Inside the Fusion office, panic ensued. Fritsch ran to find Simpson, who was already screaming into the phone at Ken Bensinger, the lead reporter on the BuzzFeed story. “Take those fucking reports down right now!” Simpson yelled. “You are going to get people killed!”
Simpson was furious. Bensinger, who was on a trip with his wife and kids to Disney World, sounded sympathetic but said the matter was out of his hands: He had argued against publication but was overruled by his editors. Simpson and Fritsch had met Bensinger by happenstance barely a month earlier. Bensinger was a friend of their Los Angeles–based Fusion colleague Jason Felch. Felch had invited Bensinger to drop by a year-end Fusion retreat at a house high in the hills of California’s Sonoma County one night in early December. Bensinger got lost en route and had backed into a ditch on a meandering dirt road high above Geyserville. A Fusion search party later found him and freed his car.
Later, over drinks, they discussed—off the record—Trump’s documented ties to Russia, setting Bensinger on a reporting trail that ultimately brought him to the Washington office of one David Kramer.
Simpson hung up and dialed BuzzFeed editor in chief Ben Smith. Smith had been lured away from Politico in 2011 to run BuzzFeed, with a mandate to make it a more serious news outfit. This was not what pros do, Simpson screamed. “Take down those reports right now!”
Smith was implacable. The dossier had been briefed to the incoming and outgoing presidents, he said. President Obama had ordered a massive investigation of Russian interference in the election. This was all a matter of national importance that deserved to be vetted and scrutinized. It was the first version of the high-minded journalistic argument he would make repeatedly in coming days to defend his decision to publish source intelligence on the Internet.
Simpson argued that Smith was missing the more immediate point. The reports could help Putin track down the sources—not just Steele, but the sources he had relied on within Russia. There were lives at risk. Smith said he hadn’t pondered that, but he said he had no intention of taking the post offline. It was too late for that anyway.
Simpson and Fritsch again reached Steele on an encrypted line. It was late in England. Steele was angry but calm. He, too, suspected that the McCain camp had acted irresponsibly and betrayed them. Fusion and Orbis would figure that out later. Right now, Steele had higher priorities. He was already making plans to, as he put it, “go to ground”—spy-speak for going into hiding. “Let’s reassess in the morning,” Steele said.
His preparations were put to use almost immediately. The following day, January 11, Steele’s longtime partner in Orbis, a former British agent named Christopher Burrows, received an unannounced visit at his home outside London from a reporter for The Wall Street Journal. Could Burrows confirm that Christopher Steele was the author of the memoranda published in BuzzFeed? The reporter said he was on deadline and urgently needed a comment. Burrows politely declined. A flurry of calls ensued between Burrows, Simpson, Steele, Fritsch, and eventually Kramer.
While Kramer claimed not to know how the Journal had obtained Steele’s name, he also said he had interceded with the Journal’s editors in an attempt to persuade them not to publish Steele’s name, for security reasons. Later that day, the paper where Simpson and Fritsch had spent most of their careers—and which had done little reporting on the Trump-Russia story throughout the campaign—ignored those warnings and identified Steele as the author of the already famous dossier.
The next to be outed later that day was Fusion. The greatest threat there was from The New York Times.
Over the previous year, Simpson and Fritsch had taken extreme care not to give copies of the Steele reports to the media. But a few weeks after the election, they had decided to make an exception. They gave an off-the-record briefing and a redacted copy of the reports to the Times’s national security team in Washington. The Times had published a now infamous story at the end of October 2016 saying the FBI had looked into suspected Russia ties to Trump and found “no conclusive or direct link between Mr. Trump and the Russian government.” The Kremlin’s hack attack “was aimed at disrupting the presidential election rather than electing Trump.” Within weeks of Trump’s shocking victory over Clinton, both statements had begun to seem increasingly questionable. The paper was anxious to figure out whether it had gotten it wrong. They knew Fusion had information on that, and asked for help.
Despite the Times’s fateful pre-election miscue, Simpson and Fritsch agreed that no other publication had the sources and global reach needed to follow up on the underlying information in the Steele reports, so they gave the documents to the Times with strict instructions: They were on “deep background,” a term of art that meant they were to be used solely to inform other reporting; they couldn’t be reproduced or quoted from under any circumstances; and Fusion could not be identified as the source. Fusion knew and trusted the leader of that reporting team, Mark Mazzetti. There was no way he would break that promise, let alone share the reports’ contents outside the Times.
Fusion knew that the minute its name was out, it would come under attack from the incoming White House and likely face retribution against the firm and its clients. But now, in the wake of the BuzzFeed leak, the competition for scoops about “the dossier” was at a fever pitch. Another Times reporter decided he was not bound by the paper’s agreement to not identify Fusion, on the grounds that the firm’s exposure was inevitable either way. On January 11, the Times published a front-page story putting Fusion and Steele together for the first time—a story with details the reporter could include only by breaking the confidential source agreement the paper had made with Simpson and Fritsch.
In twenty-four hours, Steele and Fusion had gone from no-profile to front-page news—something they neither sought nor wanted. Steele and his family went into hiding as the media—most menacingly, Russia’s state-owned propaganda arm, RT—staked out his home in a leafy village in the London suburbs.
