Crime in Progress

by Glenn Simpson;Peter Fritsch;

  “You are gonna get people killed,” Kramer said.

  Bensinger separately told Kramer and Simpson that he had opposed publishing the dossier, had been overruled by his editors, and only now understood why publishing the memos would put anyone in danger. He told colleagues at the time that he felt like he had just killed somebody. BuzzFeed’s editors said the contents of the dossier were important to readers because the government was taking the dossier seriously enough to brief Obama about it. But the obvious corollary to that was that if the information in the dossier really was being taken seriously at the highest levels of the U.S. government, and did come from high-level sources in Moscow, the Kremlin would now undoubtedly seek to hunt down the Kremlin insiders who had spilled some of its most precious secrets—acts of high treason that Putin would undoubtedly punish with the ultimate sanction.

  Kramer, meanwhile, had a more parochial concern: He might now be sucked into the story himself. So he called Bensinger a second time to make sure Bensinger wouldn’t finger him as the leaker. Later, when Steele confronted Kramer about whether he gave the memos to Bensinger, Kramer denied it to him, too. “Initially I panicked,” Kramer later explained.

  Across Washington—around the globe, really—people pulled up the dossier on their phones in elevators, in bars, and walking down the street and attempted to digest a document unlike anything they had ever seen.

  The PDF consisted of photos of numbered “company intelligence” reports, each under a header marked CONFIDENTIAL/SENSITIVE SOURCE. The material was presented in bullet points, some of which someone had highlighted in yellow. Some portions were blacked out altogether. Sprawled across sixteen memos and thirty-five pages were mentions of golden showers, warnings of a wave of cyberattacks, moles within the DNC, and secret channels for moving Russian cash into the United States. The text was sprinkled with obscure names (like the “Anunak” and “Buktrap” gangs) and employed an intelligence style (“Source B asserted”) that seemed exotic or confusing to many readers.

  Fusion woke to a starkly different world the next morning. Their little shop above a Starbucks and a consignment store had kept such a low profile, it barely warranted a page of mentions on Google. Its deliberately barebones company website featured little more than a one-paragraph statement of purpose and an email address, which fed an inbox that was largely empty.

  Within hours, that comfortable sense of anonymity went up in a puff of headlines and cable hits as the people behind the dossier became known. First to fall was the shroud around Steele.

  In London, Wall Street Journal reporter Alan Cullison began calling Steele’s friends and workmates. Kramer had given Cullison a copy of the memos in December. Now Cullison was reaching out directly to Steele, who told him he’d be willing to talk one day but that at the moment it was “too hot.” Circumstances had now changed: The Journal seemed intent on outing Steele as the dossier’s author.

  Orbis and Fusion grew concerned that the media frenzy over the memos would cause outlets to override previous promises of confidentiality, raising possible safety concerns for staff. That became a near certainty on January 10 when a young reporter for the Journal showed up at the home of Steele’s business partner, Chris Burrows, some seventy miles southwest of London and explained that he’d just traveled about ninety minutes on the U.K.’s notoriously shoddy South West service.

  “You poor sod, you’ve been on South West Trains!” Burrows said cheerily. “You’d better come in.” As they stood in his kitchen, the reporter explained his mission and brandished a copy of the Steele memos. “Is this yours?” he asked. Burrows said he could neither confirm nor deny, sent the reporter packing, and immediately phoned Steele.

  Steele suspected that Kramer was the leak and phoned him to try to figure out what was happening. Kramer denied he had leaked but volunteered to try to convince the Journal to protect Steele’s identity. “They had already made up their mind, it was clear to me, although I spent a good hour or two talking to them, explaining why this was a terrible decision on their part,” Kramer later recalled.

  The story went up on the Journal’s webpage that evening. Steele had already taken his family and fled his house, so by 10 P.M., British tabloid journalists were outside the Burrows house. By the following morning, the TV trucks were there. There was also a large media scrum camped outside the Orbis office in London, near Victoria Station.

