Nunes figured his status would help him get an audience with the heads of Britain’s spy agencies—MI5 and MI6—as well as the GCHQ, Britain’s equivalent of the National Security Agency. Normally, that might be the case. But this was amateur hour of the highest order: The agencies flatly refused to meet with him. He did, however, meet with a junior national security official, who very politely told him nothing, according to Steele’s sources.
“This Nunes is a proper clown,” Steele told Fritsch. “It’s stunning he thought that would work.”
Nunes had hoped to lay the groundwork for the upside-down world’s other big event that month, Bruce Ohr’s testimony before a joint, closed session of the House Judiciary and Oversight committees, which was set to take place August 28. Republican investigators would grill Ohr about his wife’s work with Fusion and his meetings with Steele and Simpson.
Ohr recounted how, over many years as one of the U.S. government’s top Russian organized crime experts, he had “become acquainted with both Chris Steele, Glenn Simpson, and other people. And from time to time, these people would give me information about Russian oligarchs and other Russian organized crime figures, and then I would pass that to the FBI.”
He ran through his encounters with Steele and Simpson in 2016 and 2017 in detail, including the one meeting he had with Simpson before the election. During and after the election, he said, he’d passed along information from Simpson and Steele directly to the Justice Department’s top criminal prosecutors and the FBI’s top leadership, as well as its Russian counterintelligence division. When his testimony later became public, this would come as a revelation to Fusion, which had never asked what Ohr was doing with the information the firm provided.
Ohr also provided some context for why Orbis’s and Fusion’s reporting on Trump’s dealings with Russian oligarchs had created so much concern: “The Russian state often uses oligarchs and criminals for government ends, to an extent which I think is not well understood by most people in the West.”
Republicans strained to belittle that reporting, suggesting that Ohr was wrong to trouble the FBI with mere hearsay that would never be admitted in court. “But this is not evidence in a courtroom,” Ohr pointed out. “This is source information. And most FBI investigations involve source information, at least in the early stages.” Moreover, Ohr added, his main concern was not making a criminal prosecution. “If the Russian government was attempting to influence the Trump campaign in some way, I would think that would be a national security threat,” he said. “I was very concerned when I got the information. It seemed to have very serious national security implications….Any time a citizen gets information about a crime or a national security threat, it’s appropriate to convey it to the FBI.”
Ohr also disclosed that he had brokered the follow-up meeting between the FBI and Steele in the summer of 2017, which he said was undertaken at the FBI’s request, not Steele’s. Steele was “certainly very skilled” and “provided information that did help specific cases.”
It didn’t take long for word of Ohr’s confidential interview to reach the tweeter in chief. Two days later, Trump went after the Ohrs: “Wow, Nellie Ohr, Bruce Ohr’s wife, is a Russia expert who is fluent in Russian. She worked for Fusion GPS where she was paid a lot. Collusion! Bruce was a boss at the Department of Justice and is, unbelievably, still there!”
In fact, Ohr had already been stripped of both of his leadership titles, because, he said, DOJ officials “did not want me in a position where I would be having contact with the White House.”
Back in the real world, a federal judge, on September 7, sentenced former Trump adviser George Papadopoulos to two weeks in jail, plus a year of probation and a $9,500 fine, for having lied to the Mueller team. The Fusion partners thought this was incredibly lenient, given the circumstances. Papadopoulos’s lies had deprived prosecutors of the ability to extract more from Joseph Mifsud, a London-based Maltese professor suspected of being a Russian operative, who had first told Papadopoulos in April 2016 that Moscow had thousands of emails damaging to Clinton. James Comey, in an opinion piece in the Post, bluntly described Mifsud as “a Russian agent.” Mueller would later write in his report that Papadopoulos’s falsehoods had “hindered investigators’ ability to effectively question Mifsud when he was interviewed in the lobby of a Washington hotel on Feb. 10, 2017.”
Mifsud left the United States the next day and appears to have vanished.
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Two weeks after the Papadopoulos sentencing, a curious Ukraine thread emerged that fed into yet another attempted counter-narrative to the Trump-Russia story. In this version, nefarious forces in Ukraine had cooked up the whole Russia saga in a bid to smear Trump. Months earlier, Fusion had received information from Ukraine that Republican operatives were making the rounds in Kiev, seeking information about Orbis, Fusion, and the origins of the corruption allegations against Paul Manafort.
In one of these efforts, an American freelance political operative with links to the Republican right visited Kiev in early 2018 and allegedly offered to pay for information about this supposed smear campaign. Then in mid-September, a former Fusion contractor named Graham Stack published an article in the Kyiv Post repudiating his own work on Manafort’s money laundering and arguing that Manafort owed no loyalties to Russia. “This narrative was developed by Washington commercial intelligence firm Fusion GPS in 2016, as part of their now famous dossier on Trump, distributed widely among major media outlets,” he wrote. The piece was picked up by The Daily Caller and other pro-Trump outlets.
This campaign to seek an origin of the Russia meddling story in Ukraine became a favorite hobbyhorse of Rudolph Giuliani and of Trump himself, leading eventually to the commencement of an impeachment inquiry against Trump in September 2019.
