We were both at the wall street journal my partner and i for many years, Peter Fritsch, and the News Business went into a downturn in the late 2000s thanks to the internet. It started to evolve into a less fulfilling job for me. I was in my mid40s and i decided what i really, really loved to do in journalism was investigate complex cases and that there was less market for that in the journalism world. The emphasis was on breaking news, and so i decided to try to see if i could do that sort of work in a private capacity, as a consultant. Host what kind of stories did you work on at the wall street journal . Guest i started at coming american politics in washington in the late 1980s, early 1990s, and investigating politicians for possible corruption, writing stories about campaignfinance abuses, ethics in washington and government. Over the years that evolved into different types of Investigative Journalism involving financial crime, fraud, corporate cases like enron, scandals like the savings and loan scandal, financial crisis. Overtime after 9 11 i started branching out into International Criminal matters such as terrorism and organized crime. Host what was peters role at the journal . Guest he was my editor. We were stationed together in brussels belgium which is the headquarters for the european edition of the wall street journal. He was a Foreign Correspondent for most of his career, moving around from mexico to brazil to singapore, winding up in brussels with me. Host what kind of client did you attract at fusion gps . Guest a lot of law firms involved in complicated cases, Big Companies trying to figure out whether they were competing adequately or whether there had been some irregularities in some other contracts, that sort of thing. Those are the big two. Host you did what you call opensource research. Guest my specialty was documents. I i was known as a document hel, and its really what i like to do. I like to try to amass large quantities of documents to see if i can use them to unravel a a mystery or figure out a puzzle. The United States is rich in public sources of information, compared to other parts of the world and so i know how to do that from a use at the journal. This sort of Business Plan was to use private clients and the greater resources they had to engage in largescale document acquisition projects. We would subject all those to analysis and see if we could come up with results that would be useful to clients. One of the things we call decisionsupport, a lot of what we do is amass information that enables the client to make decisions about how to proceed with whatever problems they are facing, whether its a fraud case or just a decision about how to compete against other companies. Host so not a Political Opposition Research firm. Guest that was not in the Business Plan. We didnt do anything like that really for the first several years of the company. However, in 2012 we were asked to take a look at mitt romney why some democratic folks that i knew from my years in washington. The reason that asked us to do so because our specialty is Business Research and we had wall street journal backgrounds and mitt romney was a private equity tycoon, very complicated Business Career and it wasnt the sort of subject that an ordinary Political Research firm would be well equipped to do. That was our first big exposure to this area. It was not something we set out to pursue. It was an approach that was made to us. Host where you financially successful transfer the company is very successful, has done quite well over the years here im not mitt romney style well off but its a nice living. Host what was operation bangor or project bangor . Guest project bangor was named for the city in maine. We name our projects using random categories. Sometimes we need them for cities, sometimes we named neem for types of fish. The idea is just not have it sort of give up any clues as to what the is about. Project bangor was initiated in october, september or october of 2015 and that was you look at Donald TrumpsBusiness Career and his long history of lawsuits and bankruptcies, and anything that would be significant or relevant and a political context and political campaign. Host who instigated it . Guest it was an associate of mine, someone i knew from washington and politics who said he would be interested in that case it was originally my approach to him. I asked him if he knew anyone who might be interested in Funding Research in donald trump, and he said i just might. Host who answered the call . Guest eventually we got hooked up with a newspaper in washington called the free beacon which is a conservative oriented internet only publication. Host and who is paul singer . Guest reported to be among the funders of the free beacon which is a nonprofit i dont think ive ever seen documentation of that but it dont think he disputed. Host he was the one who funded project bangor transferred the project was funded by the free beacon and we didnt inquire as to where the free beacon was getting the funding from such think it was generally known at the time as it is now that paul singer is a supporter of the free beacon. Host why would a conservative publication presumably Republican Fund and Opposition Research project on donald trump . Guest at the time it was the early primary season for the republican nomination and it was a lot of concern inside the Republican Party that donald trump was both not a real republican, some of his positions and sister donations suggested he was maybe a democrat or had some policy positions that were more akin to a democrat, particularly on trade, free trade. So there was some substantive concerns with his policy positions and then there was concern that he was