Crime in Progress

by Glenn Simpson;Peter Fritsch;

  Chairman Nunes and the Republicans didn’t care about any of that. Their questioning focused on whether Obama holdovers in the Justice Department and intelligence communities were behind a systematic campaign of leaks intended to destroy Trump. Nunes expressed passing concern that the Russians may have interfered in the election, but his primary interest was whether U.S. spy agencies had snooped on the Trump campaign. Previously a little-known congressman from rural California, Nunes was about to stumble into the national spotlight with a set of blunders that would nonetheless make him a star of the pro-Trump right.

  The night after the Comey hearing, Nunes took a furtive trip to the White House, where a Trump aide slipped him a file meant to buttress the claim that the Obama White House had run a secret surveillance campaign on the Trump team. Nunes then deployed that material the next day in two press appearances—first in the Capitol and later in the White House driveway—telling reporters he had evidence that U.S. spy agencies had “incidentally” swept up communications involving Trump and his campaign aides. He said his committee would investigate, and he vowed to follow up with the FBI, the CIA, and the NSA.

  “What I have read bothers me, and I think it should bother the president himself and his team,” Nunes said. In fact, the White House had given him the material.

  It soon came out that the White House had engineered the whole show, sharing with Nunes classified documents about incidental surveillance of Trump campaign officials collected during the campaign so he could then act as if they had come from somewhere else. Even Senator Lindsey Graham, soon to be a sturdy Trump ally, scoffed at Nunes’s ham-handed effort to change the subject, calling it an “Inspector Clouseau investigation.” The House Ethics Committee opened an inquiry into Nunes’s actions. While under fire days later, Nunes recused himself from directing the committee’s Russia inquiry, a pledge he would water down with each passing month.

  And yet, despite getting caught red-handed, Nunes had laid another foundational building block for the emerging upside-down world. The GOP-led campaign to investigate the investigators was officially under way.

  With his first public utterance as president, in his inaugural speech overlooking the Washington Mall, Donald Trump didn’t attempt to soothe or lift up the nation. He played to people’s fears in dystopian language, vowing to stop the “carnage” being inflicted on Americans by dark forces overseas. In the days that followed, he lied about the size of his inaugural crowd, publicly flirted with Putin, and sought to impose a sweeping ban on foreign Muslims entering the United States. In all, strongman rhetoric and behavior that was deeply unsettling.

  Like much of the nation, Fusion had ample reason to worry about the whiff of authoritarianism in the air. The firm had commissioned the now public intelligence memos that accused the would-be strongman, soon to hold the most powerful job in the world, of cavorting with Russian prostitutes and a litany of potential criminal offenses. Now that he was firmly in power, it seemed only a matter of time before Trump would do what he could to use the powers at his disposal against Fusion.

  There was nowhere to turn in Washington for support or protection. Voters had just returned Republicans to control of both houses of Congress. The Justice Department would soon be under Trump’s control. While everyone at Fusion longed to continue to investigate the many mysteries surrounding the 2016 election, the firm was likely to be spending much of its time dealing with investigations of Fusion by Trump’s allies in Congress.

  The congressional inquisitions into Fusion were likely to last for most of the next two years, until the midterm elections, when historically the opposition party often takes over at least one of the two houses of Congress. It promised to be a lengthy battle to survive open-ended investigations by hostile congressional committees with almost infinite resources. In the meantime, could Americans rely on Trump’s Justice Department and a Republican-held Congress to dig into what had happened in the last election—and prevent it from happening again? Recent history suggested that was unlikely.

  Instead of business drying up, however, things were surprisingly stable. Fusion’s partners found themselves fielding calls from people wanting to organize or fund private efforts to defend the firm or, far more commonly, keep investigating Trump. Interest in a renewed investigative push soared after the release of the dossier and the joint report of the intelligence agencies. Everyone at the firm wanted to revive the Trump research, and the partners began to deliberate in earnest over how that might happen.

