy, the U.K., Turkey, and Germany. It all made sense to Kramer, who recounted Putin’s prolific human rights abuses and military adventures.

  “His best export to the West is corruption,” Kramer said, adding that he believed Putin was capable of doing “whatever he thinks is necessary” to defeat the West.*3

  Kramer, who had helped drive Paul Manafort out of the McCain presidential campaign in 2008 over Manafort’s suspected ties to the Russians, did not need to be persuaded that the Kremlin had now successfully infiltrated his party. Kramer recounted his own efforts to alert the Republican political establishment to what he’d long believed was an insidious and unrecognized threat.

  Simpson then told Kramer that Fusion’s research had found a pattern of connections between Trump campaign figures and the Russians that raised questions about a possible conspiracy. Steele’s memos were field intelligence, he added, and did not include any of Fusion’s own research.

  At the end of the meeting, Simpson handed over the memos in a manila folder, emphasizing the extreme sensitivity of the material and extracting a promise to provide the documents to McCain and no one else.

  Twenty-four hours later, Kramer met with McCain in his office on Capitol Hill. After reviewing the memoranda, McCain asked for Kramer’s recommendation. Take it to the directors of the FBI and the CIA, Kramer said. McCain said he needed some time to think about how to approach the agencies. Kramer said he would follow up with Christian Brose, McCain’s right-hand man and staff director of the Senate Armed Services Committee. Brose had been in Halifax with McCain.

  “The allegations were disturbing, but I had no idea which if any were true,” McCain later wrote. “I could not independently verify any of it, and so I did what any American who cares about our nation’s security should have done. I put the dossier in my office safe, called the office of the director of the FBI, Jim Comey, and asked for a meeting.” McCain’s friend and colleague Lindsey Graham later admitted that he had encouraged McCain to turn the dossier over to the FBI. Months later Graham would feign outrage over the dossier during congressional hearings.

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  The next day, December 1, Fusion management converged on the San Francisco Bay Area for a year-end retreat. Fusion’s newest hire, Neil King Jr., a friend and former Journal colleague, had cadged access to a house in the Sonoma hills for the weekend. The plan was to do some hiking, drink some wine, and begin mapping out a strategy for the Trump era. Should they continue with political work? Should they keep working with Steele? If so, how could they pay for it? King, Simpson, and Fritsch were joined by Fusion partners Tom Catan, from D.C., and Jason Felch, from Los Angeles.

  Felch knew about Fusion’s fifteen-month investigation of Trump. He was not, however, aware of Steele’s role or his memoranda. In Sonoma, Simpson told him about Steele and his reports while hiking the hills above Geyserville on Friday morning.

  As it happened, BuzzFeed reporter Ken Bensinger was also nearby. He and Felch were friends who both lived in Los Angeles and were veterans of the Los Angeles Times.

  Felch had introduced Bensinger to Simpson the previous month. Bensinger was working on a book about the corruption scandals engulfing FIFA. Felch thought he might benefit from an off-the-record conversation with Simpson, who might be able to help with the FIFA story’s Russia angle.

  In the course of that first conversation, Bensinger said he’d discovered that the FIFA scandal actually originated with an FBI investigation into the Russian Mafia’s involvement in a successful Kremlin scheme to bring the 2018 World Cup to Russia. Two of the key figures in the case, he said, were an FBI agent named Michael Gaeta and some former British spy named Christopher Steele.

  That’s interesting, Simpson replied. Steele hadn’t shared the identity of his FBI handler in Rome with Fusion or mentioned his work with the FBI in the FIFA case. Gaeta must be Steele’s FBI contact, Simpson figured.

  From what was online, Gaeta appeared to be the real deal, a relentless pursuer of Eurasian gangsters. Simpson found a 2014 news report about Gaeta’s pursuit of a Russian mobster nicknamed Taiwanchik, who was accused of trying to meddle in the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympic figure skating competition. Fusion had been investigating Taiwanchik since the spring—he was under indictment for running an illicit high-stakes gambling ring out of Trump Tower and was a fugitive from U.S. justice. Despite that, Taiwanchik had surfaced in the VIP section of Trump’s Miss Universe contest in Moscow in 2013.

  Bensinger had unwittingly helped Fusion figure out just how plugged into the FBI Steele really was. It would later emerge that the FBI had even paid Steele as a contractor on the FIFA case.

  As the Fusion team settled in for an afternoon of wine and shuffleboard on Friday, December 2, Felch sent Bensinger a message suggesting that he tear up his plans to go home that evening; instead, he should rent a car and make the drive to Sonoma to hang with the Fusion gang. Felch didn’t explain why he should make the trip; he only promised it would be worth his while.

  The Fusion team figured Bensinger might be in a position to tell them how deeply the FBI had relied on Steele in the FIFA case, something Steele himself didn’t want to discuss. Simpson thought that, depending on how close Bensinger was to Gaeta, he might have an outside shot at confirming the active investigation of the president-elect’s Russia entanglements.

