Crime in Progress

by Glenn Simpson;Peter Fritsch;

  The administration, in fact, had worked up a series of possible responses that included everything from leaking details of Putin’s hidden wealth to booting diplomats out of the country and imposing deeper economic sanctions on Putin’s cronies. But in the end, the White House thought those steps too provocative. A dogfight with Russia over election meddling could be seen as partisan in a heated election season.

  Upon his return to Washington, Obama instead pushed congressional leaders for a bipartisan declaration blaming Russia for its attacks on the electoral process. The administration laid all its intel cards on the table for congressional leaders in a meeting on September 8.

  The Democrats agreed. But once again, Mitch McConnell staunchly refused, going so far as to threaten that if the White House made such a declaration, he would put out his own statement accusing Obama of playing politics.

  By the first week of September, it had been two months since Steele first sat down with the FBI’s Gaeta in London, and a month since he met with Ohr. No one had followed up with him. Steele would ask Simpson and Fritsch again and again: Is maintaining the appearance of impartiality in this election so important to you Americans that you are willing to risk electing a Russian asset?

  The steady stream of fresh Russia intelligence from Steele’s sources fed his growing anxiety. On September 14, he sent Fusion another report, his seventh, and one that would prove to be among his most prescient. “Russians do have further ‘kompromat’ on CLINTON (e-mails) and considering disseminating it after Duma [legislative elections] in late September,” he wrote. The stolen emails would be released through “plausibly deniable” channels, he added. Channels like WikiLeaks.

  That same day, it would later emerge, Russian military intelligence officers posing as tipsters began contacting American reporters over Twitter to give them passwords to protected sections of the DCLeaks website that housed hacked DNC information. The next day, the Russians reached out to WikiLeaks to begin arranging the transfer of yet another huge cache of emails. The emails had been stolen by the Russians from the personal account of Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta.

  By now, Steele had become alarmed about what he perceived to be the FBI’s foot-dragging. He reached out to a mentor, Sir Andrew Wood, Britain’s former ambassador to Moscow, to seek his advice and share the intelligence he had gathered. He also messaged his contact at the State Department, Jonathan Winer, to let him know he had developed disturbing information about Trump’s ties to Russia. Steele asked to meet in person the next time he was in Washington.

  In mid-September, Steele heard from the FBI’s Gaeta via Skype. Would Steele be willing to meet with the FBI team in Rome and share his reporting on Trump? Gaeta and Steele immediately established a secure system for transmission, and the reports began flowing. This sudden flash of interest by the FBI made it clear to Steele and Fusion that the Bureau was indeed now investigating Trump—and they had apparently picked up something that suddenly made Steele’s memos seem a lot more urgent and relevant. Operation Crossfire Hurricane had finally caught up with Steele. He would go to Rome on his own dime two weeks later.

  Fusion had no way of knowing how serious the FBI probe was, and warned Steele that it was doubtful anything dramatic would be done before the election, thanks to long-established Justice Department rules about refraining from any overt enforcement actions that could affect an election in the homestretch of a campaign. Steele was always annoyed by this explanation. Surely, he would say, national security trumps politics.

  The Fusion team said nothing about the FBI’s outreach to anyone. Simpson and Fritsch decided that if Hillary’s campaign operatives got wind of a possible FBI investigation, it might be unable to resist the temptation to leak it to the press. That could compromise the investigation (by alerting the targets) and subject the FBI to political attacks from Republicans that would undermine the probe’s credibility. To the Republicans, with their own history of misusing the government’s legal powers to smear and punish their political opponents, that explanation later seemed impossible to believe.

  Steele was encouraged by the FBI’s outreach. Still, he was losing faith that the Bureau would move quickly enough to put a stop to whatever the Trump campaign and the Russians were planning.

