Crime in Progress

by Glenn Simpson;Peter Fritsch;

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  In the first weeks of December, desperate Trump opponents launched a last-ditch effort to block Trump from the presidency by persuading the members of the Electoral College to vote against ratifying the election. Kramer and other die-hard opponents of Trump hoped the establishment would somehow awaken to the threat Trump represented, rise up, and stop him from taking office. McCain, Kramer hoped, would use his status—war hero, former GOP presidential nominee, Russia hawk—to lead a Republican Party mutiny and recruit fellow senators Lindsey Graham and Marco Rubio to the effort. Kramer shared his ambition with Steele, who hoped it might be possible but had no way of gauging whether it was realistic or a pipe dream.

  Steele’s sources, meantime, continued to feed him information, which he would immediately pass on to Fusion. No one was compensating Fusion or Orbis for their work.

  The final Orbis memorandum, dated December 13, described a Russian-owned company called Webzilla that had allegedly been involved in carrying out the DNC hack, Steele’s sources claimed. The report alleged that the company had been pressed into service, under duress, by the FSB.

  No one at Fusion had ever heard of Webzilla or its owner, a Russian with Cypriot citizenship named Alexsej Gubarev. Very quickly, Fusion researcher Laura Seago was able to locate common malware blocklists that flagged Webzilla and its parent company, XBT Holdings of Luxembourg, for leasing server space—mostly in the Netherlands—to individuals and organizations involved in malware, spam attacks, and other cybercrimes. The company operated through a vast web of shell companies stretching from Panama to the Marshall Islands.*2

  The final Orbis memorandum also reported that Michael Cohen met with Russians in Prague in late August under the cover of the known SVR front Rossotrudnichestvo—ostensibly a cultural organization for Russians living abroad. According to a Kremlin source, “the agenda comprised questions on how deniable cash payments were to be made to hackers who had worked in Europe under Kremlin direction against the Clinton campaign and various contingencies for covering up these operations and Moscow’s secret liaison with the Trump team more generally.”

  The Cohen allegations would also soon spark enormous controversy and litigation. While Cohen would always deny that he’d been to such a meeting in Prague, the truth or falsity of the memo’s reporting about such a meeting has never been settled.

  On the morning of December 15, the Fusion team was busy looking into Rossotrudnichestvo and Webzilla when Simpson received an email from an unexpected source, Eric Lichtblau of the Times. The news the previous week of the Intelligence Community’s conclusion that Russia not only had interfered in the U.S. election but had done so for the express purpose of helping elect Trump was causing the paper to reassess things, it seemed.

  “Hey Glenn,” Lichtblau wrote. “Are you available to talk again about Russia-Trump in the next day or two? We want to go back over all the stuff we looked at pre-election in light of CIA’s findings and see what might be there.”

  The email was copied to Lichtblau’s colleague Steven Lee Myers, the former Times Moscow bureau chief who had worked with Simpson on the Manafort stories but had been skeptical about the prospect of a Kremlin plot to help out the Trump campaign.

  Lichtblau had already met Steele at the Tabard in September and seemed impressed. But five weeks later, he and Myers both had bylines on the October 31 Times story that did more than anything to shoot down the notion of an active U.S. investigation of Russian efforts to infiltrate or influence the Trump campaign. Now they wanted to talk. And bring along the wider Times national security team.

  Simpson and Fritsch felt strongly that the Times had been played by the FBI. Their anger about the “Halloween Special” had not abated, but this wasn’t a time to nurse grudges. The Times was one of the few news outlets in the world that had the sources to follow up on the Steele reporting and Fusion’s own work.

  That afternoon, Simpson and Fritsch walked down Connecticut Avenue to the Times’s Washington bureau, a block north of Lafayette Park. Lichtblau brought them to a large conference room. They were eventually joined by Myers, Mark Mazzetti, and the national security beat reporters Matt Apuzzo and Scott Shane.

