Transcripts For CSPAN2 Glenn Simpson Crime In Progress 20240713

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 Trumps Business 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 courier service, federal express. We quickly concluded that was not an effective or safeway to transfer information and found ways to transmitted digitally that was more secure. Host and what was in the first report and what did you do with it . Guest the first report was really shocking. Its broadly stated that there was an operation by the government of russia to support donald trump and help him win the election and that trump was aware of this. And cooperating and expected to benefit from it. By then it was beginning to be known that the russians attacked the Democratic National committee and theres some discussion of that in this first document, but the overall picture was of a russian attempt to subvert the democracy of the trinity and elect donald trump president. That turned out to be correct. Host what did you do with that report . Guest we nothing initially. We eventually, obviously we eventually try to follow it up and see if we could get more. And and i cant really get intot we did with it in terms of our client, but you can assume that information that we received would go to our clients as normal matter of course. Host but at the same time to talk about in crime in progress the fact you did what to do soon provide just this wrong report. You wanted to edit it. Guest we didnt at it it. Host is that fair . Guest thats not quite right. So there were two things we what we cannot talk about is the fact that chris wanted to take this to the fbi and thought this was a National Security concern, and raise that with us. We initially were kind of hesitant because we didnt really know if that was an appropriate thing to do and we didnt think our client would be wild about that idea here but we ultimately concluded that if he thought that was the right thing to do and that there was a crime in progress, which is what the book data comes from, that he should do that. What we didnt want to do was interfere with that process by editing the document or in any way sort of politically influencing his report to the fbi which is not really a political matter for us. It was a National Security issue. What we did want to do and did do in terms of her own understanding of these matters is that we try to follow up some of information these reports using our own methods and systems which are open source. So we would look for articles in russia language media, other places, tell us more but some of the people who were named in these reports. And so a lot of what we tried to do is not necessarily prove or disprove things, because some of this doesnt fit that category. Determine whether things are in their are credible. What we conclude festively firm is that a lot of this reporting was very credible. Host and, in fact, you quote mr. Steele as saying he feels strongly that 70 of whats in his report is correct. Guest and we would agree with that. We have been through them. We did a new evaluation for this book of the original memos with three years of hindsight. Its very strong stuff. It still holds up. Host there was one issue in that come our belief in the first report, a rather salacious part of this, that you were not sure you wanted to include. Guest right. So theres a story of a sexual excavate any hotel in moscow. We just had mixed feelings about it. Chris thought it was significant, socalled p tape. Chris thought this was significant information because it could suggest that there was blackmail potential on, the criminal had potential blackmail material on donald trump. In washington we had a slightly different reaction because weve come at this might different perspective, which was this was a store that was never going to be proven or disproven and didnt really, it was neither here nor there for us. We were much more concerned with the overall picture of a conspiracy to subvert the election. Ill add that this was not the only thing that chris found in that early reporting that created concerned about blackmail. There was also the fact there seem to be secret relationship between the kremlin and donald trump that involve money. That part of this has turned out to be accurate. He was, in fact, conducting a secret business deal in russia that involve the kremlin during the 2016 campaign. In the main, chris was basically right. There was compromise as they call it. It was, you could argue back and forth whether it was personal in nature or financial in nature, but you cant argue there was some kind of sick relationship. Host how many reports were contained in the socalled steele dossier . Guest i believe it was around a dozen, over a period from june through december 2016. Host okay. First one out in june. At what point did it start leaking out to the media, and how . Guest what we talk about in the book is over the summer of 2016 as the russian hack attack intensified and the leaking of documents in the deliberate computer crimes against our client got worse and worse, we talked to reporters about things that are in the dossier but we didnt tell anyone what was in the dossier. We believed that was raw material that didnt need to go out to anyone. We used it as information to inform our own work. So we talked to people about some of the subjects but it was only after the election that we really shared some of it was shared i think at the very beginning of this, at the very end of the election, then there was some additional sharing of the contents of this after the election in early 2017. We never intended for this to leak to the press over to be printed online. Host