Crime in Progress

by Glenn Simpson;Peter Fritsch;

  The dossier’s release coincided with a surge in aggressive reporting on Trump’s Russia entanglements from a variety of serious journalists. The morning after Trump’s first presser, Post columnist David Ignatius dropped a bomb about retired general Michael Flynn, Trump’s pick for national security adviser: “According to a senior U.S. government official,” Ignatius reported, “Flynn phoned Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak several times on Dec. 29 [2016], the day the Obama administration announced the expulsion of 35 Russian officials as well as other measures in retaliation for the hacking.”

  Flynn had been holding secret talks with the Russian ambassador to discuss dropping U.S. sanctions against Russia, and the FBI had overheard the secret talks because it was taping Kislyak’s phone calls. Flynn swiftly assured Vice President–elect Mike Pence that no such conversation ever happened, a lie that would lead to Flynn’s resignation a month later.

  The day after the Ignatius column, the Senate Intelligence Committee announced it would open an investigation into the 2016 election, “including any intelligence regarding links between Russia and individuals associated with political campaigns.”

  Trump’s attempts to squelch the Russia controversy did not get much help from Putin, who blasted the Steele memos in his own press conference a few days later as “obvious fabrications” but then mischievously undermined his own denial by bragging about the prowess of Russian prostitutes. “I find it hard to believe that he rushed to some hotel to meet girls of loose morals—although ours are undoubtedly the best in the world,” he said. It was vintage Putin.

  Representative Devin Nunes of California, who served on Trump’s transition team, would soon use his chairmanship of the House Intelligence Committee to try to gut the inquiries into Trump’s Russia ties and to create multiple diversionary smoke screens. But days after the dossier leaked, he shrugged, saying it “wouldn’t be news” to know Russians were seeking to spread material to smear Hillary Clinton. Any ties between Russia and the Trump campaign, though, would be “hard to believe.”

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  The resignation of Trump’s national security adviser, Michael Flynn, on February 13, 2017, was a seminal moment in the early days of the Russia scandal, seeming to support the Steele dossier’s allegations of surreptitious dealings between the Trump camp and the Russians. But it also opened a new avenue of attack for Trump’s defenders, who quickly blamed his downfall not on Flynn’s own reckless actions but on pernicious leaks by U.S. intelligence.

  Flynn had met repeatedly with various Russian officials, and held multiple conversations about the lifting of Russian sanctions with Ambassador Kislyak in the weeks after Trump’s win in November. Compounding his foolishness, he then lied about the content of those discussions to FBI investigators. U.S. intelligence officials knew the contents of several Flynn phone conversations with Kislyak because they had eavesdropped on those calls, a fact The Washington Post broke four days before Flynn stepped down.

  Those disclosures rocked Washington and pulled the camera away from Fusion and the dossier. But instead of showing alarm over Flynn’s actions, Trump allies such as Nunes turned their fire instead on the national security agencies, demanding to know how the information had become public and again hinting that Democrats working deep inside the government were out to get the president. Trump took the same line, tweeting that “the real story here is why are there so many illegal leaks coming out of Washington.” Old hands recognized it as straight out of Richard Nixon’s Watergate playbook.

  Two days after the Flynn resignation, everyone at Fusion again huddled around the big-screen TV on the wall as Trump dismissed as “a ruse” any suggestion he or his team had ties to Russia. It was his first solo White House press conference, and he began by unspooling a long list of the highlights of his first few weeks in office—record highs in the stock market, rising business confidence. Companies, he claimed, were already moving factories back to the United States. “I don’t think there’s ever been a president elected who, in this short period of time, has done what we’ve done,” he said. He was just over three weeks into his presidency.

  Then he laid into the news outlets who were following and reporting on the Russia story. Something had to be done about it. The media had it all wrong. Trump was the real victim. “The level of dishonesty is out of control,” he said. Once his opening rant wound down, Trump was swamped by a volley of Russia questions from the assembled press corps. The first question: “Did you fire Mike Flynn?” Again, the problem for Trump wasn’t Flynn or any of his other aides who appeared to have sought counsel from the Russians or even offered assistance in return. No, the problem was that someone from the inside had leaked tidbits about all this to the press. “It’s an illegal process, and the press should be ashamed of themselves,” he said.

  On the bigger questions, he couldn’t have been more emphatic. “I have nothing to do with Russia. To the best of my knowledge no person that I deal with does,” he said as reporters kept pushing on the allegations. Ever gifted in the art of the counterattack, Trump soon began lobbing back his own allegations. They were clearly flimsy (Paul Manafort “said that he has absolutely nothing to do and never has with Russia”) and stirred incredulity (“absolutely crazy,” said Shepard Smith on Fox News) and immediate fact-checks (“That’s not exactly true,” USA Today observed), but they adroitly fed the GOP hunger for a counter-narrative.

  By March 1, both the Senate and House intelligence committees had launched inquiries into Russian interference in the 2016 election. The next day, Trump’s attorney general, Jeff Sessions, recused himself from any involvement in DOJ’s Russia inquiries. He failed, in response to a direct question about the subject at his Senate confirmation hearing, to disclose two meetings of his own with Russian ambassador Kislyak.

