Fusion had now furnished Congress with twenty-one hours of testimony and numerous investigative leads. Simpson and Fritsch knew the Republicans had little intention of chasing those leads. That would have to fall to Mueller’s team, whose actions remained a complete mystery to Fusion, because no one there had ever reached out to them. Mueller’s prosecutors had interviewed Steele over the summer, but Simpson and Fritsch didn’t know what was said, and Steele was advised by his lawyers not to tell them. On one hand, it made sense that a politically charged inquiry already under Republican attack for supposed anti-Trump bias avoided Fusion. On the other, the Fusion partners were eager to share what they had learned from more than two years of Trump research. For that, they would have to content themselves with working with media contacts and Dan Jones’s nonprofit.
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In one of Fusion’s most sprawling projects, it had been working for months with Reuters, NBC News, and the London-based NGO Global Witness to peel the onion of the Trump Ocean Club International Hotel and Tower, in Panama, the first international hotel venture launched under the Trump brand. The three organizations published the fruits of that investigation on November 17.
The core discovery in this consortium effort, at least for Fusion, was a long list of Trump condo buyers that investigators, deployed by Fusion, found in Panama real estate records. While many of the buyers were anonymous shell companies, it turned out to be possible to identify the people behind them by painstakingly cross-referencing the condo records with other records in Panama and other countries. The result was a rogues’ gallery of international criminals, including a cell of Ukrainian and Russian gangsters from Toronto. The records also suggested Trump benefited from a scheme that resembled what happened with Bayrock and the Trump SoHo: A collection of fraudsters and money launderers were in the first wave of investors, putting up cash for what are known as “pre-sales.” Using this sales data, the project was then promoted to ordinary American retirees, many of whom would end up stuck with lousy investments when the project (predictably) ran into financial trouble.
Panama is a steamy entrepôt famous for money launderers and scoundrels—and the characters in Trump’s Panama project were cast to type. The sale of condos in the project fell to a Brazilian named Alexandre Ventura Nogueira, who partnered with a Colombian later convicted in the United States of money laundering in an unrelated case. Interviewed by NBC, Nogueira said he had sold a lot of Trump condos to Russians, including some tied to organized crime, but found out too late to do anything about it.
A Panamanian prosecutor who investigated the project described the Trump Tower to NBC News as “a vehicle for money laundering.”
Nogueira would later be arrested by Panamanian authorities on charges of fraud and forgery unrelated to the Trump project. He jumped bail and fled to Brazil, where authorities were also investigating him for money laundering. He later fled Brazil and spent years on the run.
The Trumps disclaimed any recollection of dealing with Nogueira (despite the existence of photos of him with both Trump and daughter Ivanka) and said they were, as usual, just licensing their name. In 2018, amid the project’s spiraling financial problems, Trump’s name was scraped from the building; it is now a JW Marriott hotel. In June 2019, the private equity fund that bought the property accused the Trump Organization, in a lawsuit filed in Manhattan, of evading Panamanian taxes on project management fees. The Trump Organization denied the charges and countersued.
Days after the Trump-Panama stories ran, the Trump Organization agreed to remove its name from the failed Trump SoHo in New York and surrender management of the property—the latest signs that the president of the United States was either a sensationally reckless and incompetent real estate developer or a serial fraudster—or possibly both. The Panama story generated extensive follow-up coverage but did nothing to diminish Trump in the eyes of his followers.
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On December 1, Trump’s former national security adviser, Michael Flynn, pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his conversations during the presidential transition with Russian ambassador Kislyak. This was a direct hit to the administration, representing the first time a top Trump official had agreed to cooperate with the Mueller probe. What Trump himself knew about those contacts wasn’t clear, but the Times reported that there was some sort of discussion of paring back U.S. sanctions on Russia.
None of this, of course, mattered to congressional Republicans. Trump himself cued his old standby, “Crooked Hillary Clinton.” Okay, so Flynn lied. But Hillary lies more, went the presidential logic.