  The British government swiftly issued a so-called DSMA-Notice—an informal, voluntary request asking newspaper editors to refrain from publishing information that would be harmful to national security. “The public disclosure” of Steele’s name “would put the personal security of that individual directly at risk,” read the statement by secretary of the Defense and Security Media Advisory Committee. It was a noble but futile gesture.

  A few of the reporters who played a role in exposing Steele would later express regrets about the personal consequences for Steele. Among the first was BuzzFeed’s Bensinger.

  “I am sorry this has been a difficult week,” he texted Steele after the Journal story. “I was very upset to hear you were forced to go into hiding. For what it is worth, which I suspect is not much, I have not told anyone we met and do not plan to, and have not mentioned your name to anyone.”

  For weeks and from his various hiding places, Steele would phone Simpson and Fritsch around 11 or 12 at night in the U.K., which was the end of the working day in Washington and around the time the cable news networks began giving their wrap-ups of the latest developments. In a hushed and often strained voice, Steele would provide vague accounts of his whereabouts and ask for a read on what was likely to happen next—always with an eye toward whether his sources might be exposed in the coming investigations. The Fusion partners would do their best to hold his hand while explaining how hard it is under the U.S. legal system to keep even sensitive information under wraps. “You can expect for every detail of our work together to become known, sooner or later,” Fritsch told him one night.

  “Utterly outrageous that a government can’t keep its secrets,” Steele replied.

  Next to be exposed was the firm that hired Steele.

  In Washington, Simpson received a call from Times reporter Scott Shane, who said he was reporting on the origin of the Steele memos and wanted to review the history confidentially. Simpson walked him through some of the basics. Simpson then mentioned that he’d heard the website Gizmodo, at that very moment, was attempting to out Fusion as the firm that had commissioned the Steele memos. Then why not go on the record with me? Shane asked. Simpson declined, reminding Shane that the paper had agreed to keep Fusion’s identity under wraps.

  As the media frenzy reached a crescendo that night, Simpson grew concerned that Shane might not keep that deal. So he called a Times editor he knew in New York. “I have a feeling you’re getting ready to out us,” he said, protesting that such a move would be improper, since Fusion had honored its end of the confidential source agreement.

  You should be outing your government sources instead, Simpson argued—the ones who, it now seemed clear, had deliberately misled the paper the previous October about the seriousness of the FBI’s Trump-Russia investigation. The editor gave no promises on Fusion’s fate, but readers, he said, hadn’t seen the last of the October episode.

  At 9:17 that night, the Times’s story hit the Web: “How a Sensational, Unverified Dossier Became a Crisis for Donald Trump.” It identified Fusion as the firm that had hired Steele, and described it as a firm “sometimes hired by candidates, party organizations or donors to do political ‘oppo’ work.”

  Fritsch and Simpson were furious. The Times had used information about Fusion it had learned off the record and put it on the record unilaterally. Fritsch fired off a couple of angry emails to Times reporters that he instantly regretted. The truth was that Fusion’s identity was bound to come out—and the Times story wasn’t unfair. The heated react
ion was fueled as much by an anticipatory dread of what Fusion feared could happen next: angry attacks from Trump supporters; nervous clients wanting to ditch Fusion; retribution from the incoming administration.

  “We are in for some serious shit now,” Fritsch told Catan that night.

  Simpson locked himself in a spare bedroom and watched as his phone vibrated every few minutes with another message—a TV station in Japan, an old college friend, a Trump supporter. Scenarios for what might happen next played out in his head. One thing was for sure: Fusion would come under investigation by the Republican-controlled Congress, which had already vowed to look into the Russian attack on the election. The moment reminded Simpson of how he had felt after the death of a close friend in a plane crash: Something awful had suddenly happened, but there was nothing to do about it.

