Crime in Progress

by Glenn Simpson;Peter Fritsch;

  By the late spring of 2018, life at Fusion felt like it might be returning to a sort of normal again. The harsh post-dossier spotlight of the past sixteen months was beginning to dim—even as Trump himself escalated his denunciations of the firm on Twitter and in interviews and press availabilities.

  The House Intelligence Committee had found nothing much in Fusion’s bank records other than the identities of a few companies who were big donors to many GOP lawmakers—a bit of political insurance Fusion knew would frustrate committee Republicans. There were no leaks from the Republicans about these records, as they would only have angered their own supporters and demonstrated what Fusion had claimed all along: The firm was not an appendage of the Democratic Party. The silence further revealed Nunes’s court fight for what it was. The GOP lawmakers had fought for access to the names of Fusion’s clients, claiming that was critical to the investigation. But none of the third parties in those records were mentioned in Nunes’s report, or ever again. The House’s demand for those documents was punitive. Nunes wanted to put Fusion out of business, but he failed.

  Efforts by Grassley and his allies to gin up a criminal investigation of Orbis and Fusion had similarly gone nowhere. The core theses of the dossier were only getting stronger with time. There were still lawsuits to defend and right-wing media attacks afoot, but the worst of it seemed to be over. Congress would soon be preoccupied with the midterm elections, and, farther over the horizon, the Mueller report loomed.

  “Amazing to think, but it does seem like we just might survive this, touch wood,” Catan said to Fritsch over drinks one evening in late May. “The weight of the evidence is making it just too hard for people to blame the messengers anymore.”

  Steele agreed with that assessment. He took the news that Cohen had been talking with Moscow during the 2016 election about a Trump Tower deal as a major vindication of his work. Didn’t the Trump Tower Moscow revelation lie at the crux of the dossier’s argument that Putin was trying to buy off Trump, and that Cohen was a central player? “Can anyone seriously doubt the thrust of the dossier now?” Steele told Fritsch. “Such a deal would only occur with official sanction. It is prima facie evidence of a compromised relationship.”

  Mueller, meantime, appeared to be closing in on more of the president’s men: Indictments of Cohen and others now looked like a sure bet. Even the news pages of The Wall Street Journal were dogging every development of Cohen’s mounting troubles and seemed convinced of the criminality at the heart of the Trump enterprise.

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  People were also beginning to realize that Trump was only a part of the Russia story. The broader theme of Putin’s plan to destabilize America’s European allies, a core focus of Fusion’s nonprofit client, was also beginning to catch on in the media.

  “Rather than simply concentrate its efforts on spreading subversion on Europe’s vulnerable periphery, Moscow appears to have concentrated on destabilizing the West’s most powerful countries,” a Reuters columnist wrote.

  The successful Brexit vote in 2016 and Britain’s pending departure from the European Union continued to roil European politics, much to Putin’s delight. Steele and the Fusion team had spent much of the past year delving into links between Trump and a group of Britons with curious ties to Russia who had backed Brexit.

  That group was led by Arron Banks, a minor insurance executive with a Russian-born wife who had spent more than $10 million supporting the Brexit campaign. Where did that kind of money come from? It wasn’t clear. Banks was close to Russians and had often boasted of a “boozy” lunch he had with the Russian ambassador to the U.K. in late 2015, eight months before the Brexit vote. In June 2018, leaked emails revealed that at the same time, Banks and one of his top advisers were in secret talks with contacts in the Russian embassy to pursue lucrative deals in Russian-owned gold and diamond mines. Banks ultimately did not invest, but those talks looked like a possible Kremlin plot to co-opt the Brexiteers—an eerie echo of the Trump Tower Moscow tease Cohen had chased (and lied about). The Times reported that Mueller’s team, too, was interested in Banks and the ties the Brexit leaders had built to the Trump campaign. Banks had met with Trump in Trump Tower just days after the presidential election, a visit he recounted upon his return to London over a lunch with the Russian ambassador to the U.K.

