Crime in Progress

by Glenn Simpson;Peter Fritsch;

  The American media was now plunging wholeheartedly into the many strands of the Trump-Russia story. In the weeks after the dossier went public, Fusion’s inboxes were receiving queries from big-name broadcast and print journalists looking to truncate the reporting process with help from Fusion’s knowledge and archives. Many reporters were having trouble connecting the dots, or getting up to speed on the complex history of corruption in Russia and the many ties between the new generation of Putin oligarchs and political figures in the United States.

  Putting together reliable background information about all the players and allegations and launching a new round of research would require resources. No traditional political client would likely finance a sprawling investigation involving a sitting president, especially one run by Fusion and employing Steele. But what about creating a coalition of the willing—a group of contributors—to get behind what was no longer a campaign but an exercise in public education, in the public interest?

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  Fusion toyed with various proposals and iterations before settling on the idea of a nonprofit group that could work to investigate and expose Russia’s efforts to disrupt democratic institutions in the West and split the NATO alliance. The idea was a logical extension of Steele’s Project Charlemagne, which had looked at Russian electoral interference in Western Europe. The nonprofit would have to be nonpartisan and document its work rigorously.

  Fusion outlined the scope of the project as an extensive examination of foreign influence and espionage against the United States and its allies. The plan called for assembling an elite team of linguists, open-source researchers, and intelligence veterans—along with field operatives—to identify new sources and information. The investigations would look at the foreign travel and business dealings of key figures connected to Trump and inventory and analyze suspicious financing of the 2016 election.

  In some respects, it was also a survival plan. If some of their clients fled for fear of being unfairly dragged into a government investigation or political controversy, that would leave the firm with a lot of capacity to do something else. And Russian meddling in Western politics was a subject they knew a lot about already.

  Any new investigative nonprofit couldn’t be owned or controlled by Fusion, a for-profit entity that by now was inextricably (albeit wrongly) linked in the minds of many to the Democratic Party. As a public interest project, it would have to have an independent board and a separate governance structure able to accept money from donors of any ideological persuasion. The organization also needed a leader with impeccable credentials as an investigator and communicator. Most important, that person needed to be prepared for withering political fire: Anyone working with Fusion and Steele was bound to come in for sustained Republican—and Russian—attack.

  There weren’t many people in Washington who fit that bill. But in the weeks after the dossier exploded, Simpson began kicking the idea around with an acquaintance, a former Senate Intelligence Committee investigator named Daniel Jones. If anyone had the chutzpah to run a public interest investigation of foreign election interference and the dark history of a sitting president, it was Jones. A decade earlier, in the final year of the Bush administration, Jones had parlayed four years as an FBI counterterrorism analyst into a job on the staff of the Senate Intelligence Committee. He had been on the committee for barely a year when news broke that the CIA had destroyed videotapes depicting the brutal treatment of post-9/11 terror detainees. He led the ensuing committee investigation, a seven-year effort that brought him into regular and heated conflict with CIA officials eager to whitewash the Bush-era torture program. Over the course of the case, Jones found himself being spied on by the CIA and falsely accused of breaking the law. His quest to fully expose what had happened led to frequent tussles with the intelligence community and even the Obama White House.

  The Intelligence Committee ultimately completed a blistering 6,700-page account of the CIA’s horrific treatment of suspected jihadists that pulled no punches. The report won wide acclaim as a powerful indictment of practices that it said were “more brutal—and far less effective—than the agency acknowledged either to Bush administration officials or to the public.” Committee chairwoman Dianne Feinstein read a glowing tribute to Jones into the Congressional Record when he left the Senate staff about a year later, a rare honor that impressed Fritsch and Simpson.

  When Fusion reached out to Jones in early 2017, he was unfulfilled, if not unhappy, working as a consultant in the private sector. He missed working on projects he believed could make a difference. He also had good contacts in Washington, including senators on the Intelligence Committee, and experience working with the media, which had covered his committee work extensively over the years. Simpson reached out and asked if the two could meet in private.

  The two met in the conference room of Jones’s downtown office on the Sunday after the inauguration. Simpson told Jones the whole story, from Fusion’s initial assignment, in 2015, to the events of the final days of the campaign. Jones had worked on various Russia-related security issues at the Intelligence Committee. He agreed that the United States was as unprepared to counter the new Russian security threat as it had been to cope with al-Qaeda fifteen years before. Simpson raised the idea of setting up a new group that could work with Fusion and other investigators around the world to expose Russian subversion operations in the United States and other Western democracies. Jones said he thought it needed to be done—right away.

  The next morning, Simpson recounted the meeting to Fritsch.

  “Is he game?” asked Fritsch.

  “Two hundred percent,” Simpson replied.

  Nine days later, Jones incorporated a new nonprofit and named it The Democracy Integrity Project (soon known in-house as TDIP). The name was not intended to be flashy or to command attention. The first order of business: finding funders to pay for it. The endeavor—a more aggressive set of inquiries spanning numerous countries and requiring the services of Fusion, Orbis, and players to be named later—wouldn’t be cheap.