  The next day, the main topic of conversation in the Simpson and Fritsch households was security. Simpson’s house was less than a mile from Comet Ping Pong, the local pizzeria that had been shot up three weeks earlier by a Trump supporter who was convinced the restaurant was operating a child sex abuse dungeon tied to the Clintons. Simpson and his wife began to discuss whether their home was safe and decided to spend thousands of dollars to replace their flimsy backyard fence with a stout wooden wall seven feet high.

  Given what had happened to Orbis, it seemed like a safe bet there would be camera crews outside the office the next morning.

  “Hey all,” Fritsch emailed the staff. “May want to telecommute tomorrow.”

  * * *

  —

  Trump and his aides reacted to the twin stories with a fresh geyser of lies, the start of what would become a relentless campaign by the incoming president to disavow any ties to Russia and to portray all investigators as sworn enemies out to undermine his presidency and the validity of his election.

  “FAKE NEWS—A TOTAL POLITICAL WITCH HUNT!” Trump fulminated on Twitter at 8:19 P.M. The next morning: “Russia has never tried to use leverage over me. I HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH RUSSIA - NO DEALS, NO LOANS, NO NOTHING!” To Fusion, this seemed like an instant rival to “I am not a crook” and “I did not have sexual relations with that woman” in the pantheon of presidential lies.

  Then Trump accused the intelligence agencies of leaking the information against him. “Are we living in Nazi Germany?” he asked.

  The great counteroffensive was under way.

  Within hours, wild theories about the provenance and true purpose of the dossier began to proliferate. As they spread, these theories would help feed an increasingly elaborate Trump defense designed to convince the public—or at least his supporters—that there had been no Russian effort to aid the candidate and no attempt by the Trump campaign to court Russian support. It was all a partisan political operation to undermine his presidency.

  On the day after those stories broke, no one on staff had taken up Fritsch’s offer to work from home. Instead, the entire Fusion team gathered around the big screen in the office as Trump took to a podium at Trump Tower to tear into the dossier and to compare those who reported on it to Nazis.

  Trump hadn’t taken questions from the press for five months, so the hunger to attend his first presser as president-elect was intense—and all the more so in the wake of the dossier news. Cameramen and reporters had started lining up outside Trump Tower at 4 A.M., seven hours before Trump spoke.

  Trump spokesman Sean Spicer got things started, blaming the media for “this political witch hunt,” even though the mainstream media that conservatives so detest had done little to trigger the controversy. Trump minced no words when he took to the microphones. A cabal of enemies had conspired to take him down. “It was a group of opponents that got together—sick people—and they put that crap together,” he said.

  He claimed to have no involvement with Russia whatsoever. “I have no deals, I have no loans, and I have no dealings,” he said. Later it would become known that he had been negotiating a deal for a hotel complex in Moscow only months earlier.

  As for the allegations of Russian hacking, yes, he did think Russia was involved. “But I think we also get hacked by other countries and other people,” he said. On top of that, the DNC had defended its systems poorly and “was totally open to be hacked.”

  The counter-narrative that Trump and his allies would later make their main pushback against the Russia story was beginning to fall into place. In Trump’s version, he was the victim of a diabolical plot—a witch hunt!—that began with Fusion and the Steele dossier and then found enthusiastic help from enemies within the intelligence agencies and the rest of the federal government.

  Trump had spent months during the final stage of the campaign warning that the election could be rigged. If he lost, it would be because the system had conspired against him. Now, even in victory, just days from inauguration, he saw similar sinister forces at play. No matter what the facts, his enemies were out to get him.

  Never mind that almost none of the dossier’s assertions had made their way into the public eye before Election Day. Its findings in no way impacted the election itself, unlike Comey’s handling of the Hillary Clinton email investigation and the multitude of leaks and dirty tricks perpetuated by Russian hackers and bots—later determined to be the most aggressive foreign attempt in modern U.S. history to swing a national election. In the critical final days before the election, voters were swamped with headlines about Hillary’s emails and FBI-fed suspicions of wrongdoing by her and her campaign team. Hardly a word was said about an active FBI counterintelligence investigation of the Trump campaign’s many ties to Russia.