said january 2017 it hits the press. Guest right. Host what happens . Guest well, what we did at the end because we thought was appropriate thing to do, we were concerned the fbi wasnt taking this matter seriously or do some sort of cover going on. Wed seen indications it was a lot of protrump agents at the fbi. We did know was going on. It was suggested we could raise this with senator john mccain and senator mccain could raise it with james comey and that way we could ensure that this was being dealt with. We felt like that would hopefully with this to rest in terms of our obligation to make sure this didnt get swept under the rug. So we gave it to one of his advisers and host david kramer. Was he a friend of yours . Guest he was an acquaintance and affect some of what helped us act in the mid2000s with some of our early stories on kleptocracy when the wife and i worked at the wall street journal. She was originally the one who admit him. He had been helpful to us. We trusted him from that relationship and i guess one of the things we kind of knock ourselves or is given that he was at the time helping journalists, i. E. Us, we might a suspected he is going to do the same thing but we didnt. We thought he was just going to give this tooth senator mccain. As it turned out he shared it with some journalists gave this to one journalist eventually published it and that happened i think on january 10 about a week before the inauguration, and obviously all hell broke loose. Host what did you mean by all hell broke loose . What happened . Guest we became subjects in the International Media frenzy and immediately became targets for trump and his associates, accused of paddling phony information. Host journalist for higher. Guest all kinds of things. You know, we are place at center of this controversy over whether trump had a covert relationship with the government of russia. It was pretty unpleasant. I just remember getting calls from tv stations in japan in the middle of the night and all kinds of crazy stuff like that. Of course because of the nature of the controversy and the fact that russia was engaged in this hybrid war against our country, it creates some secret he concerns and was very uncomfortable. Host your firm was described as lowprofile, nefarious. Were any of those descriptions correct . Guest we do something that is relatively unique. We combine sort of some of the skills of journalism with other fields like intelligence, hence the name fusion lowprofile yes, but not because we are to liberally secretive, this is where i think we are misrepresented. But because we are just looking for attention. We are not secret of people. We are exjournalists. Ive been in public life all my adult life basically. This is not my first cspan interview, and i done about the public thinks. I speak at universities and journalism conferences and things like that. To the cult secretive is just a misnomer, but we were comfortable in our anonymity and have no plans the seeking publicity. Host Glenn Simpson, was Christopher Steeles reaction in england when this all hit the news . Guest he immediately packed up the kids and left home and went to stay with friends in other places. Because of his previous work on russia, there was an immediate concern that he would be in danger and that there was some legitimate concern about whether it would be retaliation. And then that theres a bit of harassment of the media, which if you ever find yourself in the middle of one of these, there will be trucks outside your house and people staking at your office and tried try to chase n all the time. It was a very kind of uncertain time, and we were concerned about all sorts of things, from the russians to domestic people who could be incited into doing something to us. Host during this time there was a lot of opinion reporting, and you take on your old colleagues over at the wall street journal, specifically kims trussell. Guest right. I guess taking on is the right word. I mean, we find it almost amusing that they are so insistent on this painting us. Its been the thing is. Its been a longterm campaign of defamation against us. I think its beneath that paper which is a really great tradition great journalism to constantly engage in all of these attacks against us, none of which really grounded in truth. Its remarkable. For a long time they would have denunciations of us almost daily with all kinds of fantastical allegations against us that had bore no resemblance to reality. I guess the boat had to make is the most disingenuous aspect of it is this is by people who know us and that are very familiar with our backgrounds, very careful journalists who are pretty straightforward and honest. And so its just sad to see them stooping to these kinds of attacks. Host as you well know if it office of Inspector General for the department of justice came out with a report on operation hurricane which was look into the russia trump connections, and the wall street journal editorialized on that report, and this is what they wrote on december 11, 2019. Guest its total nonsense. The material from steel was in the footnote. Carter page was a long time espionage suspect who was under investigation for many years and it turned out was involved with some russian agents who were convicted of espionage. So thats just a very deliberate misconstruing of history of all this, and we see this now constantly. Its really the old egg lie technique of essentially telling untruths impeding them as often as you get as loud as you get in the hopes that some people will fall for it. Host but in the report itself, the oig report on operation hurricane, Michael Horowitz writes that tubac witnesses, Glenn Simpson