  Two days later, Trump opened yet another front in the Republican counterattack.

  “Just found out that Obama had my ‘wires tapped’ in Trump Tower just before the victory. Nothing found. This is McCarthyism!” the president tweeted.

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  During Watergate, Richard Nixon and his allies also effectively deployed the “witch hunt” defense. Time and again they blamed the growing furor on a cabal of snobby East Coast reporters and pernicious anti-Nixon leakers from within the administration. Many prominent Republicans eagerly echoed those charges, including the young senator Bob Dole, who served at the time as the party’s chairman. The Washington Post, he charged, was in bed with the Democrats. In September 1973, he even introduced legislation to stop television coverage of the Watergate hearings. “It is time,” he said, “to turn off the TV lights.”

  What the Nixon team lacked was the unwavering, uncritical, and ceaseless support of a major media outlet. What they lacked, in other words, was Fox News and its allies in conservative digital media, who in Trump’s case amplified the Republican charges of a “deep state” conspiracy or seeded that ground themselves. On many occasions, one could plainly see Fox News, the White House, and congressional protectors like Nunes coordinating with allies in the print and online media.

  A month after taking office, Trump deemed the so-called mainstream media the “enemy of the American people,” but his band of supporters within the media—the big names like Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson at Fox News; columnists like Kimberley Strassel at The Wall Street Journal; writers at The Daily Caller, The Federalist, the Washington Examiner, and The Hill—became vital co-creators and curators of the upside-down world. For this contingent, it was never particularly important whether Russia and the Trump campaign had attempted to form a dark electoral alliance. When the Russia allegations exploded in early 2017, these instant promoters of the counter-narrative did not pause to examine the multiple reasons for concern: Trump’s longtime interactions with the Russian underworld; his reliance on Russian buyers for Trump commercial properties; the fact that a Russian oliga
rch overpaid by tens of millions of dollars to buy his Palm Beach property on the eve of the housing crisis; the abundant interactions between his campaign and Moscow—none of this was worthy of consideration or column inches.

  Instead, what mattered was that liberals in the press and in Congress, aided by Trump opponents within the government, were doing all they could to tear Trump down and frustrate the conservative push to remake the judiciary, the federal regulatory system, and the U.S. tax code. The editorial page of The Wall Street Journal was a particularly stark example of this willful blindness.

  The Journal editorial board had deep misgivings about the many ways Trump appeared to stray from Republican economic orthodoxy—his penchant for deficit spending and tariffs and his punitive approach to trade, for starters. But the same Journal editorial page, which had published hundreds of columns on the Clintons’ Whitewater real estate investments, ran no exposés on Trump’s Russian entanglements or his highly dubious land deal in Palm Beach or his long history of consorting with organized crime in New York. It evinced no alarm over the clear signs that Moscow had gone to great lengths to aid the Trump campaign.

  What it did do, just days after the dossier was published, was join Trump on the attack. And that job fell largely to Strassel, who covers the Washington political scene for the editorial page from her home in Wasilla, Alaska. Liberals, she asserted in her column just days after the dossier broke, resorted to “underhanded tactics,” “smear strategy,” “shock troops,” “dirt diggers,” and “character assassination.” To Strassel, the dossier was nothing but “a turbocharged example of the smear strategy that the left has been ramping up for a decade.” Trying to figure out if there was any truth in the allegations put forth in the dossier, she wrote, “arguably isn’t worth the effort.” Neither she nor her colleagues on the Journal edit board ever tried.

  Over the coming months and years, Strassel would become one of the right’s most reliable messengers—inspiring, augmenting, and amplifying whatever line of attack was spilling out of the Oval Office or from the desk of Sean Hannity. Events later revealed numerous Strassel columns to be wrong. In one stark example, she lampooned Simpson—under the headline “Russia, the NRA and Fake News”—for having spread “a wild new tale” in congressional testimony that the FBI was investigating allegations that Russians close to Putin had sought to infiltrate the NRA. Four months later, the Justice Department unsealed a criminal complaint charging that the Russians had done just that.

  In all, Fusion was the target of no fewer than fifty Journal editorials and Potomac Watch columns between January 2017 and July 2019, accusing Fusion of a litany of nefarious misdeeds. A big U.S. company like IBM or Microsoft likely would have recoiled under such a barrage and spent mightily on some big PR firm to beat back the attacks, but the Journal veterans at Fusion knew that the paper’s editorial page was all in for Trump, and saw no benefit in rebuttals. Week after week, the partners at Fusion marveled at the latest shell lobbed their way. Some columns they snipped out and tacked onto the wall.

  The columns offended Fusion’s founders with their intellectual dishonesty and reflexive defense of Trump. But the Fusion team was also saddened by the paper’s willingness to trash its own alumni. Fusion employed four Journal veterans who had collectively worked for the paper for nearly six decades, breaking news and sometimes risking their necks on dangerous foreign assignments.

  To make himself feel better, Fritsch drafted several angry notes to editorial page editor Paul Gigot. He never sent them.