  Despite Simpson and Fritsch’s skepticism, they agreed it was important to at least try to make people aware of what was happening, even if the truth about Trump and Russia only came out after the election. Sooner or later, the American national security establishment was going to have to clean up the Russia mess. And the best way to make sure the government did its job, they thought, was to involve the media as a watchdog.

  Christopher Steele was about to break cover.

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  Fusion wanted Steele to come to Washington and meet the press, face-to-face. The idea of briefing the American media was a novel proposition for Steele, who had had little contact with reporters and eyed them skeptically. Journalists often behaved irresponsibly, he believed, and were capable of mishandling sensitive information or selling out a source for a good story. He had never confirmed to anyone that he had worked for MI6, even after he was outed in 1999, and he didn’t want to start now.

  Trust us, Simpson and Fritsch said. There was some risk to the strategy, for sure, but it could be managed. They would introduce him to a handful of reporters they knew and could trust to protect sources. All were seasoned national security or investigative reporters who dealt regularly with confidential whistleblowers and former intelligence and law enforcement officials.

  Steele wouldn’t have to mention MI6 or name a single source, they told him. His name and nationality will be off-limits.

  “Do you think they’ll write stories based on what I say?” Steele wanted to know.

  Probably not, they said.

  Much like the Justice Department’s policy against taking overt investigative steps against candidates in the sixty days before an election, reporters try to begin wrapping up their investigative work on the presidential campaigns soon after Labor Day, to avoid the risk of being manipulated by one side or the other into an unfair or untrue “late hit.”

  The idea, Simpson told Steele, was to alert some leading journalists in the national security community to a potential crime in progress in the hope that they would investigate it, whether or not Trump won. Multiple signs pointed to active cooperation between the Trump team and Moscow. At a minimum, Putin’s men were openly aiding the campaign in ways that violated U.S. law. If the two sides weren’t working hand in hand, then at the very least the Russians were manipulating top aides and advisers to the Republican candidate. All of this warranted scrutiny, even if it seemed unlikely that the story would become public before Election Day. That shouldn’t matter: Clinton seemed almost certain to win.

  Steele flew to Washington on September 21.

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  Fritsch reserved two private rooms at 10 A.M. the next day at the Tabard Inn, a quiet, discreet, and charmingly shabby spot a bit removed from Washington’s power corridors. The meetings were organized in one-hour sessions, with breaks staggered between the rooms to prevent journalists from bumping into one another as they came and went. The guest list included Jane Mayer of The New Yorker, Michael Isikoff of Yahoo News, Matthew Mosk of ABC News, and Eric Lichtblau and David Sanger of the Times. Later, the Fusion partners took Steele to the offices of The Washington Post, where they met with Tom Hamburger and Dana Priest. Collectively, these reporters boasted more than 150 years of experience reporting in Washington and had won virtually every award the news profession has to offer.

  Fusion laid the ground rules. Steele would speak only on background, meaning any information the reporters wished to quote could only be attributed to a “former senior Western intelligence official.” His name and nationality were off-limits. Fusion, they explained, had hired Steele to loo
k into Trump’s business dealings with Russia. But he had developed information along the way that pointed to a more sinister relationship, one with serious national security implications. The information was Steele’s, not Fusion’s. Yes, Fusion was working for a client opposed to Trump. No, Fusion would not identify that client. If that meant the reporters didn’t want to hear from Steele, no problem.

  The reporters all agreed to those terms. The Steele memos that would later come to be known as the dossier were not shown or given to any of the reporters.

  Fusion explained Steele’s background as a reliable source of intelligence to U.S. law enforcement and invited them to check his reputation with their sources. Many of the reporters wanted to know if the U.S. government was aware of what Steele had found and whether it was investigating. Not wanting to compromise the FBI’s investigation, Simpson and Fritsch kept it vague: It would be fair to assume the U.S. government was aware of Steele’s information, they said. Only Isikoff pressed the question aggressively, eventually squeezing out of Steele an admission that he had briefed the FBI about Carter Page and other matters.

