Crime in Progress

by Glenn Simpson;Peter Fritsch;

  According to the Mueller report, the day after the interview was taped, Millian met with Trump campaign adviser Papadopoulos. They met again the following day, even as Strzok was in London trying to find out more about Papadopoulos’s alleged claims that the Russians had Hillary Clinton’s emails.

  Millian had contacted Papadopoulos a few weeks earlier, claiming that he had “insider knowledge and direct access to the top hierarchy in Russian politics,” Mueller would later find. Millian promised he could mobilize Russian immigrants to vote for Trump. A few weeks later he followed up with a Facebook message promising to “share with you a disruptive technology that might be instrumental in your political work for the campaign.”

  The Mueller report later concluded that Millian, a U.S. citizen otherwise happy to talk to the press, apparently fled the country once the special counsel investigation was launched. Millian spurned the Mueller team, the report said, “despite our repeated efforts to obtain an interview.” His whereabouts are unknown.

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  On August 3, Simpson and Fritsch took the Acela train to New York for a meeting with New Yorker editor David Remnick and features editor Daniel Zalewski at the Condé Nast offices in 1 World Trade Center. Remnick had been a foreign correspondent in Moscow for The Washington Post in the late eighties and had written the Pulitzer Prize–winning book Lenin’s Tomb, an eyewitness account of the collapse of the Soviet Union. Much as Steele thought it was time to escalate his efforts to get the attention of higher-ups in the U.S. law enforcement establishment, Fritsch and Simpson decided it might be useful to engage with a wider circle of journalists, especially those with particularly sensitive Russia antennae.

  Remnick was certainly under no illusions about Putin’s intentions toward the West. Much as they had with Baquet and Purdy at the Times the previous week, Simpson and Fritsch spent ninety minutes reviewing the myriad ties between Trump and Russia beyond what had been reported publicly. They repeated their briefing later that day for two senior editors at Reuters. Fusion left Steele out of its presentation but let on that credible sources thought Trump had been compromised by Moscow.

  These were smart editors who got it. Remnick had no doubt Putin was up to no good and agreed that Trump was a perfect target for the Russian spy state. He later asked a couple of his reporters to follow up on some of Fusion’s leads about Manafort and the cast of sketchy Russians orbiting Trump World. Fusion was skeptical that a magazine with a long gestation period like The New Yorker would commit to stories the daily papers were likely to get to first. Wire services like Reuters, meantime, had all they could do to keep up with the avalanche of news during the campaign. To Fusion, these were consciousness-raising encounters, and it was worth getting a reality check from savvy, skeptical journalists. While neither revved up coverage before the election, The New Yorker would later become among the most aggressive outlets in covering the Russia story.

  As Simpson and Fritsch saw it, there were too many obstacles, some practical, but also failure of imagination that stopped reporters from chasing the bigger story. It was just hard to believe that Putin would invest big in Trump or dare to provoke the United States on its home turf, the thinking went. And even if you did think something like that might be true, it would be a nearly impossible story to report out before Trump inevitably lost and went back to reality television and selling frozen steaks and fake college degrees. In that context, some editors doubted the wisdom of chasing a vague set of tips about a sprawling counterintelligence story in the final weeks of a raucous presidential campaign.

  Over at The Washington Post, Steele’s allegations about Page’s secret meetings with high-level officials in Moscow got an incredulous reception from the paper’s Russia team. “It’s bullshit. Impossible,” one correspondent said to a colleague at the paper.

  Simpson wasn’t surprised. “No worries, I don’t expect lots of people to believe it,” he replied. “It is, indeed, hard to believe.”

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  The Intelligence Community, as later became clear, was finally beginning to imagine the worst. The Kremlin’s propaganda outlets were spewing increasingly disturbing content, including segments in early August about Clinton’s supposedly debilitating secret health problems, her imminent arrest over her emails, and various other messages that appeared to echo or complement Trump campaign messaging. This rang alarm bells within the Obama administration.

