It started to evolve and then i decided what i really love to do in journalism was investigate complex cases and that there was less market for that in the journalism world for ghost stories were getting shorter, emphasis on breaking news bricco so i decided to try to see if i could do that sort of work in the private capacity. What sort of stories did you do at the wall street journal quex. I started off with politics the early eighties and late nineties and investigating politicians for possible corruption and campaignfinance abuse, ethics in washington and government and over the years that involve two different types of Investigative Journalism with financial crime, fraud, corporate cases like enron, scandals, financial crisis and savings alone and after 9 11 started to branch out to International Criminal such as terrorism and organized crime crime. What was peters role at the journal . To make he was my editor we were stationed together in brussels which is the headquarters. A Foreign Correspondent for most of his career from mexico to brazil to singapore than ended up in brussels with me. What type of clients did you attract at fusion gps quex. Involved in complicated cases trying to figure out if they were competing adequately or if there were irregularities or contracts those of the big two. And you did opensource research quex. My specialty was documents i was known as the document hound and really its what i like to do to amass large quantities of documents to see if i can use them to unravel a mystery or figure out a puzzle. The United States is rich of public sources of information compared to other parts of the world. I knew had to do that from my years at the journal. The Business Plan was to use private clients and the greater resources they had to engage in the large scale document and acquisition projects then we would subject them to analysis to come up with results that would be useful to clients we call that Decision Support to enable a client to make decisions how to proceed with whatever problem they are facing whether fraud or decision of how to compete against other companies. Not a Political Opposition Research firm quex. We didnt do anything like that really. For several years. What was project to bangor quex. It was named for a team we named our projects using random categories or cities or types of fish and the idea is not to give up any clues what that project is about and then to be initiated september october 2015 and that was a look at Donald Trumps business career. And anything that would be significant. The associate of mine from washington politics who said he would be interested and ask if he would Fund Research on donald trump and said i just might. Eventually to get hooked up called the free beacon which is a conservative oriented publications. Paul singer quex. Is among the founders of the free beacon i have never seen documentation of that. And he funded project bangor quex. It was funded by the free beacon and we did not acquire where the free beacon got their funding from. I think it was generally known at the time he was a supporter. Why would a conservative publication presumably Republican Fund and Opposition Research project from donald trump quex. It was early primary season for the republican nomination that donald trump was not a real republican and some of his positions and the history suggested maybe he was a democrat or policy positions more akin to a democrat with free trade so there was substantive concerns and that he is not a viable nominee and if nominated the republicans would lose because of his character or policy positions the demagogue orientation to have a terrible experience with pat buchanan with the populist candidate who damaged george bushs reelection. You write in your book crime in progress from about march 2016 that now there was unanimity on the need to do it they could to keep trump out of the white house and also unanimity as to why. Many strengths disqualified him from the job and up little rhetoric and the ties to the criminal underworld with russia money and the record of chicanery tops the list all prior to project bangor. That was from the republicans but you are right this is where we were spring 2016 when the republican primaries were starting to wind down with seven months of research with donald trump i had formed some very definite opinions of who this person was and if he was qualified to be president and he wasnt and that indicates a lot of our concern of the issues that are now front and center over russia but really about his associations from the figures of the underworld like the Italian Mafia he was doing business with a lot of characters related to the rusher or former soviet union crime world. Was this a follow the money case quex. It was it started out as a litigation survey because as we talk in the book he has been involved in more lawsuits than anyone i have ever investigated an incredible number of cases so it was a paper chase in the beginning but as time went on you understand the empire to figure out where the money was coming from and more and more it was a question where is the money coming from for his projects because he cant get money from banks they wont do business with him because he went bankrupt six times. A lot of other developers wouldnt because the history of not following through on his agreements so where is his money coming from and mystery plots overseas. You indicate a lot of the trump tower condominiums were sold to russians. People from the former soviet union as our by jean not all russians that was one of his biggest sources of the sale. Why is that region of the world seem to have so many shadowy figures quex. Because the communist structures make it possible to survive in the post communist era at led to plutocracy of stealing and cheating and dealing in taxes and moving money out of the country with the failure of our countries of the west to instill more of a rule of law culture it was not embedded in the