Nunes and company soon responded with more leaks designed to deflect the attention of Fox News viewers away from Flynn and back toward Fusion and the deep state. Jake Gibson, a Fox News producer, emailed Fusion late on the afternoon of December 11: “We have independently confirmed that Nellie Ohr worked for Fusion through the summer and fall of 2016”—information that could only have come from confidential records provided by Fusion to the House Intelligence Committee under subpoena and subject to a judicially ordered seal. The story published shortly thereafter said the information had indeed come from Nunes’s committee.
The story was a follow-up to Gibson’s “scoop” the previous week that Nellie’s husband, Bruce, had been “demoted” within the DOJ over his contacts with Fusion in 2016, another handout from Nunes. The MAGA crowd on the Internet had a field day with that one and began circulating fevered conspiracy theories about the Ohrs. Within days, dozens of obscure websites with names like Thunder on the Right, American Thinker, and Liberty Unyielding had latched on to Nellie’s publicly available May 2016 application for an amateur ham radio license as proof of the machinations of the Ohrs.
Aha! How better to communicate with Steele and those Russian handlers. This was up there with the D.C. pizza house that sat atop a secret Democratic child sex abuse dungeon.
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Throughout 2017, Fusion had held its tongue in the face of Republican lies and leaks. The partners had declined all press interviews and invitations to appear on television, both in deference to its confidentiality agreements with clients and as a strategic decision not to engage in tit for tat. The consensus was that it would be wise to say what the firm had to say only at a time and place of its own choosing.
The Fusion partners felt it was time to clear the air.
They decided a newspaper opinion piece was the way to go. Fritsch and Simpson had had their ups and downs with the Times over the past year, but its opinion pages still constituted some of the most valuable real estate in journalism.
They began drafting an op-ed piece for the Times decrying Congress’s investigations for the shams they were. Through the Christmas season, many drafts were circulated among the Fusion partners and their advisers, some of whom opposed the idea of going public. “Let’s not lead with the chin,” opined one. “This could get you another subpoena,” warned another.
The result ran under a joint Simpson and Fritsch byline on January 2, just as everyone was getting ready to head back to work after the long New Year’s weekend. Headlined “The Republicans’ Fake Investigations,” the piece was a fulsome defense of Fusion’s Trump work and a call for honest congressional inquiry into Russia’s efforts to help Trump become president. It ended with a plea for transparency. “The public still has much to learn about a man with the most troubling business past of any United States president. Congress should release transcripts of our firm’s testimony, so that the American people can learn the truth about our work and most important, what happened to our democracy.”
After a year under sustained fire, Fusion was on its front foot for a change.
* Patel would go on to earn derision as the author of a widely criticized “secret” Nunes report that accused FBI and Justice officials of bias against Trump. He now serves as senior dir
ector of the Counterterrorism Directorate on Trump’s National Security Council.
Fighting back felt good, very good.
The Times op-ed triggered a large wave of positive media coverage—as well as limp denials and denunciations from Republicans. “Herograms have temporarily replaced threats” in messages landing in Fusion’s general email account, Catan told the partners.
The uplift was short-lived.
Two days later, a federal judge rejected Fusion’s effort to block the House Intelligence Committee from obtaining more of its bank records. “Federal Judge Obliterates Fusion GPS’ Attempt to Hide Info from Investigators,” screamed one right-wing website. The next day, Grassley and his new wingman, Lindsey Graham, launched a counteroffensive against Fusion and Orbis, announcing they’d sent a letter to the Justice Department demanding a criminal investigation of Christopher Steele for supposedly lying to the FBI. The FBI was fully capable of referring for criminal prosecution any individual it believed had knowingly lied to or misled them. That had not happened. The Graham-Grassley referral was a transparent political stunt. On Friday, TD Bank dispatched a copy of Fusion’s account records to the House.