  The sum of those developments suggested to Simpson and Fritsch that Mueller was on it, as deep in the weeds of the possible collusion story as Fusion and Steele had been but with one key difference: Mueller had the power to compel people to talk. “These guys do not seem to be messing around,” Simpson told Steele. “And it looks like they are closing in.”

  Trump himself, of course, remained the biggest obstacle to a real reckoning of his relationship with Russia. He unleashed a barrage of Twitter attacks on Mueller after the FBI’s raid on Cohen, a sign that the president was afraid of what the feds might turn up. Powerful committee chairmen in Congress like Nunes dutifully followed, renewing their claims that the Russia probe was a hoax cooked up by Fusion, Steele, and Democrats inside the FBI. He and his colleagues were sure to back Trump if the president made good on his repeated threats to fire Mueller and the “Angry Democrats” he claimed populated the special counsel’s office.

  These attacks significantly raised the stakes for the midterm elections now flickering just over the horizon in November. If Republicans held on, that could spell disaster for the Mueller investigation. And even if Mueller survived the onslaught from Trump and the Nunes crew, any findings suggestive of high crimes and misdemeanors were likely to go nowhere without a change in control of the House. Mueller was not likely to defy Office of Legal Counsel opinions and indict a sitting president. The job of acting on his report, then, would be left to Congress. And there was no hope a Republican-controlled House would ever bring articles of impeachment against Trump or proceed with tough investigative hearings, no matter what Mueller found.

  Democrats had good reason to be fired up for the midterms. Trump was deeply unpopular, and many voters seemed eager to punish the Republicans for abetting the president’s racist and misogynist rhetoric, inertia on gun control, and ruthlessness toward immigrants and their children. The Democrats had strong candidates lining up to compete for seats once presumed to be safely Republican, and many incumbent Republican representatives had announced their decision to retire rather than face the voters again.

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  Fusion ordinarily didn’t work on congressional races, but as the election drew closer, the firm began to mull a few ways it could have an impact. Later, it would decide to design and launch a more systematic cyber-monitoring campaign, but first it went small, focusing on a single congressional district in California’s heavily agricultural Central Valley. That solidly red seat happened to have been occupied since 2003 by one Devin Nunes.

  Nunes’s hometown paper, The Fresno Bee, had endorsed him in every election since he first ran for Congress, in 2002. But after his jaw-dropping performance running interference for Trump in the Russian probe, sentiment had begun to turn against him. The Bee endorsed his opponent, a little-known county prosecutor, and even reliably conservative outlets like RedState.com were calling for him to go.

  Fusion had no illusions about being able to topple Nunes, but the notion of digging into his record made many at the firm salivate. His bumbling investigation of Trump-Russia was amusing, in some respects, and Fritsch had taken up Senator Lindsey Graham’s reference to him as Inspector Clouseau, after the incompetent police inspector in the Pink Panther movies. But there were far more serious issues at stake here, too: In his fiercely partisan stewardship of the Russia investigation, Nunes had also undermined the intelligence and law enforcement agencies and inflicted damage on dedicated crime fighters like Bruce Ohr. And he was a threat to Mueller’s ability to do his job. When Fritsch asked Fusion staff for volunteers to look into Nunes, ever
y hand shot up.

  Through a friend, Fusion obtained a copy of the Democratic Party’s research book on Nunes to see what kind of opposition research work had already been done. It was disappointing: an exhaustive review of his voting record on hundreds of bills and a smattering of random facts about his top donors and finances. In short, a 661-page collection of “votes and quotes” that lacked a coherent narrative or explanation of how Nunes had gone from the son of a proud family of Portuguese dairy farmers to a rabid conspiracy theorist who turned the crank on the GOP’s anti-Mueller fog machine.

  Fusion set to work, pulling public records from across the country and digging into Nunes’s role in California’s water wars, the defining issue for his agribusiness constituents. It turned out that Nunes had accomplished little on the one issue he was hired to champion: water rights. Farmers in his district were withering under a prolonged series of droughts. With little snowmelt flowing off the Sierras, farmers had drilled deep into the soil and drained the valley’s lush aquifer in an effort to feed their thirsty groves of almond, citrus, and pomegranate trees. Now those aquifers were threatening to go dry, and many felt their way of life was imperiled.

