Crime in Progress

by Glenn Simpson;Peter Fritsch;

  When the news broke, Steele immediately pelted Fritsch and Simpson with questions they couldn’t answer, most important, whether the FBI would be forced to give up Steele’s sources to Trump.

  Steele was so worried, he had trouble sleeping. At around 3:15 in the morning U.K. time, Steele sent Ohr a text: “B, obviously it’s chaotic with you over there right now but we should probably talk again over the next couple of days if you can. Do let me know what might work. Best.”

  They texted again at 7 P.M. the next day. “Very concerned about Comey’s firing—afraid they will be exposed,” Steele said, referring to his sources and adding that he’d also received a letter from the Senate Intelligence Committee seeking information about his dealings with the FBI. “Please let the FBI know,” Steele asked. Ohr sought to reassure him once again, which wasn’t easy.

  Ohr followed up again over the weekend and the following week. When they weren’t discussing Comey, Steele told Ohr about the broader investigations Orbis was now conducting on Russian interference in the elections in France, Germany, and the U.K. Asked if he’d be willing to share some of that information with U.S. officials, despite everything that had happened so far, Steele replied, “I would be inclined to do that. I need to check with my colleagues and my former employer. But I would like to do that.”

  * * *

  —

  Few bought Trump’s pretext that Comey had been fired for botching the Clinton email investigation. Grassley, however, was one of them. “The handling of the Clinton email investigation is a clear example of how Comey’s decisions have called into question the trust and political independence of the FBI,” Grassley said. Public trust in Comey, he continued, “has clearly been lost.”

  Trump wasted no time making Grassley and his fellow Republicans look foolish. The next day, in a meeting in the Oval Office with Russian ambassador Kislyak and Moscow’s foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, Trump blithely acknowledged firing Comey to disrupt the FBI’s Russia probe. “I faced great pressure because of Russia. That’s taken off,” Trump told the Russians. Details and photos from the meeting would trickle out nine days later—Russian state television network RT was the only media outlet in attendance. Comey was “crazy, a real nut job,” Trump told the Russians, boasting that he had just fired him the day before.

  It was an extraordinary breach. Here was the president of the United States, bragging to the Russians about having fired the head of the agency tasked with investigating his ties to the Russians. For Fusion, and many others, the president’s alarming statements offered yet more evidence that the Russians had a hold over Trump.

  Days later, Trump would repeat his boast in a nationally televised interview with NBC’s Lester Holt.

  Fritsch and Simpson understood those who made the argument that, in a sense, Comey had it coming. This was the guy, after all, whose FBI had torpedoed Clinton in the critical homestretch of the election and thrown journalists off the scent of the Russia probe in that ill-fated Halloween story in The New York Times. He was self-aggrandizing and sanctimonious. But the White House’s attempt to use Comey’s fumbling of the Clinton email controversy as a pretext for firing him was too rich. Far more likely was that Trump had learned that a federal grand jury had just issued subpoenas regarding Michael Flynn.

  “He decided that letting Comey proceed was worse than weathering the fallout from firing him,” Catan said to Fritsch.

  The Republicans seemed to see no problem in Trump’s rash move to sack Comey, who was, after all, a fellow Republican. Grassley captured the prevailing sentiment on the right when he appeared on Fox & Friends and instructed Trump’s critics to “suck it up and move on.”

  If Trump thought he’d settled the Russia matter once and for all, he was sorely mistaken. On May 17, 2017, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who had written a memo for the White House that gave Trump the legal cover to fire Comey, issued Order No. 3915-2017, appointing a special counsel “to investigate Russian interference with the 2016 election and related matters.” Rosenstein was acting to restore public confidence in the Justice Department’s Russia probe, though it seemed obvious that he was also reacting to Trump’s firing of Comey. The one-page order even made reference to the FBI probe of links between Russia and the Trump campaign that Comey had publicly confirmed.

  Leading the investigation would be former FBI Director Robert Mueller, a stern, stone-jawed Republican widely respected for his independence and rigorous investigative capabilities.

  The Mueller appointment was a huge relief to Fusion. Trump’s sacking of Comey had backfired, and badly. Rosenstein’s order was broad and seemed to give Mueller the latitude to explore whatever he saw fit. At the same time, Simpson and Fritsch feared there would now be an even more ferocious effort by Republicans to undermine the foundation of the Mueller probe by arguing that the investigation had begun under false pretenses—that Trump was set up by Steele, Fusion, and the Democrats.

  * * *

  —

  On June 7, Grassley sent Fusion a new broadside complaining that Levy had failed to adequately explain why its research on Trump in 2016 was confidential and protected by privilege. He gave Fusion a week to cough up documents and defend the legal grounds for withholding material. Otherwise, he threatened, the committee could seek to compel testimony by subpoena.

  To be sure, this was some serious saber-rattling, but it seemed unlikely that Grassley would be able to get the ranking Democrat on the committee, Dianne Feinstein, to agree to a subpoena, as required by Senate rules. That seemed especially true in the context of the moment. The same day Grassley sent his letter, former director of national intelligence James Clapper said the Watergate scandal “pales” in comparison with the alleged links between Russia and the Trump campaign.