  Jones said he had some good leads on the West Coast, while Fusion had already received unsolicited inquiries from high-net-worth individuals and people who managed their political giving. “Glenn: Been thinking about you a LOT lately,” one old friend wrote to Simpson in January. A prominent political consultant out west, she continued, “has a benefactor looking to hire someone to do some digging.” Fritsch had received similar feelers from other possible donors, mostly Democrats.

  As it turned out, though, one of the first people to step forward with financial support was a wealthy Republican investor from Arizona who wanted to explore whether it might be possible to buy a copy of any tapes the Russians had of Trump. It was a bad idea that would surface over and over, requiring Fusion to patiently explain that every scam artist on the planet would soon be selling fake Trump sex tapes. He was persuaded to support a more realistic plan.

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  In 1968, a small group of multimillionaires led by General Motors heir Stewart Mott changed the course of American history when they decided to muster some $1.5 million ($11 million in 2019 dollars) to support anti-war senator Eugene McCarthy’s quixotic bid to deny the Democratic presidential nomination to President Lyndon B. Johnson. McCarthy went on to shock Johnson in the New Hampshire primary, coming within seven points of beating the incumbent president. McCarthy soon faded, of course, but the intervention rattled Johnson, encouraged other competitors to run against him, and led the president to ditch his bid for re-election.

  The role of big money in the U.S. political system has changed profoundly since then. The wealthy and powerful have always held great sway over legislation, but their clout has grown dramatically since the 2010 Supreme Court decision on Citizens United opened the spigots for independent campaign expenditures by corporations and super PACs.

  Largess
e from the super-wealthy can also be a powerful tool for the public good, as seen in the boom in support for independent investigative journalism, for instance. It can fund tasks that government should do but can’t, or won’t.

  In that spirit, TDIP intended to tap the super-wealthy to fund work to protect the democratic system of government from a new and insidious assault. Over the next few months, TDIP embarked on a series of fundraising trips around the country—to Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Los Angeles. But it didn’t take Jones long to figure out that if you want to raise a lot of money in a hurry, the world’s most animated, unbureaucratic, and risk-loving billionaires reside largely within an hour of San Francisco.

  In mid-February, and then again in early March, Jones—supported by Fritsch and Simpson—took prospecting trips in the West. They didn’t know the tech community well, so before heading out, they sought some door openers and validators from the world they knew best.

  One of the most helpful turned out to be John Podesta, a former White House chief of staff who founded the Center for American Progress after his years in the Clinton administration. From his perch at CAP and a brief stint as a counselor to President Obama, Podesta had earned a reputation as hard-nosed and fearless. Podesta had not worked with Fusion during the campaign, but he respected its desire to finish what it had started. He was also, of course, one of the biggest victims of the Russian hacking operation. Podesta agreed to contact some friends out west on Jones’s behalf and told him to drop his name in talks with other potential supporters. It was a brave gesture: He could have easily chosen to stay out of it altogether, given the fact that he had served as Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager.

  Fusion’s first trips west in support of Jones were full of tension, small triumphs, and quirky encounters. These were people who guarded their privacy ferociously. Hushed discussions took place in the backs of restaurants, in hotel bars, in plush family offices, and in boardrooms with jaw-dropping views of Alcatraz and the Golden Gate Bridge.

  With the Trump era not yet a month old, the fear of where he might take the country hung palpably over session after session. A few potential donors, including some big names in the tech industry, begged off for reasons of personal safety. One centimillionaire, in black hoodie and sweatpants, said he’d been eyeing offshore outposts where he and his family might flee in a pinch. He pledged a generous donation that never came through.

  The sheer lack of red tape was astonishing. The beginning of the year had been nightmarish, but Fusion’s exposure did eliminate the need for more formal introductions and allowed the discussions to get right to business. Interest was high in talking to “the guys behind the dossier.” At a few sessions where two or three potential donors had been expected, a whole conference room showed up. There were also a lot of merely curious window-shoppers.

  Back east, where the money tends toward old and stodgy, one might spend days walking a persnickety board through a meticulous set of slides with itemized deliverables and monthly metrics. In San Francisco, many fortunes aren’t yet ten years old. One adviser to an Internet billionaire took no notes during a rushed encounter. He had already done his due diligence. “I think I know what I need to,” he said, before ending the meeting after half an hour. Days later, he approved a high-six-figure contribution. Other encounters could be highly frustrating. One young techie asked why he should invest in TDIP when Congress would surely act as a check on Trump.

  “Is that a serious question?” replied an exasperated Fritsch.

  Fundraising turned out to be a lot harder than Jones had expected, especially for a new nonprofit with no track record and no obligation to hire Fusion. At the end of the first trip, Fusion newcomer Neil King wrote up an after-action report that ascribed levels of confidence to the various sessions. One quick conclusion: The project would need to rely on people who “have an easy stomach for political risk.” Within weeks, some of the cases deemed long shots stepped up with significant commitments, while others that seemed surer tiptoed away.