  Nunes blamed his constituents’ plight on a Communist conspiracy to promote elaborate fairy tales about global warming to drive farmers off the land. “When you look at the radical environmental fringe, there’s no question they are tied closely to the Communist Party,” Nunes told reporters in 2009. “I have the documents that can prove it.”

  Now facing his first contested re-election bid in the 2018 midterms, Nunes didn’t have much to show for his fifteen years in Congress. While he described himself as a farmer on the midterm ballot, Nunes hadn’t been one for a decade. Three years after he was first elected, he had quietly sold off his shares of the family farm and invested the proceeds in a Napa Valley winery nearly two hundred miles from his district. He started spending more of his time hobnobbing at political fundraisers in Washington, with his campaign committees racking up more than $388,000 in expenses at the Capitol Hill Club, a private haunt for congressional Republicans where politicians and lobbyists gather to strategize and fundraise.

  Some of his spending appeared to violate campaign finance rules. Fusion discovered “fundraising” trips to Las Vegas and Boston during which Nunes spent more than $130,000 on high-end hotels, meals, and NBA tickets, at the expense of his campaign committees. The Boston fundraisers appeared to have been outings to see his favorite NBA team, the Boston Celtics. (Nunes idolized Larry Bird.) In March 2018, Fusion found, Nunes charged more than $11,000 to his campaign for a private plane charter, despite House ethics rules that generally forbid noncommercial travel.

  Nunes also spent tens of thousands of dollars in PAC money on wine from the wineries in which he held stakes. While dairy farmers had brought him to office, he was now a vocal proponent of government subsidies benefiting the Wine Institute, the industry trade group that represented both of his wineries. Collecting wine, he told a reporter in 2010, was his “one and only hobby.”

  In short, Nunes had become a D.C. swamp creature pushing the envelope of campaign finance law, maybe even breaking it. But that narrative, as clear as it was, was unlikely to capture the imagination of the public, or move the needle electorally.

  In the end, Fusion found an obscure bit of litigation that lit up the race.

  In May, weeks after that discovery, Nunes’s ownership stake in the Napa winery Alpha Omega became national news when The Fresno Bee reported on a lawsuit filed in California state court by a young woman who had worked serving wine at a 2015 tasting event aboard the winery’s sixty-two-foot yacht.

  The booze cruise, she alleged, had dissolved into a drug-fueled orgy, with a dozen men snorting cocaine and carousing with prostitutes, whose performances were later rated by the group. The server said she feared she would be raped, and later sued the winery, alleging that management had knowingly subjected her to a hostile environment.

  The young woman believed the party boys were investors in the winery, though both the winery and Nunes denied that. It didn’t keep the lurid story from exploding on social media. Nunes was apoplectic. His anger only gave more oxygen to the story. Nunes spent tens of thousands of dollars on television, radio, and Facebook advertisements attacking the Bee for its coverage of the lawsuit, drawing more attention to the case. In the end, Nunes would win re-election in November with 52.7 percent of the vote, his lowest margin of victory ever.

  Long after the election, Nunes remained apoplectic. In March 2019, Nunes sued Twitter and Republican political consultant Liz Mair for $250 million, claiming they had defamed him. He sued the Bee’s parent company, McClatchy, for defamation in April for reporting on the booze cruise lawsuit. He sued a farmer and several other constituents in his own district for questioning the ballot’s description of Nunes as a farmer. In September 2019, he sued Fusion, accusing the company of “racketeering,” for what was in fact public records research. The lawsuits were widely ridiculed, with a parody Twitter account claiming to speak for Nunes’s cow gaining hundreds of thousands of followers in a few months.

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  Midsummer 2018 marked the beginning of the Waiting for Mueller period. Enterprise reporting on Trump and Russia had slowed to all but a trickle. There were still many leads for reporters to follow, but there wasn’t much of an incentive to chase down stories Mueller’s team could probably get to first. Besides, people were exhausted from the daily grind of the Trump-Russia story.