  The following morning, James Comey walked into a hearing of the Senate Intelligence Committee and took a seat alone before a phalanx of news and television cameras seated below a bank of senators. The nation was riveted over the next two and a half hours as Comey tore into the president, who was watching at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue. Comey said there was “no doubt” Russia had hacked the DNC and attacked Trump for a lack of moral fiber, saying Trump had told “lies, plain and simple,” about the reason for his firing the previous month. Trump, he said, had fired him to derail the Russia investigation, clearly implying the president had obstructed justice.

  White House spokesperson Sarah Huckabee Sanders later responded: “I can definitively say the president is not a liar.”

  Comey’s testimony was devastating. The former FBI director had notes of his interactions with Trump and was happy to share them with Mueller. Whatever the truth of Trump’s dealings with Russia, Comey’s testimony made clear that the president was desperate to cover it up. A week later, Trump himself let slip in one of his impetuous tweets that he was under investigation for the firing of Comey, a hint that the Justice Department could be pursuing an obstruction of justice case against a sitting president. This was Watergate territory.

  * * *

  —

  Mueller’s team quickly assembled some of the most aggressive criminal prosecutors in the country, drawing from the Justice Department and top law firms like WilmerHale. Lawyers for Trump and Kushner began scouring email and other records for anything that might hurt their clients. If there was something bad there, the lawyers didn’t want to learn about it in an indictment.

  It didn’t take them long to come across a June 3, 2016, email from British publicist and music promoter Rob Goldstone to Donald Trump Jr., purporting to have some hot information from his client Emin Agalarov, a Russian pop star and friend of the Trumps. The Agalarovs were close to Putin. They had teamed up with Trump to put on the Miss Universe pageant in Moscow in 2013; Trump had even made a cameo in one of Emin’s music videos.

  “The Crown prosecutor of Russia,” Goldstone wrote to Don Jr., “offered t
o provide the Trump campaign with some official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia and would be very useful to your father.” Would Don Jr. and the campaign be willing to meet with these Russian representatives?

  The offer prompted the now famous response from Don Jr.: “If it’s what you say I love it especially later in the summer.”

  Goldstone’s offer amounted to an official government overture offering its support to damage a U.S. presidential candidate. That didn’t bother Don Jr.; he was all in. He, Manafort, and Kushner were ready to meet with “the Russian government attorney who is flying over from Moscow,” even in the midst of a heated presidential campaign. A meeting was set for six days later.

  The Goldstone emails, certain to come out one way or the other, made their way to reporters at The New York Times in what appeared to be a leak from the Trump camp in an effort to get out in front of and try to spin another damaging story about Trump’s ties to Russia.

  When news of that June 9 gathering broke in the Times, it sent shockwaves through official Washington and across the country. Here, for the first time, was ostensible evidence of Russian outreach to the highest levels of the Trump campaign, offering material that would damage Trump’s opponent. And Trump’s own son had gleefully said yes. It would immediately become known as “the Trump Tower meeting.”

  But there was a bizarre plot twist to the story—one that would pose enormous problems for Fusion.

  *  During Obama’s second term, Foster ran an investigation—done in conjunction with Representative Darrell Issa’s staff in the House—of the so-called Fast and Furious program, in which ATF officials lost track of some two thousand guns that ended up in the hands of a Mexican drug cartel. ProPublica said Foster’s probe was “marred by leaks of sensitive law enforcement information and allegations of partisan mischief directed at both Grassley and Issa. The probe seemed to generate outlandish accusations [against the Obama administration] unsubstantiated by evidence but aired publicly.”

  It was a turn of events almost impossible to believe.

  The delegation that appeared that day to sit with the Trump campaign brain trust was led by none other than Natalia Veselnitskaya, the lawyer for the Russian company, Prevezon, that Fusion had worked for indirectly in an unrelated court case. Suddenly she was at the epicenter of a mushrooming political scandal.

  Veselnitskaya had somehow obtained a meeting with the top command of the Trump campaign in the middle of the 2016 race—at the same time that Fusion was working for Trump’s opponent. For the Trump camp, it all made perfect sense. Here was Fusion working with dark unseen forces, to set Trump up, covering their tracks with the help of a buffoonish English publicist.

  When the Times story on the Trump Tower meeting broke on July 8, 2017, identifying Veselnitskaya as “a Russian lawyer who has connections to the Kremlin,” no one at Fusion knew quite what to make of it. Patrick Corcoran, the firm’s director of research, polled the rest of the group.

  “This is the same Veselnitskaya?” he asked, holding out hope there might be other Russian lawyers by that name.

  “Pretty amazing,” Simpson replied. “I mean, who knew?”

  Within Fusion, the meeting marked a shocking overlap of events, one of those truly hard to fathom coincidences. The partners quickly recognized that to outside observers, this was all just more fuel for the conspiracy theories. Surely Fusion had engineered the encounter on behalf of its Democratic clients to taint the Trump campaign with connections to the Kremlin. The White House now had a story line to counter all the revelations about Flynn, Sessions, secret back channels, and undisclosed contacts with Russians.

