Crime in Progress

by Glenn Simpson;Peter Fritsch;

  *  Another Alfa owner, German Khan, is the father-in-law of Alex van der Zwaan, a former Skadden Arps lawyer who pleaded guilty to lying to Mueller. Marshall Cohen, “Dutch Lawyer Who Pleaded Guilty in Mueller Probe Serving Sentence in Pennsylvania,” CNN Politics, May 9, 2018.

  Election Day dawned with a report from across the pond, via the not-always-reliable U.K. news stable of Rupert Murdoch. At 3:55 A.M., an insomnia-stricken Fritsch flagged a purported “World Exclusive” by a gossipy online site called Heat Street, claiming that the FBI had obtained a secret warrant under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to investigate the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia—an extraordinary claim, if true, because it meant the government had convinced a judge there was something there.

  The report’s author was an eccentric former Tory member of the U.K. Parliament named Louise Mensch, later to become notorious among journalists for her fevered but unconfirmable reports on Trump’s dealings with the Russians. The explosive FISA story made barely a ripple in the United States amid the crush of Election Day voting coverage.

  “It’s as if the Brits are the only people who believe this,” Berkowitz said.

  In any event, the national security threat posed by the Kremlin’s efforts to capture Trump would soon be academic, the Fusion team figured. No one was expecting a landslide for Clinton, but everyone thought she would win. In the office pool, predictions of her popular vote share ranged from 46.3 percent to 48.7 percent and from 287 to 341 electoral votes. No one picked Trump as the winner of either the popular vote or the Electoral College.

  As the polls began closing in the East that evening, a few friends gathered at Simpson’s house for what everyone expected would be a long evening watching the returns. Instead, most of the guests slunk off early as the bad news for Clinton began to build.

  Anxiety began to overrun an all-staff email chain. At 8:41 P.M. Simpson, fearing the worst, wrote, “Courage, folks. No matter the outcome we will do what we need to do.”

  Brave words, but mainly liquid courage. Six hours later, the Associated Press called the race for Trump.

  The Fusion team tried to sleep in, but the swamp creatures were up early the morning after. Trump’s victory was barely eight hours old when the city’s legions of opportunists began peppering inboxes to hail the victor—and, of course, pitch their services. “Sphere Consulting’s unparalleled stable of relationships and unique business model has been built for this day,” wrote one lobbyist locally famous for his aggressive billing practices. “The old prototypes of lobbying and media affairs are in the past….Now we are even better positioned to help our clients.”

  Business wasn’t really on anyone’s mind at Fusion. The team had just pulled hard on the oars for fourteen months straight and done its best to catalog and expose Trump’s unfitness for office. The feeling in the office was that Fusion had come up short. What if Fusion’s focus on the Russia story had had the perverse effect of diverting the attention of voters from the bread-and-butter issues they might have cared about more, the ones the team had originally targeted before Russia began its play to help Trump? Issues such as Trump’s promises to fix a broken immigration system he personally profited from; his business relationships with the very same foreign countries he blasted on the campaign trail for stealing American jobs; his history of business failures; his established record of lies and fabrications.

  Exhausted after more than a year of breakneck work, some employees felt despondent. Their efforts hadn’t echoed as loudly as they might have. Complicated information about covert Russian influence operations was just never going to penetrate the brains of an electorate ready to take a sledgehammer to the establishment.

  The Russian reaction to Trump’s victory, on the other hand, was euphoric. The state assembly, the Duma, burst into applause upon learning of his victory. Sergei Ryabkov, deputy foreign minister, told the Interfax news agency that Russia had been in regular contact with the Trump campaign. “We are doing this and have been doing this during the election campaign,” he said, adding that many of Trump’s people “have been staying in touch with Russian representatives.” Trump spokeswoman Hope Hicks claimed the Trump campaign had had “no contact with Russian officials.”