  Simpson and Fritsch brought along a copy of the Steele dossier memos—redacted to protect source identifiers and other details. Depending on how the meeting went, they were prepared to leave a copy to help inform the Times’s reporting.

  Lichtblau opened the meeting with a preamble that essentially reprised his email: Now that Trump had been elected president, the Times was interested in taking a deeper look at his relationship with Russia to see whether they’d missed anything.

  From across the conference table, Fritsch could see Simpson’s blood pressure rising.

  Simpson dislikes in-person confrontations but had a hard time containing himself. “I think first of all you need to know what an abortion of a story you guys wrote on Halloween,” he said, to a stunned room. Subtlety is not Simpson’s strong suit. “You fucking blew it. We told you a lot about how the FBI was investigating the Trump campaign for its ties to Russia, but your story made it sound as if they found nothing to it. We’re quite sure that is wrong.”

  This was not the ideal way to begin a sensitive, off-the-record briefing. Fritsch winced inside, but it definitely felt good to hear that said.

  Standing by his paper’s story, Lichtblau calmly explained that the Halloween story reflected the best information they had at the time. Fritsch and Simpson didn’t buy it, and, as later events would show, neither did Lichtblau. But in the moment, there was little else Lichtblau could say in front of his colleagues. So the Fusion delegation let it go.

  Later, one Times reporter with direct knowledge of the Halloween story said the piece had been gutted by Times editors late in the day after one of the paper’s reporters talked to an unnamed FBI official who was “way high up.” The official planted doubts with the Times about the possibility that the Trump campaign might be colluding with the Kremlin. For emphasis, the Times reporter raised his hand high over his head. “Way high up,” he repeated. In later congressional testimony, FBI general counsel James Baker confirmed that senior FBI officials had intervened.

  Fritsch and Simpson spent the better part of two hours walking the Times reporters through Trump’s business entanglements with Russia and the elements of the dossier. They also walked through Fusion’s role in the research. They stopped short of identifying their two anti-Trump clients, other than giving some generalities that Simpson and Fritsch had previously agreed upon: In the beginning, there was a Republican. Then, there was a Democrat.

  As the meeting wound to a close, Mazzetti asked if they might have a copy of the Steele reports, on a strictly off-the-record basis. It was not to be reprinted, shared, or published. The Fusion partners hadn’t checked with Orbis, but they agreed and passed them across the table.

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  Little did the two Fusion partners know, but thanks to David Kramer, awareness of the dossier around Washington was spreading—far beyond the confines of the discreet confidential encounters they’d had with the Times.

  At McCain’s behest, Kramer briefed the dossier’s contents to a pair of Obama administration Russia hawks: Celeste Wallander, senior director for Russian affairs at the National Security Council, and Victoria Nuland, assistant secretary of state for Europe and Eurasian affairs. Both, Kramer later said, knew of Steele and believed his work to be credible. But Simpson and Fritsch had never met or talked with either of them—and Kramer never asked them to.

  By the turn of the year, Kramer had also given copies of the dossier to a Republican congressman from Illinois whom Kramer knew and to a top aide to Speaker Paul Ryan.

  All that would become known only later. At the time, Fusion had no inkling of what Kramer was doing and would have objected strongly had they known. The deal they had made
with Kramer was a simple one: He could have Steele’s memos for the express purpose of giving them to McCain so that he could share with Comey. Period.

  As the inauguration of Trump drew closer, Kramer’s evangelizing for the Steele memoranda grew ever more frenzied and would take a fateful turn when BuzzFeed reporter Ken Bensinger reentered the picture shortly after Christmas.

  Bensinger, who was based in Los Angeles, was a resourceful and energetic reporter eager to follow up on Simpson’s tips from their California conversation in hopes of netting a juicy scoop for his FIFA book, at a minimum. He had previously arranged to meet with Steele in London on January 24 to do more reporting on his book. But Bensinger now knew about Steele’s reports and had grown worried that Steele might be less willing to talk by that date, which was four days after Trump was scheduled to be inaugurated.