It made for a lousy, wintry weekend. Of all the accusations leveled against Orbis and Fusion in the year since the dossier became public, the accusation by Grassley and Graham against Steele was perhaps the most outrageous. Steele phoned Simpson and Fritsch, distraught by these developments.
“I have served my country loyally for twenty years and only did what I thought was right,” he told Simpson. “This is how I am thanked? These people have no shame.”
Fritsch and Simpson spent the weekend reassuring Steele and Burrows that this was just politics. The Justice Department and the FBI would be hard-pressed to pursue a criminal case against someone outside of the country, let alone a British citizen who’d helped them repeatedly and honestly. “At least I hope that’s still the case,” Simpson told Fritsch privately.
Fritsch’s and Simpson’s words were small consolation to Steele. The Grassley accusation was all over the U.K. press, and Steele thought no one there would appreciate the political context of it—especially since Grassley had lobbed the charge for maximum publicity while refusing to make public any specifics. What was it that Steele had lied about? Grassley wouldn’t say.
The unhappiness only deepened the following week when The New York Times published a less-than-flattering profile of Simpson, describing him as “brash, obsessive, occasionally paranoid, perhaps with cause.” That’s fair enough, they guessed, but the story also dredged up a tragic incident from Simpson’s high school years, one that had haunted him for years. After a night of drinking at Simpson’s house in the spring of 1982, a friend stumbled into the road and was killed by a car. Simpson’s mother was arrested and charged with allowing her son to throw a party with alcohol. (The charges were later dismissed.) The anecdote felt like a cheap shot, and it landed. Simpson and his mother had to relive the horrible episode all over again.
“Well, that was gratuitous,” Simpson told Fritsch. “Yeah,” he replied. “Really uncool.”
The wind then shifted again, this time for the better. A day after the Times story ran, Dianne Feinstein, the normally reserved Democratic senator from California, abruptly released the confidential transcript of Simpson’s testimony before the Judiciary Committee—just as Fritsch and Simpson had called for in their op-ed a week earlier. She had had enough of Republican spin. “The innuendo and misinformation circulating about the transcript are part of a deeply troubling effort to undermine the investigation into potential collusion and obstruction of justice,” she said.
For the first time, the press and the public now had a firsthand account of the long history of Orbis’s and Fusion’s investigations into Trump, and saw Simpson’s categorical denial that Fusion had played a role in setting up the notorious Trump Tower meeting.
After reading the transcript, Steele called Simpson. He’d worried for months that Simpson might have inadvertently said something in the interview that would give away the identities of his sources, and he was happy to see that hadn’t happened. Steele was also grateful for his defense of his reputation and professionalism but teased Simpson for labeling him “basically a Boy Scout.”
“That’s laying it on a bit thick, don’t you think?” he asked.
Trump was not pleased to see his narrative disrupted. “The fact that Sneaky Dianne Feinstein, who has on numerous occasions stated that collusion between Trump/Russia has not been found, would release testimony in such an underhanded and possibly illegal way, totally without authorization, is a disgrace,” he tweeted.
At Fusion, it felt like a possible turning point.
Democrats who seemed wary of defending Fusion suddenly found their voices and denounced their Republican colleagues for attacking the messengers. “They have pushed to discredit Steele. They have pushed to discredit Fusion,” Senator Richard Blumenthal said on the Senate floor. Republicans were well aware, he said, that the genesis of the FBI investigation of Trump was neither Orbis nor Fusion. “This has all been known for months, but the narrative about Fusion GPS and the FBI grinds on, unhinged from fact.”
The media now began observing what had seemed obvious to Fritsch and Simpson all along: If Fusion had so much to hide, why did Simpson sit for twenty-one hours and answer the Republicans’ questions? Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank faulted Grassley for “attempting to paint Simpson as a leftist contract killer” and noted Simpson’s journalistic history of tough stories about both Republicans and Democrats.