  At a company meeting that afternoon intended to boost morale, Simpson veered off-script and predicted darkness ahead. “We’re in for a pretty mean time,” he said. Fritsch said the incoming one-party government under a vindictive person like Trump might well seek to use its powers against its critics. Maybe no one would ever find out about Fusion’s work, but that seemed unlikely: Trump’s victory meant that questions about his ties to Russia would continue to fester, which would power Washington’s rumor mill. And thanks to the Free Beacon engagement, a number of Republican operatives who’d eventually gotten behind Trump were aware of Fusion’s early work on the issue.

  A pall hung over the office. Senior research analyst Jay Bagwell seemed to be taking the Trump victory particularly hard. A lawyer and former high school history teacher from Florida who had served as an army counterintelligence agent in Afghanistan, Bagwell had seen his share of horrors. He had spent years attempting to whittle his smoking habit down to just enough butts to keep the demons at bay. “Been through some rough spots in life, this is rougher than any,” Bagwell wrote to his colleagues of Trump’s victory. “Didn’t think this country could sink this low.”

  Most of the staff hadn’t seen Steele’s reports and had little or no knowledge of his work with the FBI. But the gestalt of the moment escaped no one: There was something deeply troubling and unexplained about Trump’s ties to Russia. Those worries were now no longer academic.

  The question for Fritsch and Simpson was what to do about it. They had long known that Fusion’s engagement with the Clinton campaign would end on Election Day. Whatever Fusion did next, it would be doing on its own.

  * * *

  —

  Though both of them would later remember this time as one of paralysis, uncertainty, and fear, Simpson and Fritsch began reaching out immediately to prominent fundraisers and philanthropists to gauge whether there would be any financial support to keep up the fight. Fritsch emailed one friend on the West Coast on November 10 to let him know Fusion would soon be passing the hat.

  “When we meet in person I will describe what we did over the past year and what we want to do next,” Fritsch wrote. “We are going to need a real budget from a solid group of donors who really love this country.” The early responses were encouraging.

  Simpson and Fritsch felt certain there was an active FBI investigation of the president-elect and thought they had a responsibility to now go beyond the steps they had taken before the election. The national security community and the public needed to understand their concerns about Trump’s possible compromise.

  That’s where Steele’s mind was, too.

  In its seven-year history, Orbis had twice stepped outside its role as private consultants to warn the government of a potential national security emergency. In 2014, it went to the German government with credible information indicating that ISIS was planting operatives among Syrian refugees headed to Western Europe. In 2015, Steele and Burrows helped a former MI6 officer in China make a discreet report to the U.K. government about an attempt by Chinese intelligence to recruit him.

  During the 2016 campaign, they decided to hold off on reporting their concerns about Trump and the Russians to the U.K. authorities. “The FBI was against our doing that,” Steele recalled. “We made the critical decision not to go to the U.K. government unless Trump was elected.”

  Steele and Burrows believed, however, that Trump’s election had profound implications for U.K. security and decided to alert British authorities. On November 15, Steele went to the Wimbledon home of Sir Charles Blandford Farr, chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, a cabinet-level position roughly equivalent to director of national intelligence
in the United States. Farr was himself a former spy who had served MI6 in Afghanistan in the 1980s and was friendly with Steele and Burrows. Steele gave Farr a summary of their findings.

  “He took our reporting extremely seriously,” Steele recalled. After the meeting, Farr wrote an executive summary of the reporting that, he told Steele, went in early December to Andrew Parker, head of MI5, Britain’s domestic security and counterintelligence agency, and to the wider cabinet.

  In Steele’s view, the U.K. government eventually concluded that the contents of the dossier constituted as much a political problem as a counterintelligence issue. The United States is London’s closest ally. The two countries stand together on nearly every issue of international significance. There was little chance the electoral outcome would be reversed. In that context, the political class came to the conclusion that it would be unwise to make a stink about Steele’s intelligence reporting with an incoming administration it would have to deal with for at least four years. That appeared to be that.