  By the time Bensinger got to the house it was late, and the rest of the Fusion team soon rolled off to bed. Simpson and Bensinger stayed up, and Simpson described—off the record and in general terms—the contents of Steele’s reports and Fusion’s relationship with the former spy. Simpson didn’t show or give Bensinger any of Steele’s reports but suggested that he reach out to Steele directly, given their prior contact on the FIFA story.

  Bensinger had an early flight back home to L.A. the next morning. He was gone before any of his hosts arose, armed with a good lead and a source in London he knew to be highly reliable.

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  The next day, Steele was sitting with Burrows in London’s Garrick Club, an ornate gentlemen’s retreat whose past members include Charles Dickens, H. G. Wells, and Sir Laurence Olivier. They were there to brief their old boss, Sir Richard Dearlove, former chief of MI6. Dearlove was a legendary spy, who had served in Prague and Nairobi and ran the Washington, D.C., station before rising to run the agency from 1999 to 2004. Steele and Burrows desperately wanted to escalate their findings, and Dearlove, knighted by Queen Elizabeth in 2001, would be the man to do it.

  They pulled out a copy of the dossier and the spy chief read it carefully. They walked him through some of the sourcing, in the most general terms. The reporting was credible, Dearlove said. He then surprised Steele and Burrows by indicating that he was already aware that the British government had suspicions about links between Russia and members of the Trump campaign. It seemed the British government had made a political decision to not push the matter further.

  This news irritated Steele while at the same time reinfo
rcing his view that his reporting was strong. If MI6 had reason to believe that the incoming head of state of Britain’s top ally could, in fact, be compromised by Moscow, he asked himself, why would the government be willing to “kick it into the long grass?”

  *1  While Republicans on the Hill would later warp Special Agent Strzok’s concern about the potential threat posed by Trump to national security into a paranoid fantasy about a partisan inside the FBI working to advance his political beliefs, the Republican committee chairs would not raise a peep—let alone hold a single hearing—about the bias against Hillary Clinton within the ranks of the FBI.

  *2  Ten days after Simpson and Kramer met, The Washington Post reported that McConnell—after receiving a classified intelligence briefing in September outlining Russian efforts to boost Trump—told the Obama administration that he would publicly dispute those findings if the White House called out Moscow. Critics would later blame McConnell for putting party before country at a critical moment before the vote.

  *3  Days before the 2016 election, Kramer made similar comments at a McCain Institute forum. “Campaign 2016 and Russia,” C-SPAN, October 27, 2016, https://www.c-span.org/​video/​?417539-1/​discussion-focuses-campaign-2016-russia&start=1318.

  One topic on the agenda at Fusion’s Sonoma retreat was what to do with the trove of Trump information the firm had amassed over the previous eighteen months. While Fusion’s research reports to clients were proprietary, the expertise it had developed on Trump was the firm’s own intellectual capital. Virtually all of the documents about Trump the firm had acquired—tens of thousands of pages by this point—were public records. And many had still never been digested by the media.

  In effect, Fusion was sitting on a kind of alternative Trump presidential library, one that could be of use to those seeking to dig deeper into Trump’s past and hold the incoming administration to account. What to do with it was the question.

  The idea that got the most traction initially was the creation of a free online digital archive of important documents about Trump and his business associates to support the many post-election Trump-related investigative journalism ventures that were popping up almost weekly. Fritsch and Simpson even drafted a structure for what they called the Trump Archive. The plan, which they hoped to raise money to support, called for a nonpartisan research effort that would be overseen and executed by former investigative journalists. The draft plan lamented that, too often, serious work critical of Trump or the GOP is pushed through partisan channels too closely associated with the Democratic Party and its proxies. That made the work easy prey for the purveyors of alt-right spin, who then dub it fake news.

  The idea wasn’t short on ambition: It called for a large budget to support a website and a sustained investigative examination of Trump, his businesses, and his Russia ties. But Fritsch and Simpson worried that the plan might come under attack as appearing too partisan, too focused on Trump and not on the bigger picture of Russia’s broad campaign to disrupt democratic institutions around the world. In the end, the archive project was scuttled for a different model, which Fusion didn’t fully hatch until January. For the remainder of 2016, Fusion continued its Trump research as pro bono work without the financial backing of a client.

  On December 7, Time magazine named Trump its Person of the Year and ran an accompanying interview in which he was asked about Russian election interference. “I don’t believe they interfered,” Trump said. “It could be Russia. It could be China. And it could be some guy in his home in New Jersey.”

  No, it couldn’t. The swift reply came two days later with twin stories in the Post and the Times reporting that the CIA had concluded in a secret assessment that not only had Russia hacked the DNC, but it had done so with the express goal of electing Trump. The assessment, an obvious leak, had been briefed to U.S. senators.

  Later that same day, the senior senator from Arizona was taking matters into his own hands. McCain went alone to FBI headquarters at the J. Edgar Hoover Building on Pennsylvania Avenue. He sat with Comey for ten minutes and handed him Steele’s memoranda. Later, McCain said he “did what duty demanded I do….I discharged that obligation and I would do it again. Anyone who doesn’t like it can go to hell.”

