Ball of Collusion

by Andrew C. McCarthy

  Though FBI regulations and FISC rules require information to be verified before submission to a judge, Steele’s information was not verified. When Person A brings you hearsay from anonymous Person B, you can’t verify B’s information by arguing that A is credible. Such “vicarious credibility” would be a dubious proposition in any case; it is downright laughable under circumstances where, as in the case of Steele’s dossier: (1) A is not actually credible (i.e., Steele made significant errors, and the profound degree of his bias against Trump—including his research’s sponsorship by the opposing candidate—was withheld from the court); and (2) anonymous B’s information is hearsay even as to B (i.e., it is often second-, third-, or even fourth-hand information, derived from other anonymous sources of unknown credibility).

  The Small World of Organized Crime Buffs

  There remain significant unanswered questions about Steele. For example, was he already working on the Trump–Russia investigation for the U.S. government (and/or the British government) months before he began compiling the dossier reports for Fusion GPS? As we’ve noted, in the Freedom of Information Act litigation that the Justice Department slow-walked, Judicial Watch finally managed to pry heavily redacted FBI reports showing that, in early February 2016, Steele was given the instructions (called “admonishments”) that the Bureau routinely gives paid informants (“confidential human sources”) before they begin working for the Bureau. To be sure, we don’t know why this happened; it could be unrelated to Russia-gate. But the disclosure calls into question the oft-repeated version of events (articulated, for example, in Simpson’s congressional testimony) that Steele felt obliged to reach out to the FBI in June 2016 because he was suddenly alarmed by the Trump “intelligence” he was hearing from his anonymous sources.

  According to Simpson, Fusion GPS, which he co-founded in 2011 with another former Wall Street Journal reporter, Peter Fritsch, was a private intelligence firm. It performed research and litigation support for private clients, and, during campaign seasons, did research for political and media clients. Seeding stories to friendly media outlets was a significant part of Fusion’s client services. In autumn 2015, The Washington Free Beacon, a conservative news publication, retained Fusion to delve into the backgrounds of Trump and some other GOP candidates. The Free Beacon’s backers were of an anti-Trump bent, and the project—which focused generally on Trump’s business and finances, not specifically on Russia—wound down in spring 2016, as Trump clinched the nomination.11 Simpson, as we’ve seen, has for years been interested in Russia—especially the intersection of political authority, commercial activity, and organized crime. He was particularly drawn to information Fusion had gathered on Donald Trump’s business ties to Russia, including the degree to which the Trump organization relied on Russian sources of capital when multiple bankruptcies made it difficult for the real estate tycoon to arrange more traditional corporate financing.

  Simpson obviously believed the information he had compiled, and more that might be out there if the right people did the digging, could be useful to the Democrats. Consequently, in early March 2016, he approached Marc Elias, a partner at the Perkins Coie law firm. Simpson knew Elias and his firm represented the Clinton campaign and the DNC. He pitched Elias a proposal to keep the Trump research project going and, specifically, to train it on Russia.12

  When evaluating the collusion narrative and Simpson’s pretensions to objectivity and investigative rigor, always remember that it was Simpson who made overtures to agents of the Clinton campaign; they didn’t come to him. Neither the Clinton campaign nor the DNC disclosed to the FEC the work done by Fusion GPS, including the Steele dossier. Rather, the two combined to pay Perkins Coie over $12 million for “legal services” and “compliance consulting”;13 out of this amount, Perkins Coie paid Fusion $1.02 million; Fusion, in turn, paid $168,000 to Steele (who was also being paid by the FBI).14

  Steele was brought on board in May 2016. By then, Simpson had also recruited another Russia specialist and longtime acquaintance, Nellie Ohr. When Steele was at MI6, Dr. Ohr was a researcher at Open Source Works, the CIA’s in-house, multi-lingual division for corralling and analyzing reams of unclassified, publicly-available information.15 She graduated from Harvard in 1983 with a degree in history and Russian literature, studied in Russia in the late eighties (shortly before the U.S.S.R. fell), earned a doctorate in Russian history from Stanford in 1990, and taught Russian history at Vassar. She was also a staunch Hillary Clinton supporter.16 Besides being Steele’s collaborator on the Trump–Russia opposition research project, Dr. Ohr was (and is) married to Bruce Ohr, a Justice Department career prosecutor who by 2016 had risen to associate deputy attorney general—one of six who worked directly under then–Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates.17