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In late September 2018, congressional Republicans served yet another subpoena on Simpson, demanding he be questioned a fourth time before Congress. Sweetening the invitation to testify was the public accusation, from Republican Matt Gaetz—infamous for inviting a Nazi sympathizer as his lone guest to Trump’s State of the Union address—that either Simpson or Ohr was lying to Congress about the timing of their meetings. Simpson, through counsel, invoked his constitutional privilege not to testify and asked to be excused from appearing. The Republicans refused. Simpson appeared the next day and invoked his privilege, and no contempt proceeding ever occurred.
The Republican inquisition would soon be over—so long as the Democrats reclaimed the House.
With their last-ditch efforts to frame Simpson for perjury and destroy the careers of top law enforcement officials, the Republicans had made clear that they would be gunning for both Mueller and Fusion if they retained power. Continued GOP control of the House would also probably mean that Trump’s ties to the Kremlin would never be seriously investigated by Congress, which instead would subject Fusion and its allies to at least two more years of frivolous subpoenas and baseless allegations.
More important, Fusion was also worried that Putin could again intervene to help the Republicans win. The Trump administration had done little to reassure anyone that it was ready or able to repel another Kremlin cyberattack. As early as February, the Intelligence Community warned that the Russians would be back in the fall. “There should be no doubt that Russia perceives its past efforts as successful and views the 2018 U.S. midterm elections as a potential target for Russian influence operations,” Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats said at one hearing. In mid-July, executives at Microsoft disclosed that they had uncovered hacking attempts by the Russians against three Senate campaigns—incidents that were news to top U.S. officials.
Simpson worried that something unexpected would happen in the late stages of the election to radically change the picture. Steele’s sources, meanwhile, were telling him that Moscow’s Internet Research Agen
cy would be deploying disinformation via its bot armies in support of vulnerable Republican candidates.
So, quite apart from the smaller-bore Nunes work, Fusion decided to launch a wider, more systematic effort to monitor and protect the election. It formulated a plan with Dan Jones at The Democracy Integrity Project to monitor battleground congressional districts for election interference and uncover and expose botnets and bogus websites pushing fake news. It began an effort, starting in early September, to sift through the traffic across thousands of websites to detect and flag any suspicious, nonorganic content.
Sure enough, the Russians were once again trying to fire up Trump’s base by spewing anti-immigrant propaganda. Fusion, TDIP, and their partners at the cyber research firm New Knowledge eventually identified more than ten thousand posts on the Internet traced to known Russian influence operations. Even more troubling was the fact that much of the Russian disinformation was also now being circulated or mimicked by domestic sources.
Another threat to Democratic chances seemed to emerge in early October when a large caravan of asylum-seeking migrants formed in Honduras with the intention of eventually crossing into the United States. Trump quickly seized on the development, tweeting about the dangers of the caravans—“Great Midterm issue for Republicans!”—and threatening to mobilize the military to repel the approaching caravan. News of the caravan echoed across the Web, often augmented by dubious and inflammatory posts.
The caravan appeared to be another instance of desperate people fleeing poverty and gang violence in their home countries and banding together for safety. But this caravan was unusually large. A group of some five thousand migrants trudging toward the southern border of the United States created the perfect image to pair with Trump’s closing argument to Republican voters before the midterms: We must win to build the wall and keep these invaders out!
The whole thing just seemed too perfectly timed to the elections to be totally random. Russia’s intelligence services were known to instigate immigrant crises in Europe as a way to inflame public opinion and boost the political fortunes of far-right politicians. Could something like that be going on here?
As the final days before the election ticked by, Trump made the caravan the centerpiece of his campaign message, whipping up hysteria over the specter of an invasion by alien hordes. For a while, it seemed to be working. Polls showed the Republicans coming within five percentage points of the Democrats in voter preference for control of Congress, an ominous swing since early October. At that margin, Republicans had a shot at narrowly retaining control of the House. Suddenly the nightmare of 2016 was starting over again, where unexpected late-breaking events and a wave of cyber dirty tricks could cost Democrats the election.
And sure enough, the final days of the campaign saw shocking events—although not quite what Trump and his friends had been aiming for.
On October 24, the New York offices of CNN were evacuated after a pipe bomb was found there. Over the next forty-eight hours, additional bombs from a mentally disturbed Trump supporter named Cesar Sayoc were found at other news organizations and at the homes and offices of prominent Democrats, including Hillary Clinton and President Obama, whom Trump had repeatedly blasted as America’s true enemies.
The national conversation suddenly shifted from talk of an alien invasion to the implications of the president’s fearmongering and hateful rhetoric. Trump bitterly complained that, just when Republicans had begun bouncing back in the polls, “now this ‘Bomb’ stuff happens and the momentum greatly slows.”
On October 27, Simpson was in Pittsburgh dropping his son off at college when he heard a chorus of emergency sirens. A far-right extremist had walked into a nearby synagogue with an AR-15 semiautomatic rifle and three pistols and murdered eleven Jewish worshippers.