  Kramer had kept Steele and Simpson apprised of his effort to get the dossier to Comey via McCain, and reported that McCain had gone to see Comey. McCain, according to Kramer, said he’d handed the dossier to Comey and told him simply, “I need to know if any of this is true.”

  Steele was grateful and hopeful that something would come of it soon. Kramer said he was happy to have helped. Burrows, Simpson, and Fritsch were skeptical that it would have any immediate impact. A sophisticated counterintelligence investigation would take months or even years to bear fruit. Trump would take office in little more than five weeks.

  Little did they know, but Kramer had the same concern—and planned to push it as far as he could.

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  One problem the FBI would have in following up on McCain’s query was that the Bureau was no longer in contact with Steele; it had formally severed its relationship with him after he spoke to Mother Jones eight days before the election.

  That’s where Bruce Ohr came in.

  Ohr had worked closely with Steele’s FBI handler, Gaeta, and other FBI counterintelligence agents for years and had already begun to brief the agency about the work of Fusion and Orbis since August.

  On December 8, the day before McCain met with Comey, Ohr had reached out to Simpson to request a complete set of the Steele memos, without explaining why he wanted them. Simpson, who wrongly assumed that Ohr was acting at Steele’s behest, placed a copy of the dossier on a USB thumb drive.*1

  Ohr and Simpson met on Saturday, December 10, at a Peet’s Coffee on 11th Street, about a block from the FBI building. The temperature was barely above freezing, and downtown Washington was dead, save for a few tourists. Ohr was his usual sunny and unassuming self, displaying not the slightest hint that Operation Crossfire Hurricane, the probe of the possible compromise of the president-elect by a hostile foreign power, was ongoing.

  Simpson knew not to ask too many questions. He handed over the USB stick and briefly summarized the main points of the Fusion-Steele investigations: Manafort’s dealings with Oleg Deripaska; Sergei Millian, the mysterious Russian linguist with business and campaign ties to Trump; the midsummer trip to Moscow by Carter Page, who ran an obscure firm called Global Energy Capital along with a Russian “energy executive” named Sergei Yatsenko; the still unexplained computer server connection between the Trump Organization and Russia’s Alfa Bank. Simpson also mentioned Trump lawyer Michael Cohen, whose importance as the keeper of Trump’s darkest secrets Fusion was only beginning to fully understand.

  “[Simpson] identified Michael Cohen, a lawyer in Brooklyn w. Russian (Brighton Beach) clients, as the go-between from Russia to the Trump campaign who replaced Manafort and Carter Page,” Ohr wrote in his notes of the meeting.

  Simpson also related Fusion’s suspicions about Russian penetration of the National Rifle Association. Ohr took it all in with a stone-faced demeanor, nodding and jotting a few notes.

  Simpson knew better than to ask a law enforcement official about an ongoing investigation, but he couldn’t resist one or two questions: Why would Ohr need a copy of Steele’s memos? Ohr demurred, muttering something about the FBI being unwilling to share documents with the Justice Department.

  That seemed like an excuse designed to play on the notorious obsession of the FBI with guarding its turf. But the real reason was probably Steele’s ruptured relationship with the FBI, which meant that any Steele memos produced after November 1 would likely not have been in the Bureau’s possession. It later struck Simpson that the FBI may have wanted Steele’s reporting—without the bureaucratic risks of further contacts with Steele himself.

  Ohr implicitly
lent support for that interpretation, asking Simpson about the circumstances behind the Steele interview with Mother Jones that had triggered his breakup with the FBI. Simpson explained that the article hadn’t been Steele’s idea or initiative. In fact, Simpson explained, he had been the one who urged Steele to speak with the Mother Jones reporter.

  “Thanks,” Ohr said. “That helps.”

  Reading between the lines, it seemed likely to Simpson that Ohr was in a dialogue with his colleagues in the DOJ and the FBI about whether Steele could be trusted and why Steele had gone off the reservation by talking to a reporter on the eve of the election.

  Before leaving, Simpson could not help but raise something that was troubling him: What would happen to the Justice Department’s investigation of Trump and the Kremlin once Trump installed his own handpicked loyalist as attorney general? Ohr seemed a little surprised that Simpson would have such a concern and seemed confident that there was little risk of a successful assault by Trump on the federal government’s law enforcement institutions.

  “I’m not going anywhere,” he said.

  After leaving Simpson, Ohr took the USB drive over to the FBI, which formally entered it into evidence and transferred the contents onto a CD-ROM “for investigative use,” according to FBI records.

  Over the next few days, Simpson followed up with more information for Ohr about the NRA, including a call in which he briefed Ohr on the suspicious activities in Washington of a mysterious Russian gun activist named Maria Butina, whom he flagged to Ohr as a possible undeclared Russian agent of some sort who had obtained a U.S. visa in August 2016 by registering as a college student at American University. Ohr thanked him for the info.