  Steele did almost all the talking. Simpson and Fritsch would interject occasionally for context and explain how Steele’s conclusions jibed with what was in the public record.

  In the meetings, Steele ran through his key findings. He played down the hard-to-confirm details of Trump’s alleged nocturnal exploits during the Miss Universe pageant in 2013 and emphasized his reporting on Page’s mysterious Moscow mission and meetings with people from the Kremlin and Rosneft—the fattest hog in Putin’s kleptocratic corporate pigsty. He noted that his sources had mentioned discussions between Page and Russian officials about Trump lifting U.S. sanctions on Russians in return for other favors. The sourcing there was particularly solid.

  In a New Yorker article, Jane Mayer would later describe her session with Steele. “Despite Steele’s generally cool manner, he seemed distraught about the Russians’ role in the election. He did not distribute his dossier, provided no documentary evidence, and was so careful about guarding his sources that there was virtually no way to follow up.” Mayer’s published account was faithful to her real-time reaction: Interesting, but what is the point of this if none of it can be confirmed?

  Isikoff decided to see what, if anything, he could run down with his own law enforcement sources. After verifying Steele’s bona fides, he got through to a senior law enforcement official who confirmed investigative interest in Page’s supposed meetings with Sechin and other Kremlin types. The day after his encounter with Steele, Isikoff published a story under the headline “U.S. Intel Officials Probe Ties Between Trump Adviser and Kremlin.” The story recalled Senator Reid’s blind reference to what must have been Page in his letter to Comey and reported the alleged Sechin meeting Steele had described. The story also mentioned another alleged meeting Page had with a top Kremlin official, Igor Divyekin.

  Isikoff’s September 23 story made a modest splash for a day or two. A few days later, Page told the Post that he would be taking a “leave of absence” from the Trump campaign and trashed Isikoff’s story as “complete garbage.” The core allegation of the story, that Page was being investigated for allegations that he had “opened up private communications with senior Russian officials—including talks about the possible lifting of economic sanctions if the Republican nominee becomes president,” was later proven to be accurate by congressional investigations.

  The campaign’s swift moves to distance itself from Manafort and Page limited the fallout and contained the story, but at least Fusion and Steele felt satisfied that their work had helped lead to two of the Trump campaign’s suspected intermediaries with the Russians being taken off the field.

  “The primary objective of most counterintelligence operations is disruption, so we’re not doing badly,” Steele pointed out.

  The following month, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court approved a wiretap of Page—a fact that wouldn’t emerge until well after the election. A highly redacted copy of the court’s order said that Page had “established relationships with Russian government officials, including Russian intelligence officers,” and that the FBI thought “the Russian government’s efforts are being coordinated with Page and perhaps other individuals” tied to the Trump campaign. Still later, it came out that Russian intelligence had tried to recruit Page in 2013. The FBI had even asked him about his Russian contacts in March 2016—the month Trump introduced him to the editorial board of the Post as part of his foreign policy team. And this was all long before Steele had ever heard of Carter Page, much less put his name in a report.

  Trump defenders would later try to advance the notion that the briefings at the Tabard Inn had led to a spate of oppo-driven stories in the final weeks of the campaign. The truth is, the story in Yahoo News was the only one that emerged from the Steele sessions.

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  After making the rounds with journalists, Steele met with longtime former State Department official Jonathan Winer in a Washington hotel and gave him a rundown of the intel he’d gathered, akin to the one he had just given reporters.

  Simpson and Fritsch had known Winer for years. The lawyer and diplomat knew a lot of journalists in town, dating back to his days as an Iran-contra investigator for Senator John Kerry. He was a specialist in money laundering and transnational crime. After leaving government in 1999 for private consulting, he developed a specialty in the countries of the former Soviet Union. He met Steele soon after Orbis was founded in 2009.