Simpson and Fritsch were worried for themselves but were more concerned about Steele and stayed in constant contact with him. He was nervous but safe, and implied that he had some help from his former colleagues. Experience had taught him that the threat to his personal safety was minimal: Putin was ruthless when it came to perceived traitors but was loath to attempt the assassination of a foreign national on foreign soil.
The reaction to the dossier hit every imaginable extreme. Republicans and a large contingent of the political chattering class churned out incredulity and outrage. Many pundits focused on purported spelling errors that were actually variants in transliterations between Russian and English. But pros in the Intelligence Community accurately recognized the material for what it was: a series of contemporaneous human intelligence reports—notes from conversations with well-placed sources—intended to inform additional investigation, not to be publicly released and read as a finished product. Fusion had decided it would be best to give McCain the complete Steele reporting to avoid tainting or diluting the agent’s work in any way.
Trump weighed in, attacking BuzzFeed as a “failing pile of garbage” and adding, bizarrely, that the golden shower incident had to be bogus because he was “very much a germaphobe.” His surrogates took to Twitter and the airwaves to pile on. One of their key points: Obviously the document was flawed, since it was paid for by “operatives” presumably working for his opponent, Hillary Clinton. What none of them knew was that Steele, in fact, did not know whom Fusion’s client was when he compiled his first report, dated June 20, 2016, or that Fusion had not drafted, edited, or dictated a word of Steele’s reporting. They also could not have known that the Steele memos were but a tiny subset of a vast cache of disturbing information Fusion had accumulated about Trump and Russia over the previous sixteen months.
But even on their own, Steele’s memos made for a solid body of work. His sources were deep and well placed. And Steele was trained to filter out inform
ation that bore the hallmarks of possible disinformation or was otherwise not credible, an important skill in the world of professional intelligence collection. Fusion’s researchers found nothing in the public record that contradicted the reporting.
Bob Woodward, Bernstein’s Watergate reporting partner, was among the many members of the pundit class all too ready to talk first and report later. On Fox News Sunday that weekend, January 15, he called the dossier “a garbage document.” Woodward, who at the time was seeking access to Trump for a book, said Trump’s “point of view” was being “underreported,” a nonsensical statement, given the blanket coverage of Trump’s every utterance. Minutes later, as if on cue, Trump tweeted, “Thank you Bob Woodward.”
In the months to come, one side of the commentariat would seek to hold the Steele memos to the impossibly high standards of a court filing or a front-page article in The Washington Post, while the other would interpret them as they were intended: disturbing leads outlining a dark international political conspiracy. Amid all the noise about “salacious” this and “unverified” that was the fact that the Steele dossier offered a series of findings that provided insights into Trump’s persistent adulation for a regime in Moscow that has sought to undermine U.S. goals around the world since Putin took office in 1999.
The dossier and its exposure just ten days before Trump’s inauguration triggered a cascade of events that disrupted a secret rapprochement brewing between the incoming Trump administration and the Kremlin, and eventually led to years of congressional investigations and hearings, the firings of National Security Adviser Michael Flynn and FBI Director James Comey, the appointment of special counsel Robert Mueller to what became a nearly two-year criminal investigation, an ongoing counterintelligence investigation, and a swirling brawl between the two political parties that plagued Trump’s term in office from the very first day.
All of that would take months—years—to adjudicate. What was clear in January 2017 was that Fusion GPS, a tiny investigative research company tucked above a Starbucks and a used clothing store in Washington, D.C., was now in the middle of a dizzying political drama that seemed like something drawn from a Hollywood screenplay. The odds it would survive were not good.
Project Bangor, which was to become Fusion’s most complex and fateful assignment, began with a one-line email.
It was late August 2015, and the 2016 presidential campaign could not have been younger, nor the candidacy of Donald Trump more far-fetched. Trump had jumped in the polls since getting into the race in June, provoking the first stirrings of disbelief among establishment Republicans. His bombastic appearance in the first GOP debate, on August 5, catapulted the broadcast to the most watched primary debate ever, with more than twenty-four million viewers. But the idea of a Trump nomination still seemed outlandish, considering all his garish flaws and the supposed strengths of seasoned competitors like Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, and Marco Rubio.
As absurd as Trump seemed, Simpson sensed a rich research and business opportunity. “Trump” was the subject heading in the email he sent that Sunday morning to a longtime Republican politico. “Couple interesting threads that might be worth a look if you know anyone who might be interested in funding.”
“Yes,” came the reply. “Let’s discuss. Can I call you this eve?”
Based on that suggestion of interest, Simpson then reached out to a couple of reliable contractors who might lend a hand, part of a stable of freelance specialists—lawyers, former journalists, linguists, archivists, data crunchers—that Fusion routinely turned to when assembling its research teams.
Their response was swift: We’re in.