The Republican effort to paint the Trump-Russia scandal as a Democratic hoax was beginning to wear thin.
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Fusion’s researchers pored over the newly released Judiciary testimony, curious about the jousting between Simpson and the lawmakers. Grassley’s staff had refused to provide Fusion with a copy of the transcript. And while several staff members knew discrete parts of the Project Bangor story, Fritsch and Simpson shared information only on a need-to-know basis. Several researchers took turns doing dramatic readings of key exchanges.
In the middle of that exercise, a ripple of gasps and chuckles coursed through the office when up popped a news alert: Michael Cohen, the president’s pit bull personal lawyer, had filed a defamation lawsuit in U.S. federal court accusing Fusion and Simpson of spreading false allegations, via the dossier, about Cohen’s alleged interactions with various Russians. These reports had done “harm to his personal and professional reputation,” the suit claimed. Cohen wanted to defend his honor in a trial by jury. His complaint, along with another against BuzzFeed, was filed one day shy of a year after the website had published the dossier, barely beating the buzzer on the statute of limitations for defamation.
No one at Fusion relished another depleting wave of legal fees and the distraction of another court battle—the fourth in a year. But there was the potential for getting court-ordered access to Cohen, his records, his friends and associates—even potentially the president himself. “He’s going to lose this suit,” Fritsch said. “Yeah,” Catan replied, “but hopefully not before we get discovery.”
Fusion could easily draw up a long list of things they would like to extract from Cohen—his whereabouts during the summer of 2016, when Steele’s reporting placed him at a meeting with Russians in Prague; his passport and travel records; his emails; any recordings or notes of conversations with Trump or his campaign team. And that was even before delving into the reputational issues around Cohen’s colorful history as a mob lawyer and would-be casino operator.
Fusion, it turned out, knew a lot about Michael Cohen—more by then, probably, than any news or law enforcement organization. It was information they’d accumulated and dug up over many months, ever since Steele spotlighted Cohen as a central player in the Trump-Russia relationship in 2016. All that work established that no incoming p
resident in recent U.S. history had worked so closely with a person of such obvious ill repute. Cohen had been a bright-red warning signal flashing in plain sight. And yet no one paid him much mind until well after Election Day.
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Cohen had surfaced early in the Bangor assignment, but only peripherally. At first, he seemed to be merely another brash New Yorker and loyalist working for Trump. He was the guy who would call gossip columnists to slip them some scoop favorable to Trump, or political reporters to scream about a story the boss didn’t like. Oddly, he was also the person who fielded reporters’ questions about Russia. Political reporters knew that Cohen was central to Trump’s more recent forays into politics and had played a big role in his boss’s brief flirtation with running for president in 2012. Cohen had gained a certain viral fame in July 2015 when he was caught on tape threatening a Daily Beast reporter (“What I’m going to do to you is going to be fucking disgusting”) and insisting that Trump couldn’t legally have raped his former wife Ivana, because she was his spouse. It was vintage Cohen, and no surprise to any of the reporters who had crossed him in the past. But very few at that point considered him more than another colorful Trump lackey.
Fusion’s own interest in Cohen changed in September 2016, when the firm came across evidence suggesting that he had been a key link between Trump and various Russians of interest. Fusion noticed that Cohen had apparently served as the Trump Organization contact with the Belarusian émigré and suspicious Trump hanger-on Sergei Millian, who claimed to have partnered with the Trump Organization in making tens of millions of dollars in condo sales to Russians. Berkowitz found a message on Twitter from Cohen to Millian in August 2016 asking him if he’d seen Trump’s standing in the polls. And Cohen was friends with Felix Sater—going back to high school. A review of open-source records showed Cohen’s father-in-law was a Ukrainian émigré who owned New York taxi medallions and had once admitted to a felony money-laundering charge. Cohen’s brother had also married into a Ukrainian family and gotten Cohen into potential business deals in Ukraine shortly before he joined the Trump Organization.
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