Trump, who two weeks earlier had rousted the military to deal with the invaders, suddenly stopped mentioning the caravan. The demagoguery had backfired on Trump, as the president himself tacitly admitted on the eve of the election, complaining that “we did have two maniacs stop a momentum that was incredible….It stopped a tremendous momentum.”
With Trump’s caravan talk suddenly silenced, Democrats dramatically widened their leads in the polls in the final days of the election and wound up beating the Republicans in the fight for the House by the largest margin of votes in a midterm since Watergate.
Maybe now, Fritsch and Simpson thought, they would be left alone. At least by Congress.
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With their new majority in the House, the Democrats might finally have a chance to investigate what really happened between Trump and Russia. Incoming Democratic chairmen wasted little time announcing their intentions to do just that. Nunes would lose his prized seat as chair of the House Intelligence Committee—and, with it, his power to harass the Mueller probe, the FBI, and Fusion GPS.
Trump responded to the drubbing by firing his embattled attorney general, Jeff Sessions, whom the president had long criticized for having recused himself from the Russia investigation. In his place, Trump named as acting attorney general Matthew Whitaker, an ardent loyalist who had repeatedly echoed the president’s gripes about the unfairness of the Mueller investigation, even adopting Trump’s “witch hunt” epithet in a column for CNN three months earlier.
Whitaker was a former prosecutor from Iowa whose primary claim to fame was having caught a pass in the 1991 Rose Bowl as a backup tight end for the Iowa Hawkeyes.
Sometimes Fusion would jump on a case, with no client or marching orders, just because it looked tantalizing and fun—a sort of blend of public service, pro bono work, and staff entertainment. Whitaker was one of those cases. The moment Trump named him, Fusion dug in.
Within hours, Fusion researchers had burrowed deep into Whitaker’s past as a board member for a fraudulent invention-marketing firm called World Patent Marketing. Whitaker had held the post from 2014 to 2017 and had used his résumé as a former U.S. attorney to try to intimidate WPM customers who complained they’d been cheated. In March 2017, the Federal Trade Commission filed fraud charges against the firm, a case that later led to a $26 million fine.
On the day the Trump announcement was made, Fusion researcher David Michaels found a number of brief video testimonials stored on Vimeo in which Whitaker had touted some of WPM’s dubious inventions, even citing Trump in one clip as an inspiration for the company’s entrepreneurial flair. Other WPM materials offered up gems such as the marketing launch of a “MASCULINE TOILET,” with an elevated seat designed to accommodate “well-endowed men.” The promotion for the toilet came on the same PR announcement as Whitaker’s appointment as a board member and adviser to the firm.
Before announcing the Whitaker pick, Trump officials had made no effort to scrub the Web of any of this. The clips were taken down within hours, but not before Fusion had downloaded them and created an informal repository for all things Whitaker. It added to that in the days ahead with other facts that pointed to the flimsiness of his legal career. The stories lit up the Internet and the late-night comedy shows for well over a week. Whitaker was never likely to last in any job requiring confirmation, but his days were all the more numbered now. He was gone from the administration three months later.
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The headlines of late 2018 and early 2019 seemed to be building to a likely crescendo in the Mueller report: “Mueller Revokes Manafort Plea Deal, Saying He Lied” (November 26); “Cohen Pleads Guilty, Saying He Also Lied to Mueller” (November 29); “Cohen Sentencing Memo Indicates He Is Cooperating Fully with Mueller” (December 7); “U.S. Attorney in NY Says Cohen Paid Off Stormy Daniels at Direction of Trump” (December 7); “Cohen Sentenced to Three Years in Prison” (December 12); “Maria Butina Pleads Guilty to Being a Russian Spy” (December 13); “Mueller Indicts Trump Ally Roger Stone for Lying, Obstruction and Witness Tampering” (January 25).
/> One by one, Mueller was winning convictions against people Fusion had been raising questions about for almost three years now. And he was methodically working his way up the food chain to Trump himself; a classic conspiracy case appeared to be in the works. The speculation now became not whether Mueller would find evidence that the president had committed a crime, but just how many crimes—and whether he would actually be charged.
To Steele and Fusion, Cohen’s admission that he had lied about his negotiations with Moscow over a Trump Tower project represented an important milestone on the dossier’s road to wider credibility. Here was proof of secret business dealings between Trump and the Russians of just the sort that Steele’s sources had described. The admission also raised expectations that Mueller would at the least deliver evidence that the Trump team had been compromised by the Russians, though Simpson and Fritsch harbored doubts that Mueller’s verdict would be all that clear.
They weren’t alone in that assessment. “What the Steele dossier showed was how easy it was to see the basic narrative of what was going on,” John Sipher, who once ran the CIA’s Russian operations, said on Twitter at the end of November. “That was one guy’s take using several existing informal sources….Just think what real intelligence and investigative agencies can find.”
“Correct,” replied his former CIA Russia colleague Steven L. Hall. “Steele dossier was one small part, tip of the iceberg. Mueller is looking below the surface.”
In response to the gathering gloom, Trump’s defenders cranked up their standard what-about-this, what-about-that arguments. Fusion set up the Trump Tower meeting! Cohen was never in Prague! The FBI spied illegally on the Trump campaign! The dossier was a setup, paid for by Hillary Clinton!
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