dna. Did you find names connected with trump that you had found in the mid nineties when you are doing financial stories for the wall street journal quex. The bank of new york scandal which is a case of russian money flowing into new yorks biggest banks. Later on peter and i put to gather stories along with my wife about russian plutocracy in Eastern Europe and we wrote about Paul Manafort and his relationship with those deep figures from ukraine. And to do a great deal of reporting and these foreign parties and as an unregistered Foreign Agent in both of the surface in 2016 that is shocking to disturbing to a great deal of concern on my part and that this was taking place we didnt fully understand. One of the issues you talk about with crime in progress is presales. Thats a way to finance condo developments and covering a lot of businesses over the years thats new to me in this case. Essentially what you do when you put together a condo project you try to get commitments from buyers and if you can presell one third of the units that income can be used to finance the project go its a way to capitalize a Development Without having to get funding from a bank or another source. To promote the development so that stimulates demand for the rest of the units the sales are hyped there is a lot of puffery about how many presales you make if you inflate your presale price you can be accused of fraud by buyers that claim you were misled so there was a lot of hype about presales and not the commitments that they claimed. And then to transition in may may 2016. How did that happen quex. After we concluded donald trump would not be a suitable person we reached out to some folks in the democratic world and offered our services to them. There is a discussion of this in the book i was happy to set out the general election i thought there were controversies around Hillary Clinton i didnt want to get involved with because she also has a lot of international dealings that are problematic. So we were going to sit it out but then we found enough with trump equally disturbing we felt we didnt have a choice. And then to have an obligation to keep going. You said Hillary Clinton is the russia of two evils. I have high regard with people around her we dont with covering the clintons for many years. I felt the way they raise money particularly created potential for problems. Mark is a partner at the Washington Law Firm and originally it is seattle headquartered. And the lead law firm. So then to see if the democrats were interested to continue this research and he were simultaneously and for the clinton campaign. Does that give you indemnity as the lawyer quex. It does not indemnify us as it is widely reported the original idea was to develop information that would be useful in context of advertising and public statements and as a legal representation of trumps history of suing people for saying things about him. That was the idea. So then when it went crazy in 2017 we were not indemnified so at what point did Christopher Steele who is he and at what point did he come into the picture . Remake he was the lead russian asked mi six serving around the time the soviet union collapsed and became at the head of the desk at mi six retired 2009 almost the time i left the wall street journal. We were introduced in 2010 by mutual friends and we became friendly and did little bit of business together it is an episodic relationship but we did like working together and have these common interests. So when we finally concluded spring 2016 there was something unexplained with Donald Trumps russia it was an obvious person to go to. So then we pulled tens of thousands of pages of documents and running out of places to look that theres more to be gleaned by talking to people in russia. Was it democratically funded when Christopher Steele came along quex. It was. The foundation for the decision to bring him on was work under the republicans but the democratic clients and to be supportive of the plo and anti margaret thatcher. That should be a clue about his politics. That was his University Days i dont think thats really his Politics Today but the truth is i never really ask chris about his political views. My firm is x journalist and were not very partisan people so with the National Security background it doesnt feature in our daily lives or in our conversations very much. So i didnt ask about his political orientation so that he had contact with the member that then was ivanka tromp so he had no gray aberration. How did he go about his work. The first report was june june 2016 it was based from the region. And to travel to the region and speak discreetly. It was oral interviews with people who have knowledge of activities and russia with alleged contacts. How did that report get transmitted quex. The first was on paper by a courier service. We quickly concluded that was not an effective or safe way to transmit digitally was more secure. What about the next report . Mimic the first report was shocking it broadly stated there was an operation to support donald trump and help him win election and that trump was aware of this and expected to benefit from it. By then the russians had hacked the dnc and there is some discussion of that is that document the picture was the russian attempt to subvert the democracy in the United States and that turned out to be correct. Host what did you do with that report . Nothing initially. We tried to follow it up to see if we could get more in terms of client but we can assume those information we receive would go to clients as a matter of course course. But Mister Simpson at the same time you talk about you didnt want to necessarily just provide a real report you wanted it to be vetted. Thats not quite right. There are two things we can talk about chris wanted to take this to the fbi he thought it was a National Security concern and raised that with us initially we didnt know if that was appropriate if our client would be wild about that