We were both there for many years. They went into a downturn in the late 2000s. In the face of the internet and it started to evolved into a fulfilling job for me. I decided what i really loved to do was investigate complex cases and it was less market for that in the journalism world. The emphasis was on breaking news so i decided to try to see if i could do that work as a consultant. What kind of stories did you work on . I started out covering american politics here in washington in the late 1980s, early 90s and investigating politicians for possible corruption. Ethics in washington and over the years, got evolved into different types of investigating journalism involving financial crime, broad corporate cases, scandals, financial crisis and then over time, after 9 11, i started branching out into International Criminal matters such as terrorism and organized crime. What was peters role . Peter was my editor. We were stationed together in brussels, belgium which is the headquarters for the european addition. He was a correspondent for most of his career. From mexico to brazil to singapore, winding up in brussels with me. What kind of clients did you attract . A lot of law firms, involving collocated cases, Big Companies trying to figure out whether they were competing adequately or whether they were in irregularities. Those are the big two. Opensource research . My specialty at the journal was documents. I was known as a document hound. Its really what i like to do. I like to try to get large quantities of documents to see if i can use them to unravel a mystery or figure out. The u. S. Is rich in public sources of information compared to other parts of the world. So i knew how to do that my heres at the journal. The Business Plan was to use private clients and their resources they had to engage in largescale document and accusation projects. We would subject all those to analysis and see if we come up with results. Its generally one of the things we call decisionsupport. A lot of what we do is mass information that enables a client make decisions about how to proceed without ever problem they are facing. A fraud case or a decision about how to compete against other companies. I Political Opposition Research firm. That was not enough business line. We didnt do like that for the first several years of the company. However, in 2012, we were asked to look at me romney for my democratic folks i knew from washington. They asked because our specialty is Business Research we have wall street journal background and mitt romney was very complicated, Business Career and it wasnt the sort of subject that an ordinary Political Research firm would be wellequipped to do. Its something we set out pursue, it was approached at my desk. Where you financially successful . The company is. Has done quite well over the years. Not mitt romney style well off but its nice. Was operation bangor . It was named, we name our projects using random categories. Sometimes we name the four cities. The idea is just to not have it, what the project was about. It was initiated in october of 2015. That was a look at donald trump Business Career and his long history of lawsuits and bankruptcies. Anything that would be significant or relevant and political context and campaign. Who instigated at . An associate of mine from washington and politics, said he would be interesting. In that case, it was originally my approached him. I asked him if he knew anyone interested in donald trump and he said i might. Who answered the call . Eventually we got hooked up with newspaper, a conservative oriented internet only publication. Who is paul . Paul singer is reported to be among the founders. I dont think ive ever seen document about. Hes the one who funded that . The project was funded by the deacon. We didnt inquire whether he was getting it so i think it was generally known at the time that paul singer is a supporter. So like what a conservative publication presumably Republican Fund and Opposition Research project on complex. At the time, it was the early primary season for the republican nomination. There is a lot of concern inside the Republican Party that trump was both not real republican, some of his positions, his history of donation suggest he was a democrat or had policy positions that were more than the democrat particularly on free trade. There were concerns with his policy positions and think there was concern he was not a viable nominee that if he were nominated, the republicans will lose because of his character, his policy positions general populace demagogic orientation, republicans had a terrible experience, a similar populace immigrant candidate. Prior to that, he right in your book prime and progress, this is from about march 2016, there was now unanimity 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 wholesome but his ties to the criminal underworld is reliant on russia money and his record in business. This was all prior to that project. It was the first day, which was for the republicans. Phase two was for the democrats. Youre right, this was where we were in the spring of 2016 when the republican primaries were starting down. We had done seven months of research into trump and formed definite opinions of who this person was and whether he was qualified to be president and wasnt. That indicates a lot of our concern involve the issues that are now in center in terms of russia. Its really about his associations with the underworld. We are concerned about the maf mafia. He seemed to know and did business with a lot of characters who had ties to the mafia and later the russian or human organized crime. Was this a follow the money case . It was, it started out as a litigation survey because trump, as we talk about in the book, has been involved in more lawsuits than anyone investigated. It was an incredible number of cases. It was in the beginning, as time went on, we begin to understand his business empire, began to try to figure out