  What Steele didn’t know, however, was that concern about Russia’s influence on the incoming administration was building fast in Washington. Two days after the election, President Obama used a ninety-minute meeting with Trump to advise his successor against the appointment of Michael Flynn as his national security adviser, a warning reported only later, after Flynn’s extensive contacts with Russia’s U.S. ambassador became known.

  On November 18, Trump named Flynn to the post.

  * * *

  —

  That same day, some three hundred leading lights of the international security community arrived in Halifax, Nova Scotia, for a three-day annual conference. Among the attendees were Senator John McCain and Sir Andrew Wood, the former U.K. ambassador to Russia and mentor to Steele. During a break, Wood pulled aside McCain advisor David Kramer. Wood said he “was aware of information that he thought I should be aware of and that Senator McCain might be interested,” Kramer later recalled.

  The meeting wasn’t pure coincidence. Weeks earlier, Steele had taken Wood into his confidence about the information in the dossier and sought his opinion on whether he should take more aggressive action to alert authorities on both sides of the Atlantic. Prior to going to Halifax, Wood had stopped by Orbis’s offices in London and discussed the idea of approaching McCain.

  “You don’t have a choice. At least, you don’t have an honorable choice,” Wood told Steele, adding that he needed to loop in “the right sort of people.”

  McCain, a senior senator and a renowned Russia hawk, was the ideal messenger. As the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, he had the authority to call on the FBI director. He also had the respect of leaders in both parties and the clout to make bureaucrats jump. And he wasn’t afraid of contradicting his own party’s leadership if he felt strongly about something. Wood didn’t know him personally, however, so he decided to approach Kramer, who he knew was close to McCain.

  In Halifax, Wood told Kramer about the basic findings of the dossier and that the information came from Steele, a highly credible source. This was information McCain needed to hear right away, Kramer concluded. Later that afternoon, he and Wood briefed the senator in a small breakout room used for private meetings. Wood mentioned the possibility of a video showing the president-elect in a compromising situation in a Moscow hotel suite. “The senator listened very carefully. He didn’t really have much in the way of a reaction,” Kramer said. McCain then “turned to me and asked me if I would go to London to meet what turned out to be Mr. Steele.”

  McCain recalled the encounter in his book The Restless Wave: “Our impromptu meeting felt charged with a strange intensity. No one wise-cracked to lighten the mood. We spoke in lowered voices. The room was dimly lit, and the atmosphere was eerie.” Reassured by Wood that Steele was reliable, McCain concluded that “even a remote risk that the President of the United States might be vulnerable to Russian extortion had to be investigated.”

  Fusion didn’t learn of this meeting until days after it occurred.

  The Sunday after Thanksgiving, Kramer took an overnight flight from Washington to London, using his own frequent-flier miles. He gave Wood his cellphone number and boarded the flight, knowing only that he would be met upon his arrival at Heathrow. Once on the ground, he received a text message from Steele instructing him to look for a man in a blue coat holding a copy of the Financial Times (a bit hokey, perhaps, but sometimes life imitates pulp fiction). Kramer located Steele outside customs. Steele then drove Kramer to his home in Farnham, about thirty miles southwest of Heathrow.

  Once they had settled in the living room, Steele handed Kramer the memos Orbis had produced to date and explained that they were field intelligence collected for a private client he did not name. The sources had proven extremely reliable in the past, and their information had checked out. “He explained again that the information he gathered was what he found, not what he thought the client might want,” Kramer later said. “He stressed that point to me several times.”

  Steele explained his sourcing and provided Kramer with sufficient background information to explain how each person was in a position to know what they knew. Simpson and Fritsch had been similarly briefed during the election; the detail about the quality of the sources significantly increased the credibility of the reporting in their minds. Steele declined to give Kramer a copy of the memos; he worried that Kramer might be searched upon reentering the United States. He also hadn’t had a chance to confer with Fusion.

  Steele told Kramer that he had shared his information with the FBI but that the relationship had soured, and that he understood Kramer might be in a position to get his reports to Senator McCain for the express purpose of asking FBI Director Comey what was going on. Kramer said that, yes, he represented McCain in an unofficial capacity and he believed he could do that.