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  It would be months before Trump himself turned his Twitter account squarely on Fusion, but in the meantime, the flood of emails and tweets from his supporters could hardly have been more caustic.

  Fusion had to decide what to ignore—extreme abuse being the new normal—and what merited action to protect the staff, who hadn’t asked for any of this. Fusion flagged for potential legal follow-up messages that seemed to cross the line by inciting violence against them. One account on Twitter posted Fusion’s street address, along with the message “If you want to visit Glenn, this is his office.”

  The author identified as a member of a far-right, conspiracy-minded militia group called the Oath Keepers. He had nearly twenty thousand followers, many of whom professed to be armed. He spun an elaborate tale on Twitter for his followers suggesting that Fusion was part of a sophisticated global conspiracy to undermine Trump. The operation, he wrote, was being run out of the basement of Obama’s new house in Washington’s Kalorama neighborhood, a fifteen-minute walk from Fusion’s office. He termed it “the Obama/Valerie Jarrett #DeepState Command Center.” He posted photos of the outside of Obama’s house and suggested he was conducting nightly surveillance runs there.

  Several followers answered his call, one self-professed Second Amendment enthusiast replying, “Uh, yeah can I talk to Glenn.” Another user, pictured firing a weapon, replied, “He’s going to have a heart attack to the back of the head.”

  The Fusion staff closely tracked tweets like these, which in turn fanned fears among family members that some armed nut might come barging into the office. In this case, Fusion alerted the Secret Service, and his account was shut down not long after.

  It was easy to write off some of these threats as the products of unhinged minds. Others were more upsetting. Fusion’s partners and staff began crossing the street when suspicious-looking people approached and grew wary of opening packages. Simpson installed security cameras at his home. Fritsch allowed his dog to roam free in the house at night rather than confining him to the back hall.

  Coming to work could be a nerve-racking exercise in the weeks after the dossier was published. It didn’t help that Fusion’s modest office building had no security guard in the lobby or that it shared the premises with a podiatrist and a psychotherapy practice admitting a constant parade of unfamiliar faces. Reporters and camera crews staked out the front door. One particularly determined reporter waited outside for several hours until Simpson went home for the night and then followed him to the subway station.

  Recent events had shown how seemingly harmless conspiracies cooked up on the fringes of the Internet could spill over into real life. During the election, to take one example, Trump supporters on sites like 4chan, 8chan, and Twitter took mundane conversations plucked from John Podesta’s hacked emails and weaved them together with other random elements to create the bizarro-world conspiracy theory that Democrats were molesting children in the basement of Comet Ping Pong, a local D.C. pizzeria. They termed the resulting theory “Pizzagate.” It all seemed slightly comical until Edgar Maddison Welch, armed with a military-style assault rifle and several other guns, drove up from North Carolina with visions of saving children from depraved Democrats. He walked into the restaurant, in Northwest D.C., and fired three shots into the ground, sending families running for the exits. The judge later said it was “sheer luck” the gunman hadn’t injured anyone.

  The info@fusiongps.com account bore harbingers of other threats, too. Soon company email accounts were receiving fake messages posing as urgent requests by their email provider to change their password, or as prompts from cloud storage providers to accept a supposed file from a client. A nonexistent hedge fund—complete with its own phony website—expressed interest in becoming a Fusion research client, asking for a meeting. On another occasion, an email with a request to a co-worker was spoofed to look as if it had come from Simpson. Other times the would-be hackers tried to pose as Fritsch.

  The same “spear-phishing” efforts, which aim to trick a user into giving up their credentials, had been used by Russian intelligence agencies to hack the DNC and Podesta’s emails. Fusion moved to bolster its digital defenses. One gruff former FBI man, with a career in cybersecurity, came in and dismissed most of what was commercially available as snake oil. The best thing one could do, he said, was train everyone to recognize a phishing
email—and not click on it.

  Fair enough. But Fusion thought it needed more than behavioral training. It hired a former National Security Agency employee and his firm to assess their defenses, set up a continuous monitoring system, and investigate attacks. The good news was that, in its own haphazard way, Fusion had already made substantial progress in securing its systems. The former cyber soldier said they were already ahead of the vast majority of U.S. companies, even some many times their size. That fact seemed only to underline how vulnerable most American companies were to attack.

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  By March 20, when FBI Director James Comey sat down for his first post-election hearing, before the House Intelligence Committee, the gap between how Democrats and Republicans saw the swirl of Russia allegations was already miles wide. That rift only widened when he announced, at the top of his testimony, that the FBI had embarked on a full-blown investigation into Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election. The investigation included “the nature of any links between individuals associated with the Trump campaign and the Russian government and whether there was any coordination between the campaign and Russia’s efforts.”

  It was now official: The nation’s most powerful law enforcement agency was digging into whether the president’s team had cooperated with a foreign power to win the White House.

  The Democrats, led by Representative Adam Schiff of California, had a litany of barbed questions for Comey. Why did the Russians jump to assist Trump? Who among Trump’s aides had contacts with Russian actors, and to what end? Why did Flynn lie about his contacts with the Russian ambassador?