The sexier angle for the press was the Sunday follow-up in the Times revealing that Don Jr. had eagerly accepted the meeting with the Russians after they promised him dirt on Hillary Clinton. That fit with the rest of the building narrative of undisclosed Trump team contacts with the Russians. Corallo resigned from Trump’s legal team a few days later.
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As bad as the Trump Tower news was for the White House, it also undercut Fusion’s efforts to put off the Senate Judiciary Committee, sucking the firm into a brutal episode of political attack and maneuvering. Now Grassley had a whole new avenue to explore: Just what did Fusion know about this Trump Tower meeting, and when did they know it?
On July 5, days before the Times story broke, Grassley had invited Simpson to testify before the committee at a hearing on compliance with the Foreign Agents Registration Act, a ploy to air Browder’s grievances about Fusion’s supposed lobbying for the Kremlin. Senator Feinstein, the committee’s ranking Democrat and Grassley’s most important counterweight, declined to sign the letter. That meant Simpson could safely decline the request. But he never got that chance.
In the wake of the Trump Tower explosion, Feinstein was becoming just as eager as Grassley to get in on the Russia scandal action. She responded to the news of the Veselnitskaya meeting at Trump Tower by proposing a committee subpoena to compel Manafort to testify about the encounter. That seemed to make sense on the surface, but it would turn out to play into Grassley’s hands.
On Wednesday, July 12, Grassley put out a notice announcing his plan to hold a hearing about foreign agents, with just two nongovernment witnesses listed: William Browder and Glenn Simpson. A total PR stunt. Simpson had not agreed to testify, and Democrats had not agreed to subpoena him. As the Democrats quickly pointed out, why should the committee focus on Simpson when the most notorious alleged unregistered foreign agent in Washington was the former chairman of the Trump presidential campaign, Paul Manafort? And that was probably just what Grassley was hoping they would say. Behind the scenes, he began offering Feinstein what must have seemed like an irresistible deal: a subpoena of Simpson in exchange for subpoenas of Manafort and Donald Trump Jr.
By this point, Manafort had been under active federal criminal investigation for about a year. Given that, the likelihood that he would appear before the committee was low; if called, he would probably invoke his Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination or insist on a grant of immunity. (Manafort never did testify.) Trump Jr., whose central role in arranging the meeting meant that he, too, was obviously now going to come under scrutiny by the special counsel, was also unlikely to comply. Feinstein didn’t seem to appreciate this.
The hearing—featuring Browder, Simpson, Manafort, and Trump Jr.—promised to be a major spectacle. Except for one thing: Grassley’s staff cut a secret deal with Manafort and Trump Jr. to spare them the embarrassment of having to invoke the Fifth Amendment. Instead, Grassley would allow them to appear for a voluntary interview behind closed doors. Neither would have to explain the Trump Tower meeting in public.
Grassley’s staff didn’t clue Fusion in on this deal, instead applying intense pressure on Simpson and his lawyers to formally answer whether Simpson would testify publicly or invoke his Fifth Amendment rights. Yes or no! Time’s up! What will it be? The Fusion partners and their legal team, given the confidentiality agreements in place with their clients, saw no option other than to notify the committee that Simpson planned to take the Fifth.
The optics of declining to appear, as bad as they were, were far better than Simpson getting badgered and battered by the Republicans in what was guaranteed to be a partisan show trial.
The trap sprung, it produced exactly the headline that Grassley wanted. “Co-founder of Firm Behind Trump-Russia Dossier to Plead the Fifth,” blared Fox News.
The Fox report included a photo of Simpson taken surreptitiously at a conference he was attending at the time, the Aspen Institute’s annual Aspen Security Forum, where many of the leading lights of the national security community had gathered to try to make sense of the Russian attack on the 2016 election. Fox News cameramen had shadowed Simpson, apparently trying to obtain video of him talking to former Obama national security officials.
The hate mail was pouring in again, too. “You are doing the wrong thing and will be caught,” warned one message to Simpson on LinkedIn. “Hope your proud,” said another. “You have sold out your own country….The real Americans will never forget or forgive.”
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Only Browder would agree to appear at Grassley’s show hearing on July 27. But the committee went ahead with it anyway, dedicating nearly four hours over two days to the supposedly underhanded deeds of Fusion GPS. What started out being framed as a high-minded exercise in oversight of the Foreign Agents Registration Act wound up as an extended bashing of Fusion for a litany of supposed sins having nothing to do with that law—or even lobbying, for that matter. The star of the show would be the Trump Tower meeting, an event Browder knew about only from news reports.
For the Fusion staff, watching it all unfold on C-SPAN, the hearing was quite the spectacle. Unscrupulous politicians and their allies can do pretty much whatever they want with a congressional hearing. Thanks to the separation-of-powers doctrine at the heart of the Constitution, an elected official can slander anyone with total impunity.
The Democrats did little to push back. Feinstein even made a show of guaranteeing that the Magnitsky Act would never be repealed. That had the effect, in a hearing about supposedly improper lobbying by Fusion that had never even occurred, of validating Browder’s vehement but vague allegations that Fusion had somehow gone to bat for the Kremlin and lobbied against the act.