  After they walked through the memos, Steele took Kramer to lunch and then back to Heathrow for a 4:20 P.M. United flight back to Washington. Steele said that, once Kramer was back in the United States, he could get him a copy of the reports from Simpson, who Steele said had hired him. Kramer had spent a total of about eight hours in the U.K.

  Once Kramer was airborne, Steele checked in with Simpson and told him of his hastily arranged rendezvous with Kramer. Was Kramer as close to McCain as he claimed, and could he be trusted with a copy of the dossier? Steele asked.

  “Yes,” Simpson replied. “I’ve known David for a long time….He’s legit.” He recounted the role Kramer had played as a confidential source for Wall Street Journal stories in 2007 and 2008 outing Oleg Deripaska’s visa problems and his Washington lobbying activities.

  “David loathes Putin and his oligarchs with a passion,” Simpson told Steele. “I’m not really sure what accounts for the virulence of his animosity, but it might be because he saw disturbing classified information about Deripaska and Putin when he was at State. In any event, we definitely do not need to worry about where he stands on the Russians.”

  Steele asked Simpson to provide a copy of the Steele memos to Kramer so that he could pass them along to McCain, who Kramer said had promised to raise them directly in a private meeting with Comey. Simpson agreed.

  * * *

  —

  The next day, November 29, Kramer made his way to the Fusion office in Dupont Circle for a 5 P.M. meeting with Simpson. Fritsch was out of town, so Simpson asked Berkowitz to join.

  It had already turned into another hair-raising day. That morning, Orbis sent over a fresh memo (it was continuing its work pro bono) relating some chatter out of Moscow concerning Trump’s recruitment of Mitt Romney to be his secretary of state. The choice struck many as odd, not just because Romney was a vocal critic of Trump but also because he had presciently stated in 2012 that Russia “is, without question, our number-one geopolitical foe….They fight every cause for the world’s worst actors.”

  Steele c
ontributed a disturbing new snippet:

  Speaking on November 29 2016, a senior official working at the Russian MFA reported that a rumour is currently circulating there that US President-elect TRUMP’s delay in appointing a new Secretary of State is the result of an intervention by President PUTIN/the Kremlin. The latter reportedly have asked that TRUMP appoint a Russia-friendly figure to this position, who was prepared to move quickly on lifting Ukraine-related sanctions and cooperation (“security”) in Syria.

  Steele had asked Simpson, who, he knew, planned to meet with Kramer later in the day, to pass along the latest memo, too. (Two weeks later, Trump abruptly decided to dump Romney in favor of oil executive Rex Tillerson, whom Putin had awarded the Russian Federation’s Order of Friendship in 2013.)

  Simpson and Kramer did a little catching up, then Simpson walked Kramer through Fusion’s research into Trump’s Russia ties. He also told Kramer, as Steele had, that there were indications the FBI had an active investigation of Trump and how it appeared the Bureau had deliberately thrown the Times off the scent in late October (as would later prove true). Maybe, he said, someone in the FBI was trying to suppress information about Trump’s relationship with the Kremlin.

  Those concerns, Simpson said, had been amplified by a story written by Trump’s nemesis Wayne Barrett in The Daily Beast just a few days before the election, disclosing the existence of a pro-Trump faction within the FBI that appeared to be working closely with longtime Trump ally Rudolph Giuliani. The report was quickly confirmed by both the Times and The Guardian, with one anonymous agent telling The Guardian that the FBI was “Trumpland,” while Hillary Clinton was “the antichrist personified to a large swath of FBI personnel.”*1

  Simpson and Kramer then recalled Russia’s covert attempts to cultivate influence in Washington since the mid-2000s, along with Kremlin efforts to cozy up to some of the sleazier and more powerful members of the U.S. Congress. It appeared that the Russians had initially targeted the leading figures in both major political parties, Simpson said, adding that there were indications that the Russians also made efforts to influence Hillary Clinton and her advisers with suspicious business propositions and generous donations to the Clinton Foundation.