  Bensinger texted Steele on December 23 to say that something had come up and he now wanted to come earlier. Steele asked what was so urgent—couldn’t it wait until after the holidays? The next day, Bensinger texted that “people” were telling him about a dossier describing how Trump had been compromised by the Kremlin.

  “Can we discuss?” he asked.

  Steele, who knew nothing of Fusion’s chance encounter with Bensinger in Sonoma, didn’t reply.

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  On December 29, Bensinger hopped on a flight from L.A. to Washington.

  Soon thereafter, Steele got a text message from Kramer saying he had spoken to Bensinger and given him “the broad picture.” Kramer later claimed he’d done so at Steele’s urging; Steele disputes that.

  In any event, Bensinger was now hot on the trail of the dossier, pushing all his sources—none more so than Simpson, whom Bensinger implored to give him a copy of the rumored memoranda. Failing that, could he at least show him a copy? Simpson declined. He was not going to provide such sensitive written material to a reporter he barely knew.

  Undeterred, Bensinger went to meet Kramer. He had learned from an unknown source—not Fusion and not Orbis—that Kramer had a copy of the Steele memos and arranged to meet with him. The two met at the McCain Institute’s deserted offices near the State Department in Foggy Bottom. The offices were closed for the week, but Kramer was there and had the dossier sitting on a table in front of him. Russia was still very much in the news. Indeed, that very same day, President Barack Obama had expelled thirty-five Russian diplomats and announced other measures in retaliation for Russia’s hack attacks and election interference.

  How exactly Bensinger obtained page-by-page photos of the highlighted dossier from Kramer was later the subject of some dispute. Kramer initially claimed he had not known that Bensinger would photograph the documents. “He said he wanted to read them, he asked me if I could take photos of them,” Kramer testified in a defamation case. “I asked him not to. He said he was a slow reader, he wanted to read it. And so I said, you know, I got a phone call to make and I had to go to the bathroom…and so I left him to read for 20, 30 minutes.”

  Bensinger photographed the dossier with his iPhone.

  In journalism and politics, the old “I left the room for twenty minutes” is a familiar ruse by sources who want plausible deniability for sharing confidential information. Kramer had been a senior government official who was accustomed to speaking to the media under a cloak of anonymity; he had done so with Simpson himself a decade earlier. Kramer likely knew exactly what he was doing—despite the explicit conditions he’d agreed to with Simpson that the memos were for Senator McCain and no one else.

  Indeed, Kramer later admitted to having given a copy of the memoranda to two reporters for McClatchy newspapers in early December 2016 and eventually to at least four other news organizations.

  Bensinger later testified that Kramer had explicitly allowed him to photograph the dossier with his iPhone. Kramer was forced to clarify for the record and say that he “had no objection” to Bensinger taking the report with him.

  Bensinger had dinner that night with Simpson at a trendy farm-to-table restaurant on Connecticut Avenue called Buck’s Fishing & Camping. Over dinner, Bensinger informed Simpson that he would no longer need to pester him for a look at the Steele memos. He said he had taken care of that with a new source—someone in Foggy Bottom. Simpson assumed that Kramer had simply briefed Bensinger on the contents and that Bensinger had left satisfied.

  On New Year’s Eve, Simpson flew to Mexico on vacation. That same day, Bensinger texted Steele asking if he was available to meet in London on January 3. Based on Bensinger’s Christmas Eve text, Steele was concerned that he would want to talk about the Trump investigation, but he took the meeting based on Bensinger’s claim that he wanted to discuss FIFA.

  Ever the intelligence officer, he also wanted to find out what Bensinger had learned in Washington. At their meeting, Bensinger gave no hint that he had a copy of the dossier. When Bensinger turned the conversation to the substance of the Trump reports, Steele grew more guarded, and Bensinger left soon after.