  Like his wife, as well as Simpson and Steele, Bruce Ohr specialized in international organized crime, focusing closely on Russia and Eurasia. Ohr and Steele have known each other for over a decade—since approximately 2006, when the former spy was running MI6’s Russia desk and Ohr was chief of the Justice Department’s Organized Crime and Racketeering Section. By 2010, Steele had left MI6 and formed Orbis Business Intelligence, his London-based firm. Through Orbis, Steele helped the FBI crack the corruption case against FIFA, international soccer’s governing body.18 It was the Obama Justice Department’s most notable organized crime triumph.

  Ohr has known Simpson for many years; it is a professional rather than a social relationship, though the Times of London reports that Ohr may have introduced Simpson to Steele.19 In 2010, both Ohrs and Simpson were members of an “expert working group on international organized crime,” which produced a National Institute of Justice report. Back then, Simpson was at a Washington area think-tank, having left The Wall Street Journal; he co-founded Fusion GPS the following year.20

  In September 2015, while still researching Trump for the Free Beacon, Simpson retained Nellie Ohr as a contractor. In congressional testimony, Dr. Ohr maintained that she applied for work at Fusion because she saw an article about the firm in a newspaper and remembered Simpson’s name from having read his work as a journalist covering Russian crime and corruption. She did not know Simpson well despite their collaboration in the 2010 expert working group. Simpson, however, knew she was married to Bruce Ohr, the high-ranking Justice Department official. For his part, Bruce Ohr testified that he had “seen Glenn Simpson … on various occasions over the years, and I believe my wife has as well.” Interestingly, in his congressional testimony, Simpson seemed to go out of his way to avoid revealing that Dr. Ohr worked at Fusion. And Bruce Ohr failed mention his wife’s Fusion work or income during the 2016 campaign in the government disclosure form that his Justice Department position required him to complete.21

  The Justice Department needed to be threatened with contempt of Congress before finally disclosing records of Bruce Ohr’s communications, which document that he was in regular contact with Steele, including when the latter was working on Fusion’s anti-Trump project with Ohr’s wife and Simpson.22 We know that Simpson testified falsely when he told lawmakers he had not been in contact with any government officials about the anti-Trump project until a meeting with Ohr after the 2016 election.23 Simpson actually emailed Ohr to arrange a meeting with him on August 22, 2016, at the height of the presidential campaign. At the time, Fusion was wrapping up Steele’s latest dossier reports, which claimed that the Trump campaign was coordinating the leaking of DNC emails hacked by Russia, and that Vladimir Putin was closely following Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort’s ouster over secret payments from a Kremlin-backed Ukrainian political party. Moreover, as we’ve already seen, Simpson later beseeched Ohr to pursue the debunked suspicion of a private Trump–Putin back-channel communication system, arranged through servers connecting Alfa Bank and the Trump organization—notwithstanding that Steele told Congress this back-channel theory was beyond his competence to assess.

  It bears repeating that Simpson, Steele, and Nellie Ohr were not g
overnment agents. They were not a quasi-FBI. They worked for a private firm, retained by a political campaign. Their mission was not to make a prosecutable case on Donald Trump; it was to get Hillary Clinton elected president. This is why it can have come as no surprise to the FBI or Bruce Ohr that Steele was sharing details of Fusion’s Trump investigation with the media. After all, it was Fusion’s investigation—meaning, it was the Clinton campaign’s investigation. The federal government’s powers were put in that campaign’s service. And if Clinton had been elected, the Trump–Russia investigation would have served its purpose; you would have never again heard a word about it.