where the money was coming from. He became more and more a question of where is this money coming from that courses from trump projects . He cant get money because he went bankrupt six times. A lot of other developers wont do business with him because he had a history of refuting disagreements. So where is it coming from . He began, it became increasingly apparent that he was doing that. You indicate that a lot of the trump tower condominiums or apartments were sold to russia. People from the soviet union, not all russians. That was one of his biggest sources of sales. Why is that region of the world seem to have so many shadowy figures . More now than in the past, communists structures essentially made it impossible to survive if you want engaged in some sort of current activity. It was a lawless environment, the men in the post communist era, that sort of culture of lawlessness eventually led to a great deal of hypocrisy. Stealing, cheating, people in their taxes, they would take out loans from banks and take the money out of the country. Its a real sad story about the failure of our countries, the west to instill more of a rule of law culture but its a problem with the rule of law in the dna in these countries systems and never being able to transplant it. Did you find names connected with trump that you found in the mid 90s when you are doing financial stories for the wall street journal . One of the first race i covered back then was the bank of new york scandal which was a case of corruption money falling into one of new yorks biggest banks. Later on, peter and i when we were in brussels, we put together stories, my wife worked with us about russian hypocrisy and there was activity in Eastern Europe and among the people that wrote about of the time and his relationship with figures from ukraine. So we did reporting on him including raising questions about whether he was a Foreign Agent for some of these foreign parties. Active in washington and unregistered and also another one. Very close to grandma. Both of these characters surfaced in 2016 and the Trump Campaign. It was shocking and disturbing in that context and led to a great deal of concern on our part that something was taking place here we didnt fully understand. One of the issues talk about is the issue of greek sales, what is that . Presales is a way of financing conduct departments, someone who has 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 project is you try to get commitments from buyers before the thing is even both. If you can presale a third of the units, that income can be used to finance the project. Its a way of capitalizing a Department Without having to get funding from a bank and the presales help with promoting development. If you say we presold a building, that is demand for the rest of the units. Its that vulnerability, its area of controversy in the business because presales are often hyped and theres often a lot of puffery about how much presales youve made. If you inflate your presale claims, you can be accused of fraud, you can claim that they were misled. What we found was that there was a lot of hype about presales and questions about whether they had the commitments they claimed. When did this become a democratic funded project twice . In may 2016, it was fully democrats by june 2016. How did that happen . After we concluded, president of our country, we reached out to some folks we in the democratic world and offered our services to them. As a discussion of this on the book, i would sit out the general election, i brought some of the controversies around Hillary Clinton, i didnt want to get involved with that because she has a lot of international dealings i think are problematic. So we were going to say that but then it was deeply disturbing and it seemed like we didnt have a choice. I think you referred to Hillary Clinton as a lesser of two evils. Thats correct. I have high regard for people around her that we deal with but having covered the clintons for many years, i thought the way they raise money particularly created potential for problems. Who is mark . A partner at the law firm and originally, Seattle Law Firm but they have a big office and they are the lead law firm for the democratic party. What was his involvement in the funding project . Referring to he was the person we went to to see if the democrats were interested in continuing this research and he was simultaneously the lawyer for the National Committee and the clinton campaign. Dealings with a lawyer, did that give you indemnity . Essentially i think its now widely reported, the original idea was to develop information that would be useful in the context of advertising public statements and that sort of thing and it was continued as a legal representation because of terms long history of doing people or saying things about him. So that was the idea, it didnt really protect us from being sued, it was just anticipation of the possibility of knowing that. In fact, when everything went crazy in 2017, we were not indemnified and we found ourselves and found our different distance. I what time did christopher steal play a role . Who is he and when did he come into the picture . Chris was the lead for mike six, he served in the soviet union around the soviet union collapsed. Later became the head of the russia mi six and retired from the service in 2009, almost the exact time i left the journal. We were introduced to friends, mutual interest in russia and oligarchs and we became friendly. Did a little business together over the following years. This part of the world is not a big part of my business so it was an episodic relationship but we did like working together and we did have common interests. So when we finally concluded in the spring of 2016, that there was something unexplained about trumps relationship with russia, he was an obvious person for us to go to to see if we could find out more. By then, we had done research, tens of thousands of pages of documents. We felt we were running out of places to look for Public Information and we needed someone who was able to talk to people. And seek that there was more to be cleaned by talking to people in russia. Was a democratically funded by the time christopher steal came along . It was. The foundation for the decision to bring him on was the work we had done on the republicans but it was the democrat client who provided the funding for that work. In your book, you mentioned a couple of his political positions. He was supportive of the plo and anti margaret thatcher. Should that be a clue to people about his politics . That was his university base, a lot of people had that orientation. I dont think thats really his politics today. The truth is that i have never really asked about his political views because it wouldnt really remain. My firm is all external and we are not very partisan people. Similarly, chris has a security background so the issue of partisanship, it doesnt feature in our daily lives and it doesnt come up in conversations much. So when we got into this, i didnt really ask him about his political orientation. When i first met trump, he said he had had contact with a trump Family Member which was revealed to be evocative trump. He expressed no particular admiration for trump or Hillary Clinton. When did you get his first report . His first report came in june 2016, based on individuals who he had longterm relationships with who were from the region and able to travel to the region and speak to people in the region discreetly. Those oral interviews with people who had knowledge of trumps activities in russia and alleged context of people. How does the report get transmitted . The first one was transmitted on paper by express. We quickly concluded it was not an effective or safe way to transfer information, it was more secure. What was in that first report . What did you do with it . The first report was shocking. Its that broadly stated that there was an operation by the government of russia to support donald trump and help him when election and was aware of this. And cooperating edge. Expected to benefit from it. Biden, it was known that the National Committee and theres some discussion about into the first document. The picture was of the russia attempts in the u. S. And electronic president. That turned out to be correct. What did you do without report . Nothing initially. We eventually obviously we eventually tried to follow it up and see if we could get more and i cant really get into what we did, what we do in terms of our client but you can assume the information we receive would go to our clients as a matter of course. You talk about progress, the fact that you didnt want to provide just this raw report. He wanted to edit it. Thats not quite right. So there were two things, we can talk about the fact that chris wanted to take this to the fbi. He thought this was a National Security concern. Raise that with us. We initially were hesitant because didnt really know if that was an appropriate thing to do. We didnt think our client would be wild about the idea but we concluded if he thought that was the right thing to do if there was a crime in progress, that he should do that. What we didnt want to do was interfere with that process by editing the document or in any way politically influencing his report to the fbi which is not really a political matter for us. There is a National Security issue. What we did want to do and did do in terms of any of these matters, we tried to followup some of the Information Reports using our own methods which are open sourced so we would look for articles in russian language media, other places, for about some of the people named in the reports so a lot of what we try to do is to not necessarily prove or disprove things, some of this didnt fit that category. Its whether the things in there are credible. What we conclude is that a lot of this reporting was very credible. You quote mr. Steele saying he feels strongly that 70 of whats in this report is correct. Weve been through that, 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. There was one issue and that, i believe in the first report. It was a salacious part of this and you want sure he wanted to include it. Is a story of Sexual Activity in a hotel in moscow. We had mixed feelings about it. Chris thought it was significant. Chris thought it was significant information because it could suggest there was black male, potential black male material on trump. In washington, we had a different reaction because we, at this from a different perspective, which was that this was a story that was never going to be proven or disproven and it was neither here nor there for us, we were much more concerned with the overall picture of conspiracy for the election. Ill add that this was not the only thing that chris found in the early reporting that created concerned about black male. There was also the fact that there was a secret relationship between the claimant and trump that involved money. That part has turned out to be accurate. He was conducting a secret business deal in russia that involved the kremlin during that campaign. So in the main, chris was basically right. There was a compromise. You could argue back and forth whether it was personal in nature financial in nature but there wasnt some kind of secret relationship that. How many reports were contained in the dossier . It was around a dozen. Over june through december 2016. First one in june, at wha what. Back did it start leaking out to the media and how . What we talk about in the book, or the summer of 2016, as the russia hack attack intensified and the deliberate computer crimes against our client got worse and worse. We talked to reporters about things that are in the dossier but didnt say what was in the dossier. We believed that was wrong material that didnt need to go out to anyone. We used as information, we talk to people about some of these s