  In the end, TDIP got started with the help of a small handful of donors from both sides of the political aisle. Keeping the circle small had the merit of intimacy and shared purpose, and the added benefit of minimizing the risk of leaks. Fusion and TDIP were eager to launch a fresh batch of research both in the United States and abroad and to disseminate their findings through established channels. But no one relished more publicity, which they all agreed would get in the way of doing the actual work.

  Among the biggest early donors was a self-made billionaire who, in addition to his concerns about Russia’s interference in American elections, believed that the president of the United States was basically the don of an organized crime family.

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  By the end of February, real money began flowing into TDIP’s bank account. As later reported in its public filings with the Internal Revenue Service, the group eventually raised a little over $7 million in 2017. It was time to get things rolling.

  On March 2, Jeff Sessions had just recused himself from the Russia inquiry, sending Trump into a fury. That evening, over dinner at Mar-a-Lago, the Times would later report, Trump begged Sessions to reverse that decision and reassume command over the investigation, a request Sessions turned down.

  Fusion now figured it was more obvious than ever that neither the Justice Department nor Congress was going to make a real effort to get to the bottom of Trump’s relationship with Russia, much less Moscow’s interference in the 2016 election. By design, TDIP was not a “get Trump” project. TDIP also needed to look at Russian efforts to disrupt America’s democratic allies. That would be a job for Steele and his network in Europe.

  Without the deadline of an election, but with a public interest mandate and better funding than Fusion had ever had, TDIP had the luxury to roam into underexplored areas while also opening up entirely new inquiries. It could bring on specialists: linguists, accountants, campaign finance nerds, Web-scraping data gurus. It could also go deep on some sprawling international projects, mapping who bought what, and when, in dubious Trump projects like the towers in Panama City and Toronto that bore his name. Fusion knew veteran investigators with experience in many of these locales.

  The advent of TDIP was a relief to Fusion’s partners, because the new structure meant that they were no longer running the show. Every project had to have board approval and a public education purpose, and former Fusion subcontractors like Orbis now reported to TDIP.

  Two days after Sessions’s recusal, Jones and the Fusion team convened on a Saturday afternoon at Fritsch’s house in Maryland to begin charting a research strategy going forward. Fritsch led the Project Bangor team to his basement. Using a big whiteboard Simpson had brought and fueled with fresh pots of coffee, they took turns scribbling down the investigative and research priorities for TDIP. Soon the board teemed with names, bullet points, and overlapping arrows and circles. Threads included Russia’s efforts to co-opt Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Moscow’s ties to the key financial backers of Brexit in the U.K., and Russian efforts to sow more chaos in Italy’s already chaotic politics.

  Berkowitz suggested that TDIP also look at Russian efforts to co-opt American technology and make inroads into Silicon Valley. The Russian government had made numerous major investments in U.S. tech, with several encroaching on matters of U.S. national security. The FBI had even warned tech companies in 2014 about the potential for infiltration and theft, but it seemed to have fallen on deaf ears. Maybe TDIP could highlight the issue.

  Within weeks, many of the priorities sketched out that morning were well under way. The effort would come to dwarf the original work done for the Clinton campaign, both in budget and scope.

  One of Jones’s top overseas priorities was the question of Russian interference in French politics. The French national elections in the spring of 2017 were hugely consequential for the U.S. alliance with NATO. Jones ta
pped Orbis and other sources in Europe to map Russia’s French relationships. Steele, who’d been stationed in Paris during his time in government, identified many likely Russian confederates working on the fringes and with the right-wing campaign of Marine Le Pen. The Kremlin was running its French influence operations through an NGO called the Institute for Democracy & Co-operation (IDC), a Russian-government-funded think tank in Paris that advocates for Putin’s warped Orwellian versions of “democracy” and “cooperation” and appeared to be a thinly veiled front for Russian intelligence.*

  Russian intelligence was using “plausibly deniable business oligarchs” to support Le Pen’s far-right National Front, Steele found.

  Across the English Channel, Steele and Fusion also began giving Britain’s vote to leave the European Union the thorough scrub it so clearly needed. The vote to depart the EU faced many of the same questions of outside meddling and dubious funding streams as Trump’s election, yet it was not getting much investigative attention. It was also populated with many of the same odd characters who had featured in the Trump campaign, from Steve Bannon and Robert Mercer to Cambridge Analytica.

  Using network-mapping software designed for intelligence agencies, Steele’s team compiled a chart that appeared to show strong links between the right-wing networks in France and the U.K.

  A TDIP inquiry that would pay huge dividends in terms of press coverage as events unfolded over the next year was an examination of the complex and highly questionable career of Michael Cohen, Trump’s trusted fixer and a person with a long and sketchy history in the New York and Chicago taxi industries. Fusion led that work, carried out in collaboration with various TDIP contractors in New York and elsewhere.