  Within the government, meanwhile, the connections of Russia-gate players to organized crime work, and to each other, are extensive. During the FIFA soccer investigation, Steele worked with the FBI’s Eurasian Organized Crime unit in New York City, which was supervised by Agent Michael Gaeta—the agent to whom Steele began bringing his dossier reports in July 2016. When Ohr was a prosecutor in New York, he worked on organized cases with FBI agent Andrew McCabe, who became a supervisor of Eurasian organized crime investigations at the FBI’s New York field office. Eventually, McCabe rose to become the Bureau’s deputy director. In that lofty position, his counselor was Lisa Page. She had previously been a Justice Department trial attorney, working for Ohr for five years and focusing on Eurasian organized crime. One of her most important investigations targeted Dmitro Firtash, the Ukrainian oligarch and Paul Manafort business partner we met in Chapter Three. Also focused on Firtash was Andrew Weissmann, chief of the Obama Justice Department’s Criminal Fraud Section, which finally indicted the oligarch (and is still seeking his extradition). Ohr briefed Weissmann, his Justice Department colleague, on information he was receiving from Steele. Weissmann, who had been Robert Mueller’s counsel when the latter was FBI Director, became Mueller’s deputy when the latter was appointed Special Counsel for the Trump–Russia investigation. In that capacity, Weissmann led the prosecution of Manafort—who had been investigated by McCabe, Page, and other FBI personnel, using information provided by Steele, which had been assembled with the help of Nellie Ohr and Simpson, and was occasionally routed to the FBI through Bruce Ohr.24

  Again, a small world. Alas, Steele’s Manafort information wasn’t much use to Weissmann and Mueller since it appears to have been untrue.

  Salacious, Unverified … and Easily Disproved

  Steele began generating his reports in mid-June 2016. Cumulating to thirty-five pages, the full compilation includes seventeen reports, almost all crafted before Election Day.25 The dossier spells out the essential collusion narrative that has been mass-marketed by Trump detractors since the 2016 election, and that the Obama administration began peddling to the FISC nearly three weeks before that. Steele may be the principal author, but the work is a Fusion GPS collaboration. Contributions were made by Simpson, Nellie Ohr, and Edward Baumgartner, a Fusion-contracted Russian translator (who happens to have majored in Russian history at Vassar College when Dr. Ohr was teaching there in the 1990s).26 More to the point, the collusion narrative liberally borrows, thematically and substantively, from The Wall Street Journal reports Simpson wrote eight years earlier, examining the corrupt interplay between the Kremlin, the oligarchs, Russian organized crime, and American (mostly Republican) political consultants—such as Paul Manafort.

  The dossier reports were branded “CONFIDENTIAL/SENSITIVE SOURCE” on nearly every page, the better to create the illusion of intelligence agency rigor (rather than anonymous partisan rumor-mongering). The first report, entitled “US PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION: REPUBLICAN CANDIDATE DONALD TRUMP’S ACTIVITIES IN RUSSIA AND COMPROMISING RELATIONSHIP WITH THE KREMLIN,” is dated June 20, 2016. It is the barnburner that took the FBI’s breath away two weeks later.

  That is to say, a month before WikiLeaks on July 22 began leaking thousands of hacked DNC emails to the press on the eve of the Democratic National Convention, the Clinton campaign–sponsored dossier reports had already framed the collusion narrative into which all subsequent developments would be fit.

  The first report sensationally claimed that, by mid-June 2016, Vladimir Putin’s regime had been “cultivating, supporting and assisting TRUMP” for five years, providing the candidate “and his inner circle” with “a regular flow of intelligence from the Kremlin, including on his Democratic and other political rivals.” According to Steele’s star witness, described as, a “former top Russian intelligence officer,” the Kremlin was able to control the New York real estate tycoon because it possessed blackmail material. This “kompromat,” Steele’s “several knowledgeable sources” elaborated, involved “perverted sexual acts which have been arranged/monitored by the FSB”—the KGB successor that is Russia’s internal security service.

