The Inside Story of Christopher Steele's Trump Dossier
By Jane Mayer, The New Yorker
27 November 19
In a new book, the founders of the firm that compiled it defend their work.
For nearly three years, President Trump has spun an alternate reality in
which he was not helped and tainted by Russia during the 2016 Presidential
campaign but, rather, his political opponents and his accusers were. During
a rambling fifty-three-minute live phone interview with "Fox & Friends" on
Friday, Trump insisted again that the plot to block his election and bring
him down once he was installed in the White House was "perhaps the biggest
scandal in the history of our country."
On Tuesday, two of the President's most prolific accusers plan to disrupt
the narrative by telling their own story. Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch,
the co-founders of the Washington-based private-investigative firm Fusion
GPS, which has mined deep veins of muck on Trump for years, at the behest of
his various political enemies, will try to throw the book at Trump with the
publication of "Crime in Progress: Inside the Steele Dossier and the Fusion
GPS Investigation of Donald Trump."
Fusion was the firm that hired the former British spy Christopher Steele to
research Trump's ties to Russia during the 2016 campaign. After nearly three
years without a word from Steele, while the so-called pee tape and his other
sensational findings sparked furious controversy, the former M.I.6 spy
speaks directly and on the record about his own part for the first time in
the book, an advance copy of which was given to The New Yorker.
Whether Simpson and Fritsch's score-settling, tell-all account will change
any minds remains to be seen, but they present a mountain of evidence that
Trump's dealings with corrupt foreign players-particularly those from the
former Soviet Union-are both real and go back decades. Steele's dossier has
been debated, denounced, derided, and occasionally defended almost since the
moment it was first published, in January, 2017, by BuzzFeed News, against
Steele's wishes. Although Carl Bernstein helped to break the news of its
existence on CNN, his friend and Watergate-reporting partner Bob Woodward
dismissed it almost instantly as "garbage." During impeachment-hearing
testimony last week, the former White House national-security adviser Fiona
Hill, one of America's foremost experts on Russia and a professional
acquaintance of Steele's, described the dossier as "a rabbit hole" and
suggested that Steele may have been "played." But the authors defend
Steele's work, and their own, arguing that it has proved "strikingly right."
As the authors tell it, they became obsessed with Trump almost accidentally.
Their involvement in his campaign began as a business proposition. In the
past, they had worked mostly for corporate clients, but in 2012 they had
also done some political-opposition research on the Republican Presidential
nominee, Mitt Romney. (They declined to disclose their client.) So, in 2015,
as Trump gained momentum, but before he clinched the nomination, Simpson and
Fritsch again decided to look for political work. After firing off a quick
e-mail to a big conservative donor they knew who disliked Trump, they were
hired. They don't identify that donor but note, helpfully, that he arranged
for them to contract their opposition-research assignment through the
Washington Free Beacon, a conservative Web site known to be funded by Paul
Singer, a New York hedge-fund magnate. Once Trump secured the nomination,
however, the G.O.P. donor fled.
At that point, Fusion switched clients and political parties, pitching its
services to Marc Elias, the lawyer for the D.N.C. and Hillary Clinton's
Presidential campaign. Clinton's identity, too, was kept hidden, in this
case behind the screen of Elias's law firm, Perkins Coie. In the beginning,
Clinton's identity was also hidden from Steele, who knew only that Fusion
was hiring him in the late spring of 2016, as a contractor, to investigate
the tangled web of Trump's ties to Russia for an unknown patron. Contrary to
the conspiracy theories that the right later spread, Simpson and Fritsch
write that they never met or spoke with Clinton. "As far as Fusion knew,
Clinton herself had no idea who they were. To this day, no one in the
company has ever met or spoken to her," the book reads. As I reported,
although Steele went to the F.B.I. with his findings out of a sense of duty
and, by the late summer of 2016, knew that the F.B.I. was seriously
investigating Trump's Russian ties, the communication channels were so
siloed that the Clinton campaign was unaware of these facts. Far from
conspiring in a plot, the Clinton team had no hard evidence that the F.B.I.
was investigating its opponent, even as its own opposition researcher was
feeding dirt to the F.B.I. As one top Clinton campaign official told me when
I wrote about Steele, "If I'd known the F.B.I. was investigating Trump, I
would have been shouting it from the rooftops!"
Recent news reports have suggested that Michael Horowitz, the Justice
Department's Inspector General, in a forthcoming report, will also knock
down some of the conspiracy theories surrounding Steele, including the false
claim that his dossier prompted the F.B.I. to investigate Trump. F.B.I.
officials have repeatedly said that their investigation was already under
way when Steele tried to alert them. But Horowitz's assessment, which is
expected to be released publicly on December 9th, also reportedly includes
some criticism of Steele, and of the F.B.I.'s relationship with him.
According to the Fusion GPS founders, the real story of their role in the
Trump investigation was filled with missed cues and human foibles. They
portray themselves as hardened gumshoes who became concerned and tried to do
their civic duty and report "a crime in progress," which has been spun by
their detractors into a conspiracy.
Early on, Fusion's probe of Trump was given a huge boost by Wayne Barrett,
an investigative reporter for the Village Voice. Barrett, who was suffering
from a terminal illness, bequeathed his voluminous files on Trump to the
firm. His findings opened up Trump's past dealings, including tax and
bankruptcy problems, potential ties to organized crime, and numerous legal
entanglements. They also revealed that Trump had an unusually high number of
connections to Russians with questionable backgrounds. As his son Don, Jr.,
boasted in 2008, Russians "make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section
of a lot of our assets." (Trump denied having any business ties to Russia
during his campaign, but, later, his former lawyer Michael Cohen admitted
that Trump's associates were trying to negotiate a deal for him in Moscow at
the time. The business angle was one of the subjects on which Steele's
dossier was prescient.)
The more the Fusion team learned, the more alarmed it grew. By the spring of
2016, Simpson and Fritsch write, they were no longer just in it for the
money. They were convinced they needed "to do what they could to keep Trump
out of the White House."
It was at this point that they turned to Steele, a former spy who had left
his position as the head of M.I.6's Russia desk to co-found Orbis, a
private-investigation firm in London, and whom they had known and trusted
from previous engagements. Coincidentally, Simpson and Fritsch disclose
that, just weeks before they tapped Steele, he had reached out to them
regarding a different investigation. As I wrote in my Profile of Steele, he
was working on behalf of the Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska. Simpson and
Fritsch fill out this picture further. Deripaska, a hugely rich associate of
Putin with a clouded reputation, had hired an American law firm, which had,
in turn, hired Steele, to help them track down millions of dollars that the
oligarch believed had been stolen from him by Paul Manafort, a former
business associate of Deripaska who was about to become the manager of
Trump's Presidential campaign. So, from the start, Fusion, Steele, Russia,
and Trumpworld were on a collision course.
Initially, Steele expected his work with Fusion to be a brief engagement.
But his network of Russian sources turned up shocking information. Steele's
first report found that Russia had tried to cultivate Trump by dangling
business ventures and had been accumulating blackmail material, including
what later came to be known as the pee tape-ostensibly a recording showing
prostitutes entertaining Trump by urinating on a hotel bed, at the Moscow
Ritz-Carlton, in which the Obamas had previously slept. Following Steele's
first report, he and Fusion went back for what eventually became sixteen
more, the sum of which collectively became known as Steele's "dossier,"
perhaps the most controversial opposition research ever to emerge from a
Presidential campaign.
Despite the fact that the fabled pee tape has never surfaced and Trump
immediately denied its existence, Simpson and Fritsch write that Steele
remains confident that his reports are neither a fabrication nor the "hoax"
of Trump's denunciations. Trump's defenders have claimed that Steele fell
prey to Russian disinformation, and, therefore, it is he, not Trump, who has
been a useful idiot for the Russians. But Steele tells the authors, "These
people simply have no idea what they're talking about." He emphasizes that
his network of sources "is tried and tested" and has "been proven up in many
other matters." He adds, "I've spent my entire adult life working with
Russian disinformation. It's an incredibly complex subject that is at the
very core of my training and my professional mission."
Steele points out that the most critical criteria for judging disinformation
is "whether there is a palpable motive for spreading it"; the ultimate
Russian goal in 2016, he argues, "was to prevent Hillary Clinton from
becoming president, and therefore, the idea that they would intentionally
spread embarrassing information about Trump-true or not-is not logical."
Steele, according to Simpson and Fritsch, is equally dismissive of those who
claim that the Russians spread disinformation in order to discredit him.
"The stakes were far, far too high for them to trifle with settling scores
with me or any other civilian," he said. "Damaging my reputation was simply
not on their list of priorities. But helping Trump, and damaging Hillary was
at the very top of it. No one denies that anymore."
Simpson and Fritsch acknowledge that several of Steele's most sensational
allegations remain unproven and that others were almost surely wrong, such
as his sources' claim that the Trump fixer Michael Cohen went to Prague
during the summer of 2016 to pay off the Democrats' e-mail hackers. But they
argue that Steele was substantially right, and prescient, to see and try to
warn America of Russia's efforts to subvert the 2016 election in Trump's
favor.
They write that "a spy whose sources get it 70 percent right is considered
to be one of the best," and that, while reporters focussed on the most
salacious details, they "tended to miss the central message," about which
they say Steele was largely correct. They note that, in his first report, in
June, 2016, Steele warned that Russian election meddling was "endorsed by
Putin" and "supported and directed" by him to "sow discord and disunity with
the United States itself but more especially within the Transatlantic
alliance"-six months before the U.S. intelligence community collectively
embraced the same conclusion. Steele also was right, they argue, that "Putin
wasn't merely seeking to create a crisis of confidence in democratic
elections. He was actively pulling strings to destroy Hillary Clinton and
elect Donald Trump," an assessment the U.S. intelligence community also came
to accept. And they note that, as of September, 2019, U.S. officials
confirmed that the C.I.A. had "a human source inside the Russian government
during the campaign, who provided information that dovetailed with Steele's
reporting about Russia's objective of electing Trump and Putin's direct
involvement in the operation."
Critics will likely take issue with this, as well as with some of the
authors' others claims, including their contention that others bear the
brunt of the responsibility for the confidential dossier leaking, not them.
Fusion GPS briefed scores of journalists on the dossier, including The New
Yorker. Unable to confirm its contents, most, including me, chose not to
write about it. But, just prior to the election, David Corn, Mother Jones'
Washington bureau chief, became the first to disclose its existence and,
with Fusion's help, to get a background interview with Steele. The Fusion
team also gave an off-the-record briefing on the dossier to Ken Bensinger,
the BuzzFeed News reporter who soon after obtained and published the first
copy from another source.
Both Fritsch and Simpson were investigative reporters at the Wall Street
Journal, and their skill at ferreting out juicy secrets from public records,
particularly in difficult-to-navigate foreign countries, including Russia,
turned the private-research firm they founded in 2010 into what they
describe as "something of a public reading room" for journalists seeking
dirt on Trump's circle. In fact, it becomes evident that in the past few
years they have thrown nearly as much chum to the media as the keepers have
to the seals at the National Zoo, up the street from their Dupont Circle
offices.
Their role as purveyors of anti-Trump tips, they reveal, did not end with
Trump's election. By then, they were so deeply convinced of the danger they
thought Trump and Russia posed to democracy at home and abroad that they
kept their band together and formed an independent nonprofit group devoted
to providing further research to the media on the threat. To helm the
nonprofit, the Democracy Integrity Project, they turned to Daniel Jones, a
former aide to the Senate Intelligence Committee who has recently gained
fame from the film "The Report," in which Adam Driver plays Jones as he
struggles to bust the C.I.A.'s torture program. The Fusion and Orbis teams
have joined Jones in the real-life sequel, in which they have been roaming
the world, researching threats to democracy and alerting the media whenever
they can.
All of this helps to explain Trump's fixation on Steele, whose work he
denounced yet again, in his phone interview with Fox on Friday, as "the
phony, fake dossier, the disgusting fake dossier." Republicans in Congress,
too, continue to be obsessed with Steele. Last week, in the midst of his
opening remarks in the congressional impeachment hearings, the House
Intelligence Committee's ranking Republican, Devin Nunes, Republican of
California, went off on a tangent that was almost unintelligible to anyone
not steeped in Trumpworld's alternative narrative, claiming that Democrats
"got caught defending the false allegations of the Steele dossier, which was
paid for by them." And Republicans in Congress have dragged Simpson in to
testify multiple times, as well as subpoenaed his firm's bank records and
caused him and his partners to fear financial ruin.
Some readers of "Crime in Progress" may begin to wonder if the special
counsel Robert Mueller didn't miss the mark. The authors praise Mueller for
documenting more than a hundred and forty suspicious contacts between
Trump's campaign and Russians, and for criminally indicting thirty-four
individuals, including six in Trump's inner circle and a dozen Russian
agents behind the hack of the Democrats' e-mails and thirteen individuals
and three companies tied to Russia's Internet Research Agency. But they
criticize Mueller's probe for failing to heed the main lesson of Watergate:
to "follow the money." Simpson and Fritsch note that "there is no indication
in his report that the investigation looked at Trump's taxes, his
outstanding debts, his curious relationship with Deutsche Bank, or his long
history of financing real estate projects with foreign cash of unknown
origin-precisely the places where Russian influence efforts were most likely
to surface."
By now, most of the public attention has moved on from Trump's Russian
entanglements to those next door, in neighboring Ukraine. By getting their
version of events out to the public, in advance of that of the Justice
Department, the authors have performed a neat bit of publishing jujitsu. But
the truth about Trumpworld is that no form of journalism is quite fast
enough to keep up with every new development, because there is always
another potential "crime in progress."
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