  The Fusion partners knew that things could turn on a dime for the worse, however. What if the new administration and subpoena-toting Republicans came pounding at the door? Fusion’s partners knew they would have no one to blame but themselves for that, having agreed with Steele to share the dossier with Senator McCain. One option would have been to simply drop the whole matter, as consultants routinely do when they lose a client. That would have meant destroying its communications and written reports, giving no more information to law enforcement, and spurning all press calls.

  But given the inevitable Republican attacks on their credibility, the best defense—really, the only defense—was to go out and gather more evidence supporting the original research. In order to be effective, though, Fusion would need the help of a good lawyer to fend off whatever Congress might throw at it.

  Simpson decided to reach out to William W. Taylor III, a reserved and soft-spoken septuagenarian with a pronounced North Carolina drawl who had defended scores of people in highly charged public matters. Simpson had first met Taylor in the late 1980s while covering the political corruption investigations that grew out of the collapse of the savings-and-loan industry.

  After they started Fusion, Simpson and Fritsch would also occasionally run into Taylor on the banks of the Potomac River during the annual spring shad run, when thousands of the sleek anadromous fish make their way upriver from the ocean to spawn. Taylor was a fishing fanatic, as was Fritsch. Simpson saw fishing largely as an opportunity to sit on a river with a pole in one hand and a can of beer in the other.

  Taylor, who didn’t shy from political controversy and was not afraid to take on unpopular clients, invited Simpson over to his house in Cleveland Park. Taylor poured two cups of coffee and they sat down together in his cozy day room.

  “I think we may be in a shitload of trouble,” Simpson said. He then laid out the whole history of the Fusion investigations into Trump. Taylor agreed that, sooner or later, Trump and his Republican allies in Congress would likely decide that Fusion and Orbis needed to be discredited, even destroyed. “They will need someone to blame and we’re going to be a leading candidate,” Simpson said.

  He then rang Steele at one of his hideouts in England and put him on speaker. Steele briefed Taylor on his own investigations into Trump’s dealings with the Russians and the fallout from the dossier’s publication. Reporters were still camped outside his house and office, Steele said, and he couldn’t be sure the Russians wouldn’t also come after him for exposing what might have been Putin’s biggest covert operation ever. He and his family had been forced to move from place to place, sheltering with friends.

  After the call, Simpson told Taylor that the coming turmoil could destroy the firm, and that defending Fusion could cost millions in legal fees. That was the bad news. The good news, he added, was that Fusion had done nothing wrong, had the facts on its side, and had ample reason to believe that what it had uncovered to date was just the start of the story. The Steele memos—based as they were on anonymous sources—were certain to come under withering attack. But Fusion had reams of other research on Trump and the Russians that no one knew about and that could not be easily dismissed.

  On top of that, Simpson said, a small number of Americans seemed willing to help fund continued investigations into Trump’s seedy past and Russia’s election meddling. That could help cover legal fees while also keeping the investigation going. Taylor said tha
t this sounded like a natural fit for his skills as a white-collar defense lawyer. Taylor also thought it was a clear case of defending Fusion’s right to free speech, one that could become very high profile. “I’d be happy to help any way you need,” Taylor said.

  Fusion’s problems weren’t just legal. Its biggest worry of all: the risk now faced by the sources behind the dossier. Given the Republican reaction to the memos, it was a decent bet that they wouldn’t be too worried about exposing Steele’s sources, if they were ever to discover them. There wasn’t anything Fusion could do to protect Steele’s sources inside Russia. Steele managed those relationships and would have to decide how to proceed. In reality, there was little he could do for them, either.

  But one of Steele’s sources was a Russian who wasn’t in Russia. Steele and Simpson discussed whether the Russian intelligence services would seek to track down this source and attempt an assassination. That was a valid concern, Steele said. He spoke from experience: One of the biggest cases of his government career was his investigation of the 2006 poisoning in London of former FSB agent Alexander Litvinenko by suspected Russian agents. In 2016, the British government publicly stated what Steele suspected from the start: that “the F.S.B. operation to kill Mr. Litvinenko was probably approved…by President Putin.”