  Purportedly included in the kompromat collection was a 2013 videotape of Trump cavorting with peeing prostitutes in a luxury suite at Moscow’s Ritz-Carlton hotel, what Steele described as a “golden showers (urination) show” performed on a bed in which President Obama and his wife, Michelle, were said to have slept. Trump had been in town to host the Miss Universe pageant.27

  Would Freud ever have had a field day with Steele’s unhinged abhorrence of Trump, projected through a melodramatic portrayal of Trump’s supposed contempt for Obama? It’s an obvious question one would have thought the FBI would ask—at least of itself, if not Steele—before presenting Steele’s unverified information to a federal court. After all, the pee tape is a thing of myth, never known to have been seen. Former director Comey, now a partisan anti-Trump commentator, tells television interviewers and book-promotion audiences he cannot say for sure if his nemesis is under the thumb of Moscow’s blackmail. “I honestly never thought these words would come out of my mouth,” he declaimed in an ABC News interview, “but I don’t know whether the current President of the United States was with prostitutes peeing on each other in Moscow in 2013. It’s possible, but I don’t know.” In sworn testimony, though, he described the dossier’s tales as “salacious and unverified.”28

  Steele claimed to be confident in the lurid story because of two sources. He described the first, “Source D,” as “a close associate of TRUMP who had organized and managed his recent trips to Moscow,” and who had recently stated that “this Russian intelligence had been ‘very helpful.’” Source D seemed to have claimed to be on-scene for Trump’s supposed pee party—though Steele’s rambling, imprecise writing style makes it unclear whether D was merely at the hotel or purports to have attended the “golden showers” performance itself.29

  One is left to wonder: Did it not occur to the FBI that Trump had not made any “recent trips to Moscow”? Trump is a very public person, and it should not have been difficult to figure out—especially since intelligence agencies had been investigating his connections to Russia for months—that there is no record of his having been in Moscow after the brief weekend trip for the pageant in 2013. What Russian intelligence could Source D have been talking about?

  In any event, Steele’s belief in the episode was enhanced because of confirmation by “Source E,” the half-line description of whom is blacked out in the first report. But Source E also appears at other critical junctures in the dossier and is described by Steele as “an ethnic Russian close associate of Republican US presidential candidate Donald TRUMP.” (That is from a dossier report that the “meticulous” Steele forgot to date. It describes events in late July 2016.) Source E, along with “several of the staff” (it is not clear whether Steele means Trump’s staff or the hotel’s), were said to have been aware of the incident when it occurred in 2013, and Source E allegedly led Steele to “a female staffer at the hotel” (Source F), who purportedly confirmed the incident to another of Steele’s unidentified sources (an “ethnic Russian operative” sleuthing for Steele’s company).

  The first notable thing here is that the FBI should have been able to find sources D and E without difficulty. It would be common sense and normal procedure to attempt to corroborate inform
ation before using it in court. If asked, Steele would have been obliged to identify his sources to investigators; he was a paid FBI informant, and he is in fact said to have identified at least some of them.30 Even going solely on Steele’s description of the sources as Trump associates with Russian backgrounds, figuring out who they were should have been a layup for the Bureau. Yet, if that sort of routine scut work was undertaken, there is no public evidence of it.

  The press has identified one of Steele’s sources as Sergey Millian. He was outed by both The Wall Street Journal and ABC News.31 They report that Millian is referred to in various dossier reports as both Source D and Source E. Of course, in Steele’s first report, he cannot be both: E is a separate source offered as corroboration of D’s pee tape story. In that report, Millian is Source D32; we do not know who E is, though there has been speculation as to his identity.33 But does Millian become E in later dossier reports, as the Journal and ABC suggest? Probably. The best explanation for this discrepancy is Steele’s slapdash style: He seems to have lost track, making Millian Source D in the pee tape report, then making him Source E in a subsequent late July report. The Journal was told by “a person familiar with the matter” that Millian was the dossier source for both the “compromising video” (i.e., the pee tape) and Steele’s later claim of a “conspiracy of cooperation” between Trump and the Kremlin. In the latter report, which we’ll address in more detail shortly, the source for the “conspiracy of cooperation” allegation is called “Source E.”34 If both claims are attributable to Millian, then Steele designated him Source D in the first and Source E in the second.