and jonathan weiner, former state department official, declined our requests for voluntary interviews, and we were unable to compel their testimony. Why didnt you testify are why didnt you submit testimony . Guest great question. My testimony was compelled three times in front of congress. I testified for over 20 hours. I went through this entire story under oath and subject to criminal penalties. And i was at every question imagine about the origin of this. All of which was very expensive to be represented through all of this, my a team of lawyers. So when Inspector General came around after we had done this three times, our position was that we told our story and the only thing this would produce would be more legal bills and that the outcome of these interviews would be identical to the previous three. They have investigate us repeatedly and they always find the same thing. So ultimately we felt he would come out where everyone else to go. In fact, thats where we are. Chris steele did not start the fbi investigation. Nobody really did anything wrong here. There was no deep state conspiracy to rig the election. Essentially its everything we have said all along, so we feel like we made the right call. Host senator grassley and congressman devin nunes play a role in trying then as well. Guest crime in progress as well. Guest they were the original defenders of the president , stepped forward to investigate the investigators. What they did for the first two years of Donald Trumps presidency was investigate us, and attempts to depict us as partisan hacks, fabricators, everything you can imagine. That went on for two years and it sort of is like the wall street journal, its very disingenuous and they really were not interested in getting to the bottom of whether the russians really did run this massive operation which obviously now we know they did. Host just to go back, how did the fbi get wind of this deal reports diffusion . Guest originally chris approached a long time contact of his at the fbi. This was another guy named michael who is someone that chris had worked with on the fifa scandal and was a eurasian organized crime agent and had worked with chris on russian oligarchs and kleptocracy. Shortly thereafter chris also met up with bruce ohr whos an old context of his and some and i also knew a little bit. Host and he was or is it doj, correct . Guest correct. Hes been punished for having had the courage to listen and try to pass along some information along with a lot of other decent people. Theres been a campaign of vilification against Civil Servants for doing their jobs, and he unfortunately is one of the many people who suffered through this. People ask me how bad was it . Nsa you know, it was unpleasant for us but its nothing compared to the people who have had their careers damaged and reputations really hurt by some of the things that it been done to them at the behest of donald trump. Host his spouse, what is her connection . Guest nelly is a distinguished expert on russia, shes a russian linguist. She worked for the cia for a time. She approached me in 2015 host did you know her . Guest i knew her from conferences. Up until recently the world of russian organized crime and expertise was very small, wasnt much interested in it. Sort of like people or interested in islamic terrorism pre9 11. So i knew her from events where we met and had casual conversation about issues related to russia organized crime. She approached me in 2015. She was between fulltime jobs. She was looking for parttime work. She said if you have anything, i saw your name in the newspaper, if you have anything that could use my russian language skills, im available. We did at the time, had nothing to do with Donald Donald trumpr politics. It was a case that involves an alleged russian sex trafficking operation so that is have that originated. Host from the oig report regarding bruce ohr. Michael horowitz writes that he provides information he received from steele and since into the fbi which had already received much but not all of the same information through its direct contact steele. Bruce ohr did not advising of aa supervisor in office of the Deputy Attorney general about his contacts with steele and simpson about his wifes work for fusion gps or about his acting as a contact until the office of the Deputy Attorney general leadership confronted ohr about his activities in late 2017. Is that correct . Guest i dont know. I mean, i dont have any reason to dispute it, but i just, i dont know about the internal workings of the doj. Im not really qualified to pass judgment. I will just add for the sake of completeness that the ig found he had violated any rules or policies or committed any transgressions. Ultimately left with labeling that a quote laughs and judgment. Obviously in hindsight thats the igs job is to judge things in hindsight. Hindsight is 2020. A lot of the other considerations worth the fact that our country was under attack, and in that light its hard to fault him for essentially doing his job, which was to protect our country. Host how did mother jones david corn become a part of this story . Guest david with someone i have known for many years on and off. We travel in the same circles as journalists, journalists originally and i had occasional contact with him about stop after i left the journal and started fusion. Hes an Investigative Reporter who now runs the bureau here for mother jones and also a bit of an espionage buff and is written at least one or two books about espionage matters. He reached out to me at the very, very end of the campaign at a point when we were very concerned about what was happening inside the government and the fact