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Even as Grassley and his allies bellowed on about the evils of Fusion and political opposition research, one of his own staffers, a longtime Republican operative named Barbara Ledeen, was getting ready to face the music from the Mueller team, which had secretly opened up an investigation into her activities.
Ledeen was the wife of Michael Ledeen, a conservative foreign policy activist who had a brush with fame during another Republican scandal, the 1980s Iran-Contra affair. Michael had been a consultant working with the National Security Council and was accused of transferring arms to Iran in the secret arms deals between the United States, Israel, and Iran—a lower-profile version of Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North. The Ledeens were known in Washington as peddlers of far-right propaganda and were good friends of Michael Flynn, Trump’s disgraced former national security adviser. Michael Ledeen was also a Trump foreign policy adviser who the Mueller report notes was in contact with Flynn shortly before Flynn had his infamous telephone call with the Russian ambassador about dropping sanctions on Russia.
During the campaign, Trump had famously urged Russia to look for the thirty thousand “missing” emails Clinton said she had deleted from her private email server. Behind the scenes, as Mueller would later report, Trump had also tasked Flynn with the hunt for the missing emails, a job he undertook with Barbara Ledeen and a Republican financier and operative named Peter Smith.
Many months before Trump’s entreaty, Barbara Ledeen had emailed Smith to say that the Chinese, Russian, and Iranian intelligence services could “reassemble the [Clinton] server’s email content.” Smith raised tens of thousands of dollars and hired security experts to track down the emails. He even claimed, according to the Mueller report, that “he was in contact with hackers ‘with ties and affiliations to Russia’ who had access to the emails, and that his efforts were coordinated with the Trump campaign.”
The special counsel devoted several pages of its report to describing the activities of the Ledeens but never established whether any of that was true. Smith’s effort, which he did communicate to Trump campaign co-chairman Sam Clovis, never found any Clinton email
s. However, the report established that Smith appeared to have inside information late in the campaign about WikiLeaks’s plans to publish John Podesta’s hacked emails, reporting that the group “will save its best revelations for last.”
In May 2017, Smith checked into a motel in Rochester, Minnesota, near the Mayo Clinic, and tied a plastic bag over his head. His death was ruled a suicide.
Many of the details of the role played by one of Grassley’s own staff members in the Trump campaign’s effort to procure Hillary Clinton’s emails from the Russians would remain a closely guarded secret for another two years. There was much irony in Grassley’s focus on Fusion at a time when a senior member of his team was being investigated for Russia ties by the law enforcement community he purported to oversee.
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In the summer of 2017, of course, the public knew little about what Mueller and his team were doing. The political stakes of his probe were incredibly high, and his staff were under strict orders not to leak. And they didn’t. Reporters would stake out the special counsel’s office in Washington, trying to figure out who came and went, striking out more often than not.
Fusion was also keeping its secrets. After Mueller’s appointment, Simpson again began pressing Steele to connect the FBI with one of his sources who was outside Russia. Sometime after Mueller was appointed, Steele told Ohr how to find the source, which Ohr then relayed to the Bureau.
With strong encouragement from Simpson and Fritsch, Steele and Burrows had also sat down in September 2017 with a team of prosecutors and FBI agents from the special counsel’s office at a London hotel. Steele already knew one of the agents. There was a little chest-beating at the start: Steele and Burrows reminded the investigators that they’d spent their entire careers being loyal allies of the United States and had no intention of changing course. They had nothing to hide, Steele said, but he demanded assurances that any information they provided about sources would not leak and put them in physical danger. The interview lasted the better part of two days. While Simpson and Fritsch were curious to hear the details, they decided it would be better not to know, so they couldn’t be forced to provide that information if asked under subpoena.
For Fusion, it was tempting to leak news of this meeting to the media or the Democrats as a way to throw Republicans off-balance and possibly take some of the heat off. News that Mueller’s office was now working with Steele would prove Orbis had no fear of an honest, independent investigation.
Simpson and Steele also debated whether and how to help some of the congressional committees. Steele had no faith that the committees would honor pledges of confidentiality. It was an agonizing dilemma, as Steele told Ohr. “The congressional committees leak,” Steele said. “I want to help. But I don’t want to see it all played out in the press for political points.”
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Fusion and Orbis decided they had no choice but to keep quiet.
There were plenty of other clues that Mueller’s probe was gathering steam.
An increasingly desperate Manafort had finally registered in June with the Justice Department as a foreign agent for Ukraine and disclosed more than $17 million in payments to his consulting firm—a filing that by his own admission was several years late. It was clear to the Fusion team that Manafort’s lawyers were scrambling to limit his legal exposure.
The action was even more dramatic behind the scenes. Early one morning in late July, the day before Grassley’s hearing about the evils of Fusion, FBI agents raided Manafort’s home in Alexandria, Virginia. A day later, former Trump foreign policy adviser Papadopoulos was arrested by the FBI at Dulles Airport after stepping off a flight from Munich. The Mueller team wanted to talk to him about his knowledge of Russian offers to help the Trump campaign.
The president’s men were in real trouble.