  Winer returned to government in 2013 at then–Secretary of State Kerry’s request as special envoy for Libya. On the side, he acted as an informal pipeline between Steele and State Department official Victoria Nuland for Orbis’s reporting on Russia. Again, Steele shared that work for free, in the interest of helping an ally augment its understanding of a place where good source intelligence was hard to come by, increasingly so since the shift in the Intelligence Community’s focus to Islamic terror after 9/11.

  Winer was stunned by Steele’s Trump findings and vowed to do what he could to bring the matter to Secretary Kerry’s attention. As a lawyer and veteran of many D.C. political scrapes, Winer was also sensitive to the optics of the situation: Here was a former British spy working for some former journalists who, he knew, were probably working for the Democrats.

  Soon after his meeting with Steele, Winer called Fritsch and asked to talk. Winer and Fritsch live in the same neighborhood in the Washington suburbs. One evening in late September, Fritsch went to Winer’s house with a copy of all the reports Steele had produced to date. Fritsch allowed Winer to read them and take notes, for the express purpose of making Kerry aware of the substance of Steele’s reporting.

  Winer then pulled out a document of his own for Fritsch to review. It was a report that appeared to be written by some kind of investigator, but it was sloppy and unformatted; it looked like a reporter’s raw notes. Its findings, however, were explosive: They echoed Steele’s own reporting that the Russian FSB spy service had tapes of Trump having sex with prostitutes in Moscow. It was now Fritsch’s turn to be stunned.

  This appeared to be a totally different reporting stream, providing a measure of corroboration for Steele’s reporting. But was this report legitimate? It made reference to conversations with journalists, including the Journal’s former Moscow correspondent Alan Cullison. Was this all just hearsay or reporter gossip? There was no way to know. Winer would only say that it came from a trusted friend. Fritsch had a few suspicions about who that was. Winer had long been friends with Sidney Blumenthal, a former journalist who had gone on to work in the Clinton White House and become very close to both Bill and Hillary. Fusion knew that Blumenthal worked with a Los Angeles–based freelance journalist named Cody Shearer to generate opposition research for the Clintons. Fritsch asked if his hunch was right, but Winer would neither confirm nor deny.

 
When Fritsch returned to the office and described the document to his colleagues, Simpson sighed and said, “We don’t want to get within a thousand miles of that.” But the parallels to the dossier were admittedly intriguing. Fusion’s suspicions later proved correct. Shearer was, in fact, the author of the document, and Blumenthal had indeed passed it to Winer, who also shared a copy with Steele.

  Steele had no idea who Blumenthal was and had trouble accepting Fusion’s warnings to him that anything the Clinton operative touched, no matter how legitimate, was destined to be branded as hopelessly partisan. Winer had explained to Steele the origin and chain of custody of the document. Even still, Steele believed the parallels to his own reporting to be potentially germane, especially since the information seemed to come from an entirely different source network.

  The FBI’s Gaeta had asked Steele to share anything he deemed potentially relevant. The Shearer memo qualified, in Steele’s mind. He provided a copy of the memo to the FBI at meetings in Rome on October 3, with a handwritten note on the front—scrawled in the back of a Roman taxi—explaining his understanding that the document had been written by Shearer and that he had no knowledge of its sourcing and couldn’t vouch for its veracity. Copies of the report and Steele’s note were dutifully recorded in the FBI’s file documenting its dealings with Steele.

  Steele’s Rome meeting, which took place in a secure facility, was attended by a phalanx of FBI agents, one of whom Steele already knew from the Litvinenko case. Burrows had been expected to attend but had other commitments, so Steele felt outnumbered and a bit under siege. The atmosphere was charged, the urgency now palpable. Steele and Burrows had always thought of their FBI relationship as cordial and contractual, but now Steele was being bombarded with intrusive questions and insistent requests for Orbis to gather more information on various subjects. “They were unusually demanding,” he told Simpson afterwards. Steele promised to do what he could. The assumption that emerged from the meeting was that after Trump lost the election and its contract with Fusion ended, Orbis would go back to working directly for the FBI.