At that point, neither Simpson nor Fritsch knew much about Trump. Simpson was a longtime denizen of political Washington, a former Roll Call reporter turned investigative sleuth. Fritsch, a former foreign correspondent for the Journal who had spent more than fifteen years in Latin America, Southeast Asia, and Europe, knew Trump from his years in New York mainly as the rakish star of tabloid columns by Liz Smith and Cindy Adams. Trump had been a marginal figure, at best, in national politics. A couple of brief flirtations with a presidential run, frequent fulminations over trade or immigration policy, and a lot of potshots, some racially tinged, at President Obama—that was about it. His presence in Washington wasn’t much more fulsome: a few turns of congressional testimony, an occasional appearance at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, and a big hotel project under way on Pennsylvania Avenue, a few blocks from the White House.
A quick check of Simpson’s own reporting archive showed that in the course of publishing hundreds of articles about American campaigns, elections, and lobbying, he had mentioned Trump fewer than five times.
But Trump was climbing in the early polls, and Simpson’s Republican acquaintance had begun to fret that his bombastic and xenophobic message might actually appeal to just enough nativist Republican primary voters to give him an edge in a fractured field.
Trump’s Achilles’ heel was probably his own troubled record in business, a subject most traditional “opposition research” firms weren’t as well equipped to handle. Simpson had an inkling that establishment Republicans might be willing to fund a deep look at Trump’s business past and finances for the stories that often hid in the small print of footnotes.
When they spoke that night, Simpson told the Republican operative that there were plenty of preliminary indications that Trump would be a fertile subject for investigation, and that some of the lines of inquiry would probably resonate with the media or primary voters. The operative said he was interested but needed to secure funding for Fusion’s fee—about $50,000 for the first month.
After hanging up, Simpson banged out a quick email to an old journalistic acquaintance, the legendary Village Voice investigative reporter Wayne Barrett. Simpson was a longtime admirer of Barrett’s reporting, which he began reading as a journalism student in college. Two of Barrett’s biggest lifelong foes, Simpson knew, were Donald Trump and former New York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani. Barrett had written biographies on both. He also knew Barrett was struggling with lung cancer.
“Hey Wayne,” he wrote. “Hope you are hanging in there. It’s that time in America we all await with a curious mix of morbid anticipation and dread. Got some time to chat?” Simpson didn’t bother mentioning Trump. They’d compared notes during the 2012 presidential campaign, and he knew Barrett would get it.
Barrett replied the next morning: “i’ve been feeding every reporter in america on donald,” he wrote, “but most can’t report like you. on vacation at ocean city house, where all my old trump files reside.”
While Barrett’s claim to be “feeding every reporter in America on Donald” was hyperbole (as was his flattery), the truth wasn’t too far off: Barrett literally wrote the book on Trump with his 500-page 1992 exposé, Trump: The Deals and the Downfall. One of Barrett’s earliest Trump pieces for The Village Voice in the 1970s had led to a grand jury investigation, while his book’s details on Trump’s organized crime ties nearly cost Trump his Atlantic City casino license. “While I was reporting that book in 1990, I was muscled out of Trump Castle and handcuffed overnight to a wall at the Atlantic City jail,” Barrett later recalled.
Any researcher or reporter who wanted to know about Trump would naturally call Barrett, who was a strong believer in the necessity of collaboration among journalists when investigating politicians. He had trained, mentored, counseled, or otherwise encouraged dozens of talented investigative reporters over the years, many of whom went on to become some of the best in the business.
After updating Simpson on his ongoing health struggles, Barrett briefed him on Trump. Not nearly as rich as he claims. Terrible toward women. Serial liar. Lousy businessman. Ties to organized crime. What’s more, Barrett added that he had a huge pile of old Trump documents he would be happy to share. Simpson was encouraged, and soon asked a New York–based colleague to go di
g through the boxes of files Barrett brought back to his Brooklyn brownstone as summer ended. There would be plenty of material to sift.
* * *
—
By Labor Day weekend, Trump had carved out a solid lead over the pack of more than a dozen candidates, garnering the support of more than a quarter of Republicans, according to the rolling average compiled by RealClearPolitics. Many Republican elites figured he would soon hit his ceiling, but the jitters were rising. Ever since the commentator Pat Buchanan fatally wounded President George H. W. Bush’s re-election chances by challenging him in the 1992 Republican primary on an anti-trade, anti-immigrant “America First” platform, establishment Republicans lived in fear of the party’s nativist wing. Free trade was part of Republican orthodoxy, and it was an article of faith among Republican elites that a populist Republican nominee would get crushed in a general election matchup with virtually any Democrat. On September 4, 2015, the Times reported that top Republican strategists and donors were combining efforts in a still nascent campaign to stop Trump.
Less than a week later, Fusion had put together the outline of a draft plan to investigate Trump. The pitch was basic, and the investigation was meant to last just a month or so. The checklist of specific areas they intended to cover was also short: “Research Donald Trump’s long-standing connections to organized crime, receipt of questionable tax abatements in New York City, overall record of tax avoidance, use of bankruptcies to victimize workers and small businessmen, and overall litigation history.” The foundation of the research would be the collection and compilation of a large stash of news articles, books, and corporate, legal, and tax records, the beginnings of what was to become a vast repository of Trump data.
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