News of the FBI raid on Manafort broke in The Washington Post two weeks later, giving more urgency to the Republican bid to discredit Fusion. Now that Mueller was clearly gaining momentum, the Fusion partners were even more convinced that it was important to his probe that they delay appearing before any public congressional hearings for as long as possible. There was also the risk that Republicans would extract something in the hearings that could lead to the revelation that one of their clients had been the Clinton campaign—which Republicans would use to impugn the Mueller probe. The more time went by, they reasoned, the stronger Mueller’s case would become and the weaker the White House case for firing Mueller would be.
After Grassley successfully goaded Simpson into stating his intention to take the Fifth, Levy raised hell with Grassley’s staff. Levy worked out a deal for Simpson to sit for a voluntary, closed-door interview that would be extremely limited in scope and would allow Fusion to keep confidential the identities of its clients and sources. Grassley withdrew his subpoena.
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Simpson’s interview with Senate Judiciary staff was set for 9:30 A.M. on August 22. This was not an encounter to be taken lightly. What he said would be on the record: Any slipup, any misremembered fact, could come back to haunt Fusion. So for two weeks straight, Simpson made a beeline for the Dupont Circle offices of Cunningham Levy Muse to prepare for his testimony.
During one of these sessions, Simpson recalled an aspect of Steele’s dealings with the FBI that they’d kept secret for so long he’d almost forgotten about it. During the Rome meeting, Steele’s handlers at the FBI had let slip that the Bureau had information from inside the Trump campaign that supported Steele’s reporting.
“Apparently, someone at the Trump campaign bragged to someone else that the Russians were providing information hacked from the Democrats to the campaign,” Steele told Simpson. “Whoever heard it decided to blow the whistle to the FBI.”
It sounded to Steele like that whistleblower was someone low down on the totem pole, a secretary or intern, perhaps. It would later turn out not be a whistleblower, but George Papadopoulos. While Simpson didn’t know that at the time, he was confident enough in Steele’s account of the Rome meeting that he decided to bring it up during questioning in an effort to bat aside the Republican premise that Steele and Fusion had cooked up the FBI investigation.
Grassley’s show-trial FARA hearing the previous month meant there was no longer any question that his staff was bent on destroying Simpson’s credibility. He searched his memory for every stupid thing he’d ever done, anything embarrassing in his background. There was plenty. He’d made his mistakes with alcohol. That didn’t seem likely to be the kind of thing anyone would find particularly interesting many years later, but you never knew. If asked, best to fess up. There were also old libel cases against him at the Journal (which the Journal successfully defended) and countless investigations they’d run at Fusion that had sparked one controversy or another. Sleep came late, if at all, counting all the possible things that might come up.
Witness preparation is basically an exploration of the limits of memory. It’s important to recall events as best you can; it’s equally important not to speculate about events you can’t recall precisely. Over many hours, Simpson sat with Levy and Muse going over the galaxy of questions they expected Simpson would get from both sides. The Republicans would be fishing for intel on Fusion’s clients and seeking to portray Simpson as a partisan dumpster diver who worked for Russians.
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The interview was supposed to be conducted without notice to the press, but someone on the committee made sure to leak the time and place to the networks, resulting in a stakeout by broadcast news camera crews.
Levy’s insistence that Simpson be afforded the exact same ground rules as Manafort and Don Jr. meant that Simpson was sitting for a voluntary interview and could refuse to answer certain questions without invoking the Fifth. The identities of sources and Fusion clients, Levy warned, were both off-
limits.
Things got off to a rocky start when the Grassley investigator began quizzing Simpson on whether he had any offshore bank accounts or controlled any foreign companies—a tactic intended to unsettle him. The answers were no and no. But the questions annoyed Simpson. When the investigator next asked whether Fusion had an account at TD Bank in Washington, D.C., Simpson was too quick to say yes to what seemed like a routine question. Levy tried to object, but it was too late. The Republicans had obtained a vital piece of intelligence that they would later seek to exploit to the fullest.
The Republicans managed to get through the whole nine-and-a-half-hour exercise without turning to Trump’s involvement with the Russians. The Democrats, on the other hand, wanted to know everything—especially regarding how Fusion had come to hire Steele.
“That calls for a somewhat long answer,” Simpson said, explaining in detail for the first time how Fusion had already conducted a lengthy investigation of Trump’s business empire by the time Steele came along. Simpson recounted the circumstances of the engagement with Steele and the former spy’s early judgment that there was a possible crime in progress, which he felt duty-bound to report.
The Republicans, from the testimony’s start at 9:34 A.M. until it finally wrapped up at 7:04 P.M., fixated on scrounging up any scrap of information that could support Browder’s allegations about the Magnitsky lobbying controversy or prove that Simpson was the real mastermind of the Trump Tower meeting. Simpson thought it best to avoid antagonizing them by pointing out the fatal (and obvious) flaw in the fevered Trump Tower–Fusion conspiracy theory: If Fusion had arranged or even heard about a meeting between the Trump campaign and the Russians to get dirt on Hillary Clinton, wouldn’t they have told the FBI, the Democrats, the Clinton campaign, and the media before the election?
Crime in Progress Page 26