  “It’s Mueller Time,” one television correspondent told Fritsch over the July 4 holiday. “Time to chill a bit and see what he comes up with.”

  Then, just days before Trump planned to meet with Putin in Helsinki, Finland, Mueller struck with an indictment of twelve Russian intelligence officers he alleged were behind the hacking of the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign. The move confirmed in painstaking detail what the Intelligence Community had already said publicly, and had the effect of cornering Trump.

  Three days later, on July 16, Trump stood next to Putin at a press conference in Helsinki and said he didn’t “see any reason why” Russia would have been responsible for interfering in the 2016 election. It was a stunning slap at the U.S. Intelligence Community and a very public show of fealty to Putin. “Absolutely, utterly appalling” was all Steele could say when he called later that day. Even Cohen, Trump’s blindly loyal lawyer, would later say the Helsinki moment was when he stopped believing once and for all in Trump’s loyalty to his country.

  The Helsinki summit quickly became an extraordinary political debacle—even for a president who seemed to engineer political debacles on a weekly basis. The episode took place just as the U.S. national security community was descending on the Colorado ski resort of Aspen for the annual Aspen Security Forum. Simpson found a very different atmosphere there from the previous year, when he’d spent much of his time on the defensive over Grassley’s allegations. This time the Trump administration was on its heels, with the president’s own intelligence leadership expressing shock and amazement at his behavior.

  Speaking at the conference, Trump’s own handpicked FBI director, Christopher Wray, publicly distanced himself from Trump’s statements. “The Intelligence Community’s assessment has not changed, my view has not changed, which is that Russia attempted to interfere with the last election and that it continues to engage in malign influence operations to this day,” Wray told NBC’s Lester Holt before dozens of top intelligence officials, military leaders, and journalists.

  Meantime, the hits would keep on coming. The same day Trump stood by Putin in Helsinki, the Justice Department indicted Maria Butina, the Russian who had worked to get inside the GOP by cozying up to groups like the NRA. Prosecutors alleged that Butina had tried to set up a secret meeting between Trump and Putin during the election. Butina, according to Trump’s own Justice Department, had come
to the United States bent on “infiltrating organizations having influence in American politics, for the purpose of advancing the interests of the Russian Federation.” The indictment said she worked to steer Republicans toward a more Russia-friendly policy through contacts she had made inside the National Rifle Association—precisely the thing Simpson had told House investigators she appeared to be doing eight months earlier. At the time, a column by Kimberley Strassel in The Wall Street Journal had ridiculed Simpson’s House testimony about Butina as “another wild tale from Fusion GPS.”

  “THIS IS SOOO GREAT,” Simpson messaged Fritsch, linking to the column as a reminder of its total wrongheadedness.

  “Beyond glorious,” Fritsch agreed.

  Another Republican canard—that Carter Page had been unfairly maligned by Steele’s reporting—collapsed in late July when the FBI released more than four hundred pages of redacted documents detailing why, in October 2016, agents thought Trump adviser Carter Page was a possible asset of Russian intelligence. It turned out that they had reams of intelligence on Page going back years that had nothing to do with the dossier or Fusion’s research on Page. Russian intelligence had tried to recruit him as early as 2008.

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  As Congress broke for August recess, Trump’s hardcore defenders were still scrambling to discredit Steele and find hard evidence of the Democratic deep state conspiracy at the heart of the FBI investigation.

  With all eyes diverted by the twin courtroom dramas playing out in New York (where Cohen would plead guilty to campaign finance violations for paying off Stormy Daniels on Trump’s behalf) and Virginia (where Manafort was convicted of tax fraud), Nunes made a secret trip to London to try to get the lowdown on Steele. He wanted to know what the British government knew about Steele’s contacts with the DOJ. Like Trump, Nunes had also latched on to the fact that Nellie Ohr had worked for Fusion at one point and was married to Bruce Ohr of the Justice Department.