idea but we thought if he thought that was the right thing to do and there was a crime in progress then he should do that but we didnt want to do was interfere with the process by editing the document in any way to political influence the report to the fbi it was a security issue. What we did do in terms of our own understanding is we try to follow up some of the information using our open Source Systems for articles of russian language media to tell us about the people named in these reports a lot of what we try to do not try to prove or disprove things it doesnt fit that category but if they are credible and we still believe this reporting was very credible. And you quote mister steele to say he feels strongly 70 percent of what is in his report is correct. We agree with that we did evacuations for the book with three years of hindsight and its very strong stuff and still holds up. There was one issue in the first report that was a salacious part youre not sure you wanted to include. There is a story of a sexual escapade and we just had mixed feelings about it chris thought it was significant the socalled pletter tape and thought it was significant because it could suggest there was blackmail potential on donald trump. In washington we had a different reaction because we come at this from a very different perspective that this was a story that would never be proven or disproven and was here nor there we were more concerned with the overall picture of the conspiracy i will add this isnt the only thing chris found in reporting that created concerns about blackmail that the fact there was a secret relationship between the kremlin and then was a secret business deal and russia so basically is right with the compromise you could argue back and forth if it was personal in nature or financial but not that there was no secret relationship. How many reports are contained in the steel dossier quex. I believe around one dozen june through december 2016. Out in june at what point did it start leaking to the media and how . What we talk about in the book over the summer 2016 as the russian hack attack and testified on dench in my and test of intensified we talk to reporters but we didnt tell anyone what was in the dossier we had this raw material and we used it for worker information and talked about the subjects it was only after the election that we really shared some of that was shared at the very beginning or at the very end of the election with this addition all sharing of the contents after the election and early 2017 we never intended for this to leak to the press or be presented online. Host january 2017 it hits the press. Right what we did at the end we were concerned the fbi was not taking this seriously we have seen indications donald trump agents at the fbi so it was suggested we could raise this with senator john mccain and he could raise it with james call me and we could ensure this was being dealt with and we felt that would hopefully put this to rest in terms of our obligation to make sure this wasnt swept under the rug so we gave it to one of his advisers kramer he is an acquaintance of mine and someone that had helped us back in the 2000s with our early stories when my wife and i were at the wall street journal. She originally had met him and had been helpful to us. So we trusted him from that relationship so given at that time we might have suspected he was going to do the same thing but as it turned out he shared it with some journalists and then they eventually published it that happened on january 10th before the inauguration and then all hell broke loose. Host what do you mean . What happened . We became subjects of the International Media frenzy and immediately became targets for the Trump Associates accused of peddling information and journalism for higher. And were placed at the center of this controversy if donald trump had a coverup with the government of russia. I just remember getting calls from japan in the middle of the night and crazy stuff like that because of the nature of the controversy and the fact russia was engaged in this hybrid war against our country created some security concerns. Your firm was described as the peak low profile in the various were any of those descriptions correct . We do something that is unique that combines the skills journalism with other fields like intelligence hence the name of fusion but not because we are deliberately secretive this is where i do think we are misrepresented some say were looking for attention we are asked journalists in public life all my adult life basically so i have done a lot of public things i speak at universities and journalism conferences. So to be called secretive is a misnomer that we were comfortable in our plans. Host what was Christopher Steeles reaction in england when this hit the news . He packed up the kids and left home immediately and went to stand with it on stay with friends and other places. Because of his previous work on russia there was an immediate concern he would be in danger and there was some legitimate concern of retaliation and then the harassment of the media with you find yourself in the middle so that was a very uncertain time and we were concerned about all sorts of things from the russians. Host during this time there is a lots of opinion reporting and you take on your colleagues from the wall street journal specifically kim. Take. Taking on a guess is the right word we find it almost amusing they are so insistent on defaming us and have a longterm campaign of defamation i think it is beneath that paper that has a great tradition for journalism to constantly engage in these attacks against us so it is remarkable for a long time they would have annunciations of us almost daily all kinds of allegations with no semblance to reality the point im trying to make is that this is by people who know us and are very familiar with our backgrounds very careful journalists who are pretty straightforward and honest its just sad to s