  In early August 2016, CIA Director John Brennan emerged from an internal intelligence review convinced that Russia had launched an audacious attack to not only hack the Clinton campaign but use the information to help Trump win the election. He said nothing publicly, but he was also worried about repeated contacts between Trump campaign officials and Russians. As he testified later to Congress, “Frequently, people who go along a treasonous path do not know they are on a treasonous path until it is too late.”

  On August 4, Brennan held a call with Alexander Bortnikov, the head of Russia’s FSB intelligence agency, and warned him against further interference with the election. Bortnikov denied Russia’s involvement, a denial Brennan later called “hogwash.” The Kremlin was now officially on notice.

  With President Obama’s approval, Brennan then decided to brief the so-called Gang of Eight—the party leaders in Congress and the chairs and ranking members of the Senate and House intelligence committees. The group included House Speaker Paul Ryan, who was already aware of suspicions from inside his own leadership that Trump had some sort of corrupt relationship with Russia. The Republicans, led by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, were openly hostile to Brennan, accusing him of a ploy to help Clinton.

  In fact, some of them appear to have already had a pretty good idea of what was going on. On June 15, the day that Guccifer 2.0 leaked internal DNC research on Trump to Gawker and a website called the Smoking Gun, Republican House leaders gathered privately and discussed Russia’s malign activities and intentions in a meeting that was secretly recorded by someone in attendance.

  In the recording, Speaker Ryan recounted a meeting he’d just had with the new prime minister of Ukraine and recited a warning he had received from the Ukrainian leader: “What Russia is doing to us, financing our populists, financing people in our governments to undo our government, you know, messing with our oil and gas energy, all the things Russia does to basically blow up our country, they’re just going to roll right through us and go to the Baltics and everyone else.”

  Another Republican, Cathy McMorris Rodgers, then recalled a recent visit to the region. “My big takeaway from that trip was just how sophisticated the propaganda is coming out of Russia and Putin,” she said.

  “It’s very sophisticated,” Ryan agreed. “This isn’t just about Ukraine.”

  “It’s a propaganda war,” Rodgers said.

  “Maniacal,” Ryan agreed.

  Ryan’s number two in the house, California representative Kevin McCarthy, then chimed in. “I’ll guarantee you that’s what it is,” he said, noting that there was no question the Russians were trying to help Trump. “The Russians hacked the DNC and got the opposition research that they had on Trump,” he said with a chortle. “There’s two people, I think, Putin pays: Rohrabacher and Trump,” he declared, referring to longtime California congressman Dana Rohrabacher. “Swear to God.”

  It was an extraordinary claim. But no one at the meeting, which wasn’t known publicly until it was reported by the Post eleven months later, raised any suggestion they might want to inform the FBI of these concerns. Instead, Ryan elected to put a cork in it. The discussion, he decreed, was off the record. “No leaks!” he ordered. “What’s said in the family stays in the family.”

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  Steele’s memos kept coming in at a steady pace, with three more in July that detailed Russia’s offensive cyber operations, its use of WikiLeaks as a platform for
hacked material, and Carter Page’s activities in Russia. His sixth report landed on August 5, the day after Brennan gave his warning to the Russians. The Russians, it said, were feeling a bit like the dog that caught the ambulance. Their operation had been partially exposed, and they were pointing fingers at one another over whom was to blame for the heat now coming from Washington. Steele’s report said that Kremlin chief of staff and Putin confidant Sergei Ivanov thought the U.S. operation, led by Putin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, “had gone too far in interfering with foreign affairs with their ‘elephant in a china shop black PR.’ ” This was high-level Kremlin-speak suggesting a rift at the top over the hack.

  The report said Peskov feared for his job. One week later, however, Putin instead sacked his longtime friend Ivanov. Steele’s report may have misread the outcome, but it was prescient regarding turmoil at the top. To Steele, this signaled that Putin had decided to go all in on the campaign to disrupt the election and help Trump.

