Crime in Progress by Glenn Simpson;Peter Fritsch; & Peter Fritsch

Author:Glenn Simpson;Peter Fritsch; & Peter Fritsch
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Penguin Random House LLC
Published: 2019-11-25T16:00:00+00:00

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Fusion’s other concern was how to push ahead on the Trump work. It was time to move on from the post-election swirl and to determine how best to augment other lines of inquiry—in the press, in Congress, or among state and local prosecutors. But who would they be working for, and under what arrangement?

Ever since the November election, Fusion had funded all of its work on Trump and Russia itself, and that was getting expensive. In one costly episode, Simpson and Berkowitz flew down to the Virgin Islands to meet a potential source claiming to have information about Trump’s relationship with Deutsche Bank—Val Broeksmit, the son of a former top Deutsche executive who’d apparently committed suicide in 2014, shortly after quitting. Broeksmit had been introduced to Simpson by a reporter in Europe. He claimed to possess a cache of potentially telling emails downloaded from his father’s computer. On the off chance these emails would offer new insights into the bank’s interactions with Russia and its many loans to Trump, Simpson decided it was worth giving Broeksmit, a penniless rock musician, an all-expenses-paid jaunt to the U.S. Virgin Islands to find out. Berkowitz joined them.

The three spent several days there in the last days of January, at a slightly shabby beach resort. Simpson agreed to pay Broeksmit $4,000 for a copy of his father’s emails and Broeksmit’s time for help reviewing them. The correspondence turned out to be revealing about Deutsche Bank’s mismanagement but did little to illuminate the bank’s relationship to the Kremlin or to Trump.

These kinds of dry holes are common in investigations. But the affair underscored the challenge Fusion was facing: The Trump-Russia mystery would be unraveled only by an ambitious, well-funded investigation. They needed to be able to pay last-minute international airfares at the drop of a hat and compensate people who might be able to contribute their expertise or vital information. Fusion couldn’t afford to fund that kind of operation for much longer without going broke.

Fusion suspected its work was unlikely to be sought after by the Republican majority in Congress, whose efforts to investigate Russia’s assault on the 2016 election were likely to be cursory and half-hearted. Nor did it seem likely, given the politically charged nature of the dossier controversy, that law enforcement would come asking for help anytime soon. By necessity, the main constituency for any future Fusion research into Russia’s attack on the 2016 election—at least for the next two years—would be the press and the public at large.

The American media was now plunging wholeheartedly into the many strands of the Trump-Russia story. In the weeks after the dossier went public, Fusion’s inboxes were receiving queries from big-name broadcast and print journalists looking to truncate the reporting process with help from Fusion’s knowledge and archives. Many reporters were having trouble connecting the dots, or getting up to speed on the complex history of corruption in Russia and the many ties between the new generation of Putin oligarchs and political figures in the United States.

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