  The source was someone Steele and Fusion might be able to help. Simpson didn’t know the source’s identity but lobbied Steele to introduce the source to the FBI. If the FBI or the Justice Department knew the source’s pedigree and skill, the agencies might want to intervene to offer protection—should he or she be willing to accept it. Steele initially demurred, saying that this person didn’t want to have any contact with the FBI and had been well aware of the risks when he agreed to pass information along to Steele.

  Simpson decided to explore the question himself. He sent Bruce Ohr a single-sentence text on January 20, 2017, at 3:13 P.M., some three hours after Trump had been sworn in as the forty-fifth president of the United States: “Can you call me please?” Soon thereafter, his cellphone rang.

  As reflected in Ohr’s scribbled notes, taken down at the time of the call but made public much later, Simpson explained that he was concerned about a person “likely to be identified by the other side & will need protection.” Eventually, he feared, “articles will make it clear to [the Russians] who this is.”

  “They can’t reach [the source],” Simpson added—at least not quickly. But in time, they might try. Ohr pressed for more details, but Simpson said he didn’t have many and was already freelancing. Steele himself hadn’t heard from his source in the wake of BuzzFeed’s release of the dossier.

  “Chris has the information that can help you find [the source],” he told Ohr. Maybe there was something the U.S. could do to help this person, maybe even with money? By now there was a very public investigation going on. This person was someone the FBI would want to interview and evaluate. Ohr was noncommittal but said he would follow up with Steele.

  Steele and Ohr talked on Skype the next day. Steele said he and his family were “restabilizing” after a tumultuous few days and had successfully avoided the British media’s manhunt. With any luck, he said hopefully, he would be able to come out of hiding the following week.

  Ohr related his previous day’s talk with Simpson about the source’s personal safety. The Russian’s security was “a serious potential issue,” Steele told Ohr, but he’d finally heard from his source via a message on social media, and the person was “alive and well.” Steele added that he did not have “clearance” from the source to reveal his identity to Ohr, and the individual was waiting to see if he “gets into a real pickle.”

  “His default position is to keep his head down,” Steele said, “but he may need help quickly.”

  They continued the conversation in encrypted text messages a week later.

  “Hi B! Our [person’s] OK for the time being but I would like to keep our channel open on [this] situation if that’s alright?” wrote Steele.

  “Understood,” replied Ohr. “We will be available if needed.”

  Steele wasn’t eager to turn the Russian over to the Justice Department at such a tumultuous time. No one was sure what would happen once Trump and his team took over. In late-night calls after Steele’s family had gone to bed, Steele and Simpson fed each other’s anxiety about what a lawless new president might be contemplating doing with the Justice Department and the FBI.

  Those concerns were greatly intensified when the White House abruptly fired Ohr’s boss, acting Attorney General Sally Yates, just three days later. With the loss of his longtime friend, Ohr was now far more exposed to potential White House retaliation for his ties to Steele, should it ever find out about them. Steele worried that this might hamper Ohr’s ability to intervene effectively on behalf of the source. “B, doubtless a sad and crazy day for you re SY,” Steele texted Ohr. “Just wanted to check you are OK, still in situ and able to help locally as discussed, along with your Bureau colleagues, with our guy if the need arises?”

  While the public explanation for Yates’s firing was her unwillingness to instruct the Justice Department to make legal arguments that would justify Trump’s Muslim travel ban, Steele couldn’t help but wonder if that was a pretext for something darker going on behind the scenes. Fusion and Orbis suspected that Yates might be aware of Ohr’s contacts with Simpson and Steele, and might have even authorized them. Had Trump somehow found out?