  By now, there was a daily drumbeat of Russia-related news. On August 8, Roger Stone, the colorful pro-Trump agitator and former Manafort business partner, told a Republican conference in Florida that he had “actually communicated with [WikiLeaks leader Julian] Assange” and had intel on what WikiLeaks would dump next. The implication was that Stone knew what the Russian hackers were up to.

  For reporters, and for Fusion, there was a bread-and-circuses quality to Stone’s theatrics. It was hard to take seriously and easy to ignore. Dirty trickster that he was proud to be, Stone also excelled at playing the buffoon. But, like Trump, he was dangerous precisely because he was so easy to dismiss.

  The Stone slapstick nearly drowned out a much more consequential bit of news that same day, one that would lead Fusion down another important research path. Late that night, Bloomberg filed a story from Spain about a Russian named Alexander Torshin under the headline: “Mobster or Central Banker? Spanish Cops Allege This Russian Is Both.” The story described how a former senator from Putin’s political party who had gone on to run the Central Bank of the Russian Federation was the subject of an investigation in Spain into money laundering by a Russian organized crime syndicate called the Taganskaya Gang. Torshin insisted in an interview with the reporter that it was all a big misunderstanding. He had high-powered friends in many countries, he insisted.

  Halfway through the story, tossed in almost as an aside, was a tantalizing line: “Torshin…said his network of contacts extends to the United States, where he’s a member of the National Rifle Association. He said he’s met Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump and in May shared a dinner table with the billionaire’s son, Donald Trump Jr., at the gun lobby’s annual convention in Louisville, Kentucky.”

  Simpson circulated the story around the Fusion office first thing the next morning, highlighting that sentence.

  “Wild, looks like he has been close to the NRA for many years,” Berkowitz said after doing some quick digging.

  One key aspect of the story made no sense, though. Supposedly, Torshin was leading a movement to put guns in the hands of ordinary Russians, which would somehow fix Russia’s many problems. And yet gun ownership is tightly regulated there, far more than in the United States, and few Russians can own guns legally.

  This had the appearance of a Trojan horse—a Kremlin-backed ruse to cozy up to Trump and open a back door to the Republican establishment through the NRA. That was the kind of lead Fusion could run down. The partners worked to track down a report from the Spanish prosecutor leading Operación Dirieba, the case looking at Torshin and Russian money laundering. Simpson also had extensive files on Torshin’s alleged crime family, the Taganskaya Gang. Torshin had attracted attention in late 2004 for his role in supporting rigged elections designed to put Russia’s favored candidate, Manafort client Viktor Yanukovych, into power in Ukraine, an election he said comported with “democratic principles and election legislation.”

  For Fusion, it was the beginnings of a unified-field theory of Russian venality. In sum, the Kremlin had a guerrilla army of oligarchs, spies, and gangsters—some of whom were all three—spread across the free world. They were now working in concert to destabilize the West by infiltrating and corrupting right-wing political parties and their affiliated social issue groups, like gun rights groups and the Christian right. “God, it all seems so crazy,” Berkowitz said to Fritsch one afternoon.

  If there was a Kremlin plot to influence Republican Party politics, it made sense that they would try to infiltrate the NRA. It would be a perfect cover for cultivating relationships with influential conservatives or even possibly funneling campaign money to Republican candidates without detection. The Russians could also use it to promote Russian small-arms exports to the United States and lobby to reverse import-export regulations imposed by the Obama administration. The NRA had publicly opposed Obama’s ban on Kalashnikov imports in 2014. Torshin also was a close friend of Kalashnikov’s late founder and had promoted the brand in the United States.

  The Russia-NRA story would take many more months to unwind, work that took Fusion researchers well past the election.