that the fbi had reopen an investigation into Hillary Clinton, and seems to be suppressing the fact i had a parallel investigation into donald trump. That really concerned us and confused us. When he asked to talk to me, i agreed to meet him and that led eventually to him speaking over skype chris steele, a story that ran in the final days before the election about how chris had provided information to the fbi. Host you expressed disappointment and your coauthor express disappointment that some of these stories, some of information you found out was not rising to the top of the media. Guest right. Its complicated to describe because we were frustrated and disappointed at sort of, in fact, some of the stuff didnt get more attention but we were also cognizant of the fact that a lot of this work hard to believe at the time and it was a lot of other things going on. We dont think that reporters kind of fell down on the job or were not doing their jobs so much as this was a difficult thing to try to raise. It was frustrating at the time and obviously in retrospect, we think the country would have benefited if more attention has been paid to these issues prior to the election. Host were you frustrated by the Obama Administrations silence on this issue . Guest yes. I think i could say we were, but we were also cognizant of the fact that theyre in a difficult position, too, and the republicans in congress were very resistant to acknowledging what was really happening and doing something about it and that put them into a very difficult position. Host also we didnt really know what the Obama Administration was doing. The problem with this in general is that when youre doing a case like this, you know theres a parallel Law Enforcement or intelligence operation look at the same things, you dont have any visibility into whats happening inside the fbi or the cia or anything like that. We did know what they were doing about it. Host from crime in progress, october 7 the Obama Administration put out a statement trying to dominate the evening news cycle, close, u. S. Intelligence community is confident the russian government directed the recent compromise is of emails from u. S. Persons and institutions including from u. S. Political organizations. The recent disclosures are intended to interfere with the u. S. Election process, october 7, 2016. What else happened that day . Guest a lot. Wikileaks released a new batch of emails that completely upended everything against thats, the indy. The other event that occurred that day was the Washington Post published an audio recording of donald trump talking about sexual assaulting women. All three of these events occurred in one day. The second two of these events tended to drought at press the most important, which was this announcement by the government. Host have you found efforts by the congress to investigate the 2016 election conclusive . Guest certainly the efforts that have taken place since the house changed hands and became a democratic majority control, have been much more serious and sincere. I mean, for the first two years of this the republicans really use the power to try to obscure the truth, cover things up and discredit us and anyone else who would dare to raise concerns about what was really going on here. So things have gotten better from that sense in the last year. I think that adam schiff has been a remarkably able investigator and that they have tried to bring this to light. The lost time from the first two years of the Trump Presidency has left a lot of people confused about what really happened and created this sort of error of inconclusive this around the Russian Election operation in 2016. I think the body of evidence that has emerged leaves little question about what happened. There was a concerted effort by the kremlin to elect donald trump president of the United States and he instigated and encouraged it. You can argue about whether theres enough evidence to charge a criminal conspiracy but you cant argue but the fact there were 140 context between the trump people and the kremlin or russians during the campaign. You cant argue but the fact told trump was doing business, trying to do business in russia secretly during the campaign. So to my mind the picture of what happened in 2016 was pretty clear. But i get the fact that other people dont see that because theres been this deliberate effort to obscure that. At the highest levels of are covered by donald trump and his attorney general william barr and they have succeeded to some extent in confusing people about what the facts are. Host Glenn Simpson, can you draw a Straight Line or a crooked line between your augusr republican friend and the Mueller Report . Guest well, i mean, its my life, you know, so for me there is a Straight Line. Its meandering actually, not quite straight, but i think in general this is the culmination of a lot of things that i have been worried about and interested in for a very long time, in terms of the increasing destabilization of the west by this wave of criminality coming out of the east. The fact that it has seeped into our politics and infected our politics here in washington, is something that i was writing about and worried about ten years ago. And so for me this is, it is one long story. And, unfortunately, we are at a where its a very worrying outcome, and i think people need to be one of the reasons we wrote this book and talk about this now is people really need to wake up to just how much of a threat this is to our way of life, our democratic system, and the rule of law in our country. Host does. Host still exist . Guest yes, we are a thriving 15 person firm, still worked out of the same office, Dupont