Michael: What if the most explosive political document of the 21st century—the Steele Dossier—wasn't the start of the Trump-Russia story, but the shocking mid-point of an investigation that began with a simple hunch about a B-list celebrity's bad real estate deals? Kevin: Wait, so you're telling me this whole international espionage saga, the thing that dominated the news for years, didn't start with spies and secret meetings? It started with something as boring as… property records? Michael: Exactly. It’s an absolutely wild ride, and it’s the incredible story at the heart of Crime in Progress by Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch. Kevin: And these aren't just any authors. These are the guys who ran Fusion GPS. They were veteran investigative reporