Glenn Simpson - Crime in Progress: Inside the Steele Dossier and the Fusion GPS Investigation of Donald Trump

The surest sign the dam was about to burst came in the form of an encrypted call, on the afternoon of January 4, 2017, from a number in the 646 area code. A New York cellphone. Glenn Simpson and his business partner at Fusion GPS, Peter Fritsch, had been getting their share of blind calls since Donald Trumps election.

The inauguration was just weeks away, and reporters from all the major media outlets were desperate to catch up on a story many had fumbled or simply ignored: how to explain the bizarre relationship between Trump and Russia.

By then, Simpson and Fritsch were deep into that story. Few outside of a small group of journalists and lawyers knew of their work during the campaign, but word had started seeping out after Trumps upset victory. Their Washington-based research firm had been digging into Trumps ties to criminal elements in the United States and Russia since September 2015. Month after month the project had grown in scope, starting with a review of his business record and expanding to a full excavation of his many dubious real estate projects, from Panama to Azerbaijan. Fusion worked with a global network of sources and subcontractors to examine Trumps dealings with an array of oligarchs and convicted criminals from the former Soviet Union as well as his decades of mysterious trips to Russia in pursuit of real estate deals that never got off the ground.

Fritsch swiped his phone to answer. Hello, Peter? a voice said. This is Carl Bernstein. The legendary former Washington Post Watergate reporter was now working with CNN. He had something urgent to discuss. Bernstein was polite and affable, far from the aggressive, take-no-prisoners reporter Fritsch imagined from All the Presidents Men.

After exchanging a few pleasantries, Bernstein said he wanted to discuss some information he came across that suggested Trump might be entangled with Russian president Vladimir Putin in ways virtually no one knew or even suspected. If true, Bernstein said, this was a situation as dire as Watergatemaybe more so. He was also eager to get to a former British spy working at a company based in London called Orbis. He asked if Fritsch could help put him in touch.

Fritsch, a former Wall Street Journal reporter and editor, fished a bit, trying to figure out how Bernstein had known to call Fusion. Hardly one to give up a source, Bernstein made vague reference to mutual friends. Im pretty sure what Im hearing is more than just rumor, he said.

Then he got to the point. He had heard some documents existed that painted an alarming portrait of the ways in which Russia may have compromised the incoming president. Could Fritsch help flesh out his understanding, off the record? Could he help him get in contact with the ex-spy who had produced the documents? Fritsch answered in general terms that, yes, Trumps relationship with Russia was important, but he begged off any deeper discussion. At least for now.

After hanging up, Fritsch called Simpson on an encrypted line. Simpson was wrapping up a year-end holiday in Mexico. Hey, I think we have a problem, Fritsch said. I think Carl Bernstein may have Chriss reports.

Chris was Christopher Steele, a former intelligence officer with Britains MI6 who once served in Moscow and went on to run the spy services Russia desk. A highly respected but low-profile Russia expert, Steele was about to become famous in ways he never expected. Ugh, Simpson said. Thats not good.

After delving into Trumps Russia dealings for nearly nine months, Fusion had hired Steele in May 2016 to supplement its research. By then, Fusion had many reasons to harbor suspicions about the Trump campaign. Months earlier, they had uncovered court filings in Virginia seeming to show that Trumps campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, owed tens of millions of dollars to Oleg Deripaska, a Russian oligarch who wanted his money back and had close ties to Putin. Simpson and Fritsch had also gotten wind of a closely guarded secret: The FBI suspected that the Russian government had hacked into the computer system of the Democratic National Committee. Fusion began to wonder if these events were related.

Steeles task was to tap his Russian source network to answer some nagging questions arising from the information on Trump that Fusion had already gathered: Why had Trump made so many trips to Russia over the years, without ever getting a single development project off the ground? Why did so many threads in the Trump story lead to Moscow and figures close to Putin? And why was Trump so smitten with Putin, who seemed fond of Trump in return?

Simpson had spent fifteen years in Washington and Europe as a Wall StreetJournal investigative reporter, focusing much of his work on the emerging scourge of transnational crime. To his surprise, some of the characters from the exSoviet Union who surfaced in the initial phase of Fusions investigation of Trump were people he had written about a decade earlier while investigating Russian corruption and organized crime for the Journal, stories Fritsch had edited while the two worked in Brussels.

Simpson wasnt completely surprised by the news of the Bernstein call. He told Fritsch that he had recently heard from a friend at The Washington Post that Fred Hiatt, the papers editorial page editor, was talking about some sensational memoranda that sounded a lot like Steeles work.

Someone was leakingthat was clear. This had the potential to be a big problem.

The Steele reportssoon to be known as the dossierwere field intelligence from one of the Wests most senior Russia watchers. The memos he produced were never meant to be viewed outside of a tiny circle of people, much less shared with the public. In unredacted form, the reports could expose Steeles sources and jeopardize lives. Steele took great care to mask those sources in his reports to Fusion. Still, the information clearly came from people with extraordinary access in Russia, and Russian intelligence could figure out who they were and track them down. Those sources included a number of people inside Russia and field operatives outside the country who needed protecting at all costs. Unredacted memos flying around among the Washington press corps risked exposing people to real danger.