Circle and its a wonderful place to work. Host are you doing more political work now . Guest thats a hard question to answer. Doing a lot of campaign work. Because were in washington a lot of the things that come up and up, more recently certainly have a political cast to them. We talk about devin nunes having done some political work on him, but i would say its a very small part of our business. Host what is trek to the democracy techrepublic. Thats a nonprofit that was set up in early 2017, spring sprin7 to continue to investigate foreign interference in democracies. Its russian interference, interference with other countries in western democracies. What we essentially suspected and now conclude is that there is a concerted effort by the government of russia to undermine democracy and democratic elections in the west, in the uk, france, germany, america. Its much bigger than donald trump or america, that this is an assault against our system and thats really where we need to put our investigative efforts is in exposing what russia is really up to hear on a much broader scale. Host the democracy integrity project, are the results for your Research Available to the general public, to the media . Guest some of it, yes. Because of my role as a contractor i dont have the full visibility into what they do with things, but i believe some of what theyve done has been put out. Host but it was started by fusion gps . Guest not exactly. We talked about, so would happen was after the election we lost our client. We continued to be concerned about these issues and we worked on them without a client for many months. We talked about the need for some sort of effort to continue to look at this issue of russias war on our democracy, and i talked about it with dan jones who is an acquaintance of mine, a former investigator for the Senate Intelligence committee and he is the one who incorporated the organization, and we worked for it as a vendor. Host how has the last three or four years changed your life . Guest i mean, my life hasnt typically been turned upside down. I became sort of a a public pen that i didnt really desire or long for. I also just became, you know, this whole controversy consume so much of my time and it just made me unable to work on sort of the other aspects of our business that i enjoy and had to deal with a lot of things like lawyers and lawsuits that ive not had to do with much in the past. Host you talk about potentially bankruptcy by law, by paying lawyers. Guest we believe theres been a very deliberate attempt to bankrupt us by burning bearing as in lawsuits and subpoenas. Certainly seem like it was a possibility at one point that we would just be buried in so many cases that we wouldnt be able to pay no matter how much money are private business make we wouldnt be able to pay our lawyers. Host whats your relationship with mrs. To enter coauthor, Peter Fritsch, tod . Guest we all are very close. We are mutually supportive of each other. We all feel we did nothing wrong and the decisions we made were in the best interest of our countrys, in our societies, and that we would like to see this through in the sense that everyone should understand what it is we are worried about here. And so we are all friendly. Host you went through some rough patches though drink this. Guest of course. Sort of like youre in a foxhole, right . You are like arguing should we retreat, go forward . And so the pressure certainly makes for tense times. Host one more name we want to bring into this conversation and thats jacob berkowitz. Who is that . Guest jake is our analyst at fusion who is a generation or so younger than me and peter, and was hired, one of our earliest employees and happen to be the guy who got the assignment to work on project bangor at the beginning. The way you run a project is essential if have one sort of person who is the keeper of the records and does the sort of closeup management of the information. And so you have a project leader such as myself, a more senior person and then you have an analyst who manages things daytoday. Thats jake. He became a walking encyclopedia of information about trump and russia. Host this is the conclusion of crime in progress. Progress. Quote, theres ample evidence amassed over the past three years to show that the Trump Campaign and the russian government repeatedly sought to Work Together to swing the 2016 election, and that they succeeded. The Trump Campaigns conspiring with russia may not be a crime provable in federal court, but it amounts to what of the post significant the trails in american history. Guest i believe that today. I also feel that, so when we wrote that it was the summer of 2019 and we had no inkling that the president was out there engaging in conduct that was almost exactly the same as what we were saying he had done in 2016. So the proof of that observation really is in front of a study with the impeachment proceedings where he went out and did the exact same thing. So its hard to deny that he has a proclivity to do this. Host Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch are the cofounders of fusion gps and the coauthors of this book, crime in progress inside the steele dossier and the fusion gps investigation of donald trump. Guest thank you very much. Many of these authors have appeared on booktv and you can watch them online at booktv. Org. Tonight on booktv in primetime, Gloria Steinem chronicles her life and career through to a collection of her essays and notable quotes. Brian kilby provides a history of the 19th century war with mexico over texas. Prior to the attack on pearl harbor. For more information, visit booktv. Org or check your program guide. The