  Hours after the initial Times story posted, Trump’s legal team produced a handy explanation: It was all Fusion’s fault. While the exact identity of Fusion’s Democratic clients was still a secret, it had been widely reported that the firm had taken on an unnamed Democratic sponsor after Trump secured the nomination.

  “We have learned that the person who sought the meeting is associated with Fusion GPS, a firm which, according to public reports, was retained by Democratic operatives to develop opposition research on the President and which commissioned the phony Steele dossier,” said Trump legal team spokesman Mark Corallo. “These developments raise serious issues as to exactly who authorized and participated in any effort by Russian nationals to influence our election in any manner.”

  The statement landed on a Saturday night in July, prompting a flurry of calls and texts among the Fusion partners, most of whom were off on weekend getaways.

  “That statement is just silly more than anything,” Fritsch said. “Complete nonsense,” Simpson agreed. However, he added, they should probably clear the air. “The Sunday news programs will be all over this tomorrow morning, so we should probably have the lawyers issue a denial.”

  “It needs to be UN-lawyerly,” Catan came back. “Like: This makes no sense, or, What??”

  The problem was that, to a casual observer, it did look suspicious, and expressions of incredulity were not going to help.

  On reflection, the basic facts were incriminating, at least circumstantially. The Trump Tower meeting appeared to have taken place the same day Simpson was in New York to attend a federal appeals court hearing with his client Veselnitskaya. Even more bizarre, Veselnitskaya was sitting down with the Trump campaign at the very moment in early June 2016 when Steele was beginning his assignment for Fusion that would result in his collection of a stream of information about alleged Russian collusion with Trump. It was all going to be difficult to explain, even to rational observers.

  The truth was, Fusion did not know much about Veselnitskaya. Simpson had met her only a handful of times, sometimes only exchanging pleasantries. She was the Russian lawyer who’d hired the American lawyers for whom Fusion worked. Fusion mainly dealt with the Americans, and they were some of the firm’s oldest clients—serious professionals.

  Had the lawyers somehow missed something? Had Fusion? One or both of those interpretations now seemed possible. Veselnitskaya hadn’t come across as some Kremlin power broker, and there was no reason to suspect that she had the political juice to get a meeting with the leadership of the Trump campaign. On the other hand, it was known to Russia watchers that the Kremlin’s efforts to influence events in the West frequently involved Russian businessmen and other civilians with business in the West. Moreover, while the Prevezon case had started out as a dispute over some international banking transactions, it had evolved into a battle with Browder, Putin’s bête noire. It certainly seemed possible that once Prevezon had begun to raise serious questions about Browder’s financial machinations and unwillingness to testify in an American court, the Kremlin had taken an interest in the case.

  The bottom line was that Fusion’s role in the Prevezon case was more than a simple problem of optics. Simpson and Fritsch liked to think of themselves as savvy players, and yet here they were—apparently sucked into just the kind of Kremlin plot Steele reported had been going on for years.

  Simpson wondered whether the Trump Tower meeting was a “chicken feed” operation, in which an intelligence service makes a broad promise of bringing useful information to a potential asset (in this case, Don Jr.) with the goal of determining how receptive he’d be to a more substantial relationship. The actual information exchanged at such a “dangle” meeting would be real, albeit relatively unimportant—or chicken feed—but would give Russia a window into where it could apply additional pressure down the line. In this case, the meeting attracted Trump’s son, son-in-law, and campaign manager. That alone was valuable intelligence, and also potential blackmail material.

  If that theory was right, it meant Veselnitskaya was more than just some corporate lawyer bumbling through a boring civil forfeiture case. She was playing a game of chess on another level. Once they got past their incredulity, the thought made the Fusion par
tners sick.

  The truth about Fusion’s role was far from nefarious but no less comforting: The firm had helped some Russians accused of money laundering defend themselves in federal court, for all to see. It was a civil case, not a criminal one, and the whole thing had been resolved with an out-of-court settlement after it became obvious that the government’s evidence was shaky at best. Lawyers and investigators defend the accused every day; it is a role fundamental to the legal system. Steele liked to point out that Western courts are one of the only venues where Russians resolve their disputes without resorting to bribes or guns. In that sense, Fusion hadn’t done anything wrong. But that wouldn’t be obvious or matter to many people.

  The truth was that legal work had little resemblance to the public interest investigative journalism the Fusion partners had practiced for much of their careers, and from which they derived their own self-image as basically good guys doing good things. They’d left that world behind years ago.

  The media, prompted by Corallo’s statement, had begun hounding Fusion to respond the following Sunday morning, July 9. The partners issued a straightforward public denial. “Fusion GPS learned about this meeting from news reports and had no prior knowledge of it,” it read. “Any claim that Fusion GPS arranged or facilitated this meeting in any way is absolutely false.”

  Then Trump lent a hand, undercutting his own whitewash with a competing cover story issued while flying back across the Atlantic aboard Air Force One. In this version, which Trump himself dictated, the Trump Tower meeting was merely about reviving a bilateral program that enabled Americans to adopt Russian orphans. Fusion’s denial and Trump’s continued bumbling hastened the collapse of the White House cover story—at least in the mainstream media.