  Unbeknownst to Fusion or Steele, by then the Steele memos were all over town, thanks to Kramer. The Wall Street Journal had a copy. So did NPR. And just as Steele was meeting with Bensinger in London, Kramer was meeting with Watergate legend Carl Bernstein in New York. Bernstein, who consulted for CNN, was now also in possession of a copy of the dossier. It was only a matter of time before it all burst into public view.

  *1  Later, when Simpson mentioned the meeting to Steele, he was surprised to learn that Steele had had nothing to do with arranging it and hadn’t spoken to Ohr in months.

  *2  Much later, Fritsch would have to testify on Fusion’s behalf in a defamation suit Gubarev brought against BuzzFeed for having published the dossier. Gubarev’s case was dismissed on the grounds that the BuzzFeed report was about a government investigation.

  When it was released on January 6, 2017, the U.S. Intelligence Community’s fourteen-page report on Russia’s election meddling was stark and unambiguous. It confirmed all the worst suspicions and fears haunting Fusion and Orbis. It also marked a stunning about-face for the United States government.

  Here was the combined might of the FBI, the NSA, and the CIA saying in the clearest terms that Moscow had not just sought to undermine the public’s faith in democratic elections but had “developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump” and worked to “denigrate Secretary Clinton and harm her electability.” And the orders, the report said, had come directly from Vladimir Putin himself. All three agencies had “high confidence in these judgments.”

  These conclusions closely echoed the alarms Christopher Steele had been raising going all the way back to July 2016, six months earlier. Before the election, even after the Obama administration finally declared that the Russians were behind the DNC and other hacks, officials still didn’t want to take the next step and say Moscow was trying to elect Trump—not with the vote itself still weeks away and Trump bellowing about a rigged election. But much had changed since then.

  The day before the intelligence report went public, FBI Director Comey and the entire brain trust of the U.S. Intelligence Community had traveled to the White House to present their findings in person to President Obama.

  After they had walked the president through the report, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper raised another, more delicate matter. As Comey described later in his memoir, Clapper explained that there was some “additional material” that “needed to be brought to Mr. Trump’s attention.”

  That material, Comey wrote, “had been assembled by an individual considered reliable, a former allied intelligence officer, but it had not been fully validated.”

  He was speaking, of course, of Steele’s memos.

  The intelligence chiefs told Obama about the memos’ most striking allegations: Russia had material on Trump “for the possible purpose of blackmail.” They said that Trump himself neede
d to be informed of this, as the FBI had heard that the media would soon report on the dossier’s existence. When Obama was told that Comey would perform that task alone, the outgoing president shot the FBI director a look, Comey recounted, that said, “Good luck with that.”

  The next day, just hours before the release of the DNI report, the heads of the intelligence agencies traveled to Trump Tower to brief the president-elect about their findings and the Steele allegations. They slipped into the building through a side entrance. “We were sneaking in to tell him what Russia had done to try to help elect him,” Comey later wrote.

  When it came time for the briefings on the Steele material, the Trump aides and the Obama officials all left so Comey and Trump could talk one-on-one. The FBI director didn’t get far before Trump cut him off. He dismissed it all as patently untrue, Comey said.

  The release of the Intelligence Community assessment later that afternoon caused an explosion within a Washington press corps that had largely begun to move on from the Russia story. It would also reorient thinking in a way that heightened the impact of the Russia news to come. Four days later, CNN broke the dossier story, followed quickly by BuzzFeed’s posting of the Steele memos.

  Fusion’s work since the late summer of 2015 was about to go public.

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  The minute he saw the BuzzFeed story, Simpson called Bensinger and urged him to take the memos down. Bensinger said it was out of his hands, and Simpson had no real recourse other than to appeal to Bensinger’s boss, Ben Smith. He, too, was unmovable. Simpson suspected that McCain adviser David Kramer had leaked the documents to Bensinger, so his next call was to Kramer, and it wasn’t a polite one. Kramer, after denying to Simpson that he had leaked the memos to BuzzFeed, then called Bensinger and begged him to take the documents off BuzzFeed’s website.