  Ohr might soon also be fired, Steele feared. If that were to happen, Steele would need another contact at the FBI to help him manage the Russian. “We can’t allow our guy to be forced to go back home,” he told Ohr. “It would be disastrous all round.”

  Two days later, The Wall Street Journal disclosed the existence of a DOJ counterintelligence investigation into Michael Flynn, Carter Page, Roger Stone, and Paul Manafort, “due to their known ties to Russian interests or their public statements.”

  While Yates and the White House both denied that her role in the counterintelligence investigation of Flynn had any role in her firing, her disappearance prompted Steele to put the brakes on efforts to bring his source in from the cold.

  In the U.K., Steele remained in hiding, but some of the Russians named in his memos began to come after him—not with thugs, but with lawyers. His last memo in December had contained allegations that companies owned by a Russian Internet mogul had been used in the hacking operations against the Democratic Party. The mogul’s lawyers sent Steele a threatening letter, calling the memo “gravely defamatory” and demanding a complete retraction and apology as well as a promise to pay damages. Steele and Burrows, who had only ever worked in the shadows, were trying to cope with a type of threat they’d never experienced, and they worried their firm could be driven into bankruptcy.

  Orbis was in chaos, and some of its staff were close to open revolt, Steele told Simpson. Key employees felt that their professional careers were now endangered by a project they hadn’t even known about or worked on. Everyone at Orbis had been forced to take down their profiles on LinkedIn, for security reasons and to avoid press scrutiny. It was a little difficult to market your services to clients, some of their best investigators complained, when prospective customers can no longer examine your background or send you a message on LinkedIn.

  A more immediate concern for Steele and Burrows was the bills rapidly piling up from their law firm. Seeking to reassure them and send a tangible signal of solidarity, Fusion wired Orbis $50,000 to help pay their lawyers, no strings attached.

  * * *

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  Fusion’s other concern was how to push ahead on the Trump work. It was time to move on from the post-election swirl and to determine how best to augment other lines of inquiry—in the press, in Congress, or among state and local prosecutors. But who would they be working for, and under what arrangement?

  Ever since the November election, Fusion had fun
ded all of its work on Trump and Russia itself, and that was getting expensive. In one costly episode, Simpson and Berkowitz flew down to the Virgin Islands to meet a potential source claiming to have information about Trump’s relationship with Deutsche Bank—Val Broeksmit, the son of a former top Deutsche executive who’d apparently committed suicide in 2014, shortly after quitting. Broeksmit had been introduced to Simpson by a reporter in Europe. He claimed to possess a cache of potentially telling emails downloaded from his father’s computer. On the off chance these emails would offer new insights into the bank’s interactions with Russia and its many loans to Trump, Simpson decided it was worth giving Broeksmit, a penniless rock musician, an all-expenses-paid jaunt to the U.S. Virgin Islands to find out. Berkowitz joined them.

  The three spent several days there in the last days of January, at a slightly shabby beach resort. Simpson agreed to pay Broeksmit $4,000 for a copy of his father’s emails and Broeksmit’s time for help reviewing them. The correspondence turned out to be revealing about Deutsche Bank’s mismanagement but did little to illuminate the bank’s relationship to the Kremlin or to Trump.

  These kinds of dry holes are common in investigations. But the affair underscored the challenge Fusion was facing: The Trump-Russia mystery would be unraveled only by an ambitious, well-funded investigation. They needed to be able to pay last-minute international airfares at the drop of a hat and compensate people who might be able to contribute their expertise or vital information. Fusion couldn’t afford to fund that kind of operation for much longer without going broke.

  Fusion suspected its work was unlikely to be sought after by the Republican majority in Congress, whose efforts to investigate Russia’s assault on the 2016 election were likely to be cursory and half-hearted. Nor did it seem likely, given the politically charged nature of the dossier controversy, that law enforcement would come asking for help anytime soon. By necessity, the main constituency for any future Fusion research into Russia’s attack on the 2016 election—at least for the next two years—would be the press and the public at large.