  And yet, in the telling of the president-elect and his defenders, the dossier and its enablers were now part of a giant conspiracy to delegitimize and undermine a presidency that even Trump himself doubted would ever come to pass. Fusion, still bound by its confidentiality obligations to its clients, made no attempt to respond to these increasingly wild theories and allegations.

  * * *

  —

  Fusion’s skimpy webpage got its first surge of traffic in the hours after the Times piece. Soon, its general email address, info@fusiongps.com, would become a portal to a dark world, vibrating to whatever strange and alarming things were happening out there beyond Fusion’s walls. If Trump or one of his lieutenants let it rip, or Sean Hannity spewed some conspiracy theory about the dossier on Fox News, the mailbox would fill with invective aping those remarks, often with a few threats thrown in.

  “I hope you get caught up in the Steele operation and they take you all down…and out,” said the first hate-mail message, received in the early morning of January 12. The sender, from Plantersville, Texas, signed off, indecipherably, with this query: “Why did WTC7 fall down????!!!!!!” One Fusion hater correctly guessed Fritsch’s email address. “How about you stop being a treasonous pig?” he wrote. “Hillary Clinton is a criminal and you back her? Treason’s punishment is death and the war is coming scumbag.” Fusion reported that one to the police. There were frantic messages from cable news producers looking to get in touch, requests for comment from various reporters, and offers of help from old acquaintances.

  The next day, January 13, Britain’s Daily Mail ran a sensationalist piece about Fusion under the headline: “Meet the espionage firm which ordered Trump ‘dirty dossier’—a secretive D.C. firm which has aided Planned Parenthood and attacked Mitt Romney’s friends.”

  The reporter who wrote the article had been in Fusion’s office more than a year earlier asking for help with stories. The article was accompanied by three vaguely sinister snapshots of Simpson, Fritsch, and their partner Tom Catan. More helpfully, it also included a photo of the squat glass tower across the street from Fusion’s office, which was described as Fusion headquarters; in fact, it was the building where BuzzFeed has its D.C. office. That would feed the conspiracy theorists while at least keeping the crazies looking in the wrong direction.


  That same day, Forbes published one of the first pieces attempting to debunk the dossier, written by a seventy-six-year-old former economist at Stanford’s Hoover Institution named Paul Roderick Gregory. Gregory described himself as a Russian expert who had traveled there “close to one hundred times,” he wrote. “I sort of know how these things work.”

  His judgment? “I can say that the dossier itself was compiled by a Russian, whose command of English is far from perfect…a Russian trained in the KGB tradition.” This theory that Steele had been duped by the Russians—or, in this case, had simply passed along a Russian document wholesale—would have many progeny in the months ahead. Gregory’s only known qualifications were that he himself was the son of a Russian immigrant and had taken Russian language lessons from the wife of JFK assassin Lee Harvey Oswald.

  William Browder, still irked over his loss in the Prevezon subpoena battle, was also quick to jump on the “disinformation” bandwagon. In one interview a couple of weeks after Fusion was outed, Browder accused Simpson of “working with a Russian spy” and “spreading knowingly false information based on payments from the Russian government.” In another interview, with the right-wing website The Daily Caller, Browder called Simpson “a professional smear campaigner.”

  The vitriol from the far right was aided by a spate of articles that began appearing about Steele’s long-standing relationship with the FBI and his role in the DOJ’s FIFA corruption investigations. Simpson and Fritsch hoped some of that reporting would validate Steele’s credentials as a legitimate law enforcement source and someone who had helped expose Kremlin-led corruption. But to the conspiracy-minded, the information only served to fuel suspicions that the FBI was the puppet of Steele and Democratic dirty tricksters.