not a viable nominee, that if you were nominated the republicans would lose because of his character, because of his policy positions and a general populist demagogic kind of orientation that republicans had a terrible experience with pat buchanan who was a similar kind of populist antiimmigrant candidate, nativist who damaged george bush is reelection. Host prior to that you write in your book crime in progress that, this is from about march of 2016, there was now unanimity inside fusion on the need to do what they could to keep trump out of the white house and also unanimity as to why. Many of his traits disqualified him for the job and his political rhetoric was loathsome but his ties to the criminal underworld, his reliance on it in foes of russian money and his record of two cannery in business top the list. This is all prior to project bangor. Guest it was the first phase of project bangor which was for the republicans and then phase two was for the democrats. Youre right though this was where we were in the spring of 2016 win the republican primaries were starting to wind down, we had done seven months of research into donald trump and that formed some definite opinions of who this person was and whether he was qualified to be president , and he wasnt. As that passage indicates. A lot of our concern didnt involve the issues that are now front and center in terms of the controversy over russian and foreign entanglements. They were really about his associations with figures from the underworld, generally we could were concerned about the Italian Mafia. He seemed to know and do business with a lot of characters who had ties to the Italian Mafia and then later to the russian or he would organize crime broke. Host was this a follow the money case . Guest it was. It started out as as a litigatn survey i would say because donald trump, as a talk about in the book, has been involved in more lawsuits than anyone ive ever investigated. This is an absolutely incredible number of cases. It was a paperchase in the beginning, but as time went on and we began to understand his business empire, we began to try to figure out where the money was coming from indeed, and it became more and more a question of wheres all this money coming from that courses through Donald Trumps projects . Because he cant get money from banks because they wont do business with them because he went bankrupt six times. A lot of other developers wont do business with him because he has a history of not following through on his agreement and repudiating them, and so where was all his money coming from . It became increasingly apparent it was coming from overseas a lot of it and from mystery thoughts overseas. Host you indicate a lot of the trump tower condominiums or apartment were sold to russia. Guest people from the soviet former junior. Not all russians. That region of the world is one of his biggest sources of sales. Host why is that region of the world seem to have so many shadowy figures . Guest i think host now than in the past tragic its a legacy of communism. Communist structures essentially made it impossible to survive if you were not engage in some sort of criminal activity, so whitbread as sort of a lawless environment. In the postcommunist era, that sort of culture of lawlessness eventually led to a great deal of stealing, cheating. People didnt pay their taxes. They would take out loans from banks and then just move the money out of the country. Its a real sort of sad story about the failure of our country, the west, to instill more of the rule of law culture in the former soviet union. Fundamentally it is a problem with the rule of law was not embedded in the dna of these countries political systems and never been able to transplant it. Host did you find names connected with President Trump that you advance in the mid90s when you were doing financial stories for the wall street journal . Guest one of the first stories i cover back then was the bank of new york scandal which was a case of russian money flowing into one of new yorks biggest banks. Later on peter and i when we were in brussels put together stories along with my wife worked with us about russian kleptocracy and there was activity in eastern europe. Among the people that we wrote about at the time was Paul Manafort and his relationship with some dubious figures from ukraine. We did a good deal of reporting on him, including raising questions about whether he was a Foreign Agent for some of these foreign parties, active in washington and whether it was an unregistered Foreign Agent. Also another oligarch whose very close to the kremlin. We wrote a a good bit about his well. Both of these characters surfaced in 2016 in connection with the Trump Campaign. It was shocking and disturbing to encounter them in the context and lead to a great deal of concern on our part that something untoward was taking place or that we didnt fully understand. Host Glenn Simpson, one of the issues you talk about in crime in progress is the issue of presales. What is that . Guest presales is with financing condo developments. Someone who is covered a lot of Business Issues over the years, it was new to me in this case. Essentially what you do when you put together a condo project is you try to get commitments from buyers before the thing is even built. If you can presell a third of the units, that income can be used to finance the project. A way of capitalizing a Development Without having to get funding from a a bank or se other source. The presales also helps with promoting the development to following buyers. If you presoak the building that stimulates demand for the rest of units. Its a vulnerability, an area of controversy in the business because presales