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  Fusion’s NRA research had barely gotten off the ground when, in mid-August, the Times produced the results of its latest reporting in Ukraine: “Secret Ledger in Ukraine Lists Cash for Donald Trump’s Campaign Chief.” Manafort had received more than $12 million working for the pro-Russia party in Ukraine. This was even wilder than what Simpson and Fritsch had suspected when they met with the Times brass several weeks earlier in Philadelphia. The paper had worked its sources in Kiev to track down a ledger that kept a record of the illicit payments to Manafort. Some of the records came from a muckraking former journalist in the Ukrainian parliament. In text messages, Manafort had recently claimed that “the renewed interest by reporters is being generated by the HC campaign.” Trump’s other defenders would make the same claim repeatedly over the next three years. In fact, while Simpson recalled mentioning the Ukrainian parliamentarian to Purdy as a source the Times might want to try, Fusion didn’t know the lawmaker.

  Manafort was unable to persuade Steve Bannon and other Trump advisers that the Times report was merely a groundless hit job by the Clinton campaign. Under rising pressure and scrutiny, Manafort resigned as Trump’s campaign chairman five days later. On the same day, August 14, Roger Stone started messaging with Guccifer 2.0, the front for the Russian hackers who had penetrated the DNC.

  The presidential campaign was now heading into the homestretch. Fusion was running flat out, and having a hard time keeping up with all the Trump-Russia angles. Each headline had the effect of making Steele’s reporting that much more credible in their minds, reinforcing the sense that Trump was indeed compromised by the Russians. For voters and the press, the blur of events made it nearly impossible to spot the underlying patterns or to give each development its proper attention.

  Even the FBI seemed to be having a hard time processing everything they were seeing. Early on August 11, Strzok texted Lisa Page in all caps: “OMG I CANNOT BELIEVE WE ARE SERIOUSLY LOOKING AT THESE ALLEGATIONS AND THE PERVASIVE CONNECTIONS.” A moment later he added, “What the hell has happened to our country!?!?!??”

  Fusion and Steele still had no idea whether the FBI was on the case. So Steele asked Simpson to share some of their combined findings with Bruce Ohr, their mutual acquaintance in the Justice Department. On August 22, Simpson and Ohr met at a Peet’s Coffee near the Justice Department headquarters in Washington. The meeting lasted less than an hour. Simpson tried to fill out the picture Steele had begun to paint for Ohr three weeks earlier, describing possible intermediaries between the Russian government and the Trump campaign, including Manafort, Carter Page, and Sergei Millian. He thanked Simpson and headed back to work, making no mention of any active FBI investigation.

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  By the end of August, the soon-to-retire
Senate minority leader, Harry Reid, had received private briefings on the Russian interference, as had other senior members of Congress, and he was frustrated with Republican reluctance to call out Russia’s hostile activity. He had also learned of Russian efforts to infiltrate the computers of state election systems and was frustrated by the Obama administration’s slowness to react.

  Reid sent a letter to Comey calling for an investigation. The August 27 letter issued a blunt assessment of the situation: “The prospect of a hostile government actively seeking to undermine our free and fair elections represents one of the gravest threats to our democracy since the Cold War.”

  Many journalists wrote the letter off as partisan politicking. But at Fusion’s office, ears perked up. Fusion thought it was evidence that Reid had been briefed by Brennan and probably knew a lot more than he was saying. So did Strzok, it turned out. He texted Page a link to the Times account of the letter, saying, “Here we go.”

  Polls at the end of August still showed Clinton ahead by anywhere from 4 to 9 percentage points. The prospect that Russia could tamper with voter rolls was a serious concern to Obama and his team, more so even than a bunch of leaked emails that basically confirmed what everyone knew about the DNC’s distaste for Bernie Sanders. That possibility caused Obama to task Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson with working with state voting officials to make sure systems were secure. Once again, the effort broke down along party lines; Republican state attorneys general said they didn’t want the feds poking around in their voting systems.

  By early September, Obama had decided he needed to intervene. He did so in private, a move later criticized by a frustrated Clinton campaign. The president pulled Putin aside on the sidelines of the G20 summit in Hangzhou, China, said the United States knew what Russia was up to, and warned of retaliation. Obama hinted at what retaliation might look like at a subsequent press conference, telling reporters, “Frankly, we’ve got more [cyber] capacity than anybody, both offensively and defensively.”