are often hyped and that often a lot of puffery as they call it about how much presales youve made. What we found was there was lots of hype about presales and a lot of questions about whether they had the commitments from buyers that they claimed. Host at what point did this become a democratically funded project . Guest it was, we transition between republicans and democrats in may 2016. It was fully a democratic project by june of 2016. Host how could that happen . Guest after we concluded donald trump would be not a suitable person to be president of our country, we reached out to some folks we knew in the democratic world and offered our services to them. Theres a discussion of this in the book, i wasnt particularly enthusiastic. I was planning to set up a job election. I thought some of the controversies around Hillary Clinton, i did want to get involved with because she, too, has a lot of international dealings that i think are problematic. And so we were going to sit it out within when we found it so much about donald trump it was deeply disturbing, it seemed like we didnt have a choice and that was an obligation to keep going. Host i think you refer to Hillary Clinton as the lesser of two evils in here. Guest thats correct. I have high regard for many people around her that we dealt with, but having covered the clintons for many, many years, i thought the way they raised money, particularly just created potential for problems. Host who is marc elias . Guest apart at the the Washington Law Firm and originally its a seattle headquarters laufer but had a big Washington Office and they are the lead law firm for the democratic party. Host what was his involvement in funding project bank or . Guest he was the person who we went to to see if the democrats were interested in continuing this research, and he was simultaneously the lawyer for the Democratic National committee and for the Clinton Campaign . Guest dealing with a lawyer, did that give you indemnity . Guest it does not indemnify us. Essentially as i think is now widely reported, the original idea was to develop information that would be useful in the context of advertising and public statements and that sort of thing. It was configured as a legal representation because of Donald Trumps long history of suing people for saying things about him. And so that was the idea, that it didnt really protect us from being sued. It just was configured in anticipation of the possibility that we might be sued. And, in fact, when everything went crazy in 2017 we were not indemnified and we had have to defend ourselves and fund our own defense. Host at what point did Christopher Steele play a role . Who is he and at what point did he come into the picture . Guest chris was the lead for mi6. He served in the former soviet union around the time the soviet union collapsed, and later became the head of the russian desk at mi6 and then retired from the service in 2009 almost exactly the time i left the wall street journal. We were introduced in 2010 by mutual friends who knew over mutual interest in brush and oligarchs. We became friendly and did a a little bit of business together over the following years. This part of the world was not a big part of our business so it was an episodic relationship but we did like working together and we did have these common interests. And so when we finally concluded in the spring of 2016 that there was something unexplained about Donald Trumps relationship with russia, he was an obvious pern for us to go to to see if we could find out more. By then we had done nine months of research of donald trump and pulled tens of thousands of pages of documents, and we fet we were running out of places to look for Public Information and that we needed someone who is able to talk to people and see if theres more to be gleaned talking to people in russia. Thats why we went to him. Host was it a democratically funded project by the time Christopher Steele came along were still a republican project . Guest it was. The foundation for the decision to bring on was the work we do under the republicans but it was the democratic client who provided the funding for that work. Host in your book crime in progress you mentioned a couple of his political positions. He was supportive of the plo and he was antimargaret thatcher. Should that be a clue to people about his politics . Guest i mean, that was his university base, one a lot of people had lefty orientation. I dont think thats really his politics today, but the truth is i never really asked chris about his political views because it wasnt really germane. My firm is all x journalists and we are not very partisan people, and similarly chris has a National Security background. So the issue of partisanship, it doesnt feature in our daily lives and doesnt come up in our conversations very much. So when we got into this i didnt really ask him about his political orientation. When we first started talking about donald trump the only thing he said to me was he actually had some contact with a trump family member, which has recently been revealed to me, so we express no particular animus towards trump or any great admiration for Hillary Clinton. Host how did he go back to work and when did you get his first report . Guest his first report came in june of 2016. It was based on individuals who he has longterm relationships with who were from the region and were able to travel to the region and speak to people in the region discreetly. So it was a oral interview with people who had knowledge of Donald Trumps activities in russia and is alleged contacts with people in the kremlin. Host how did that report get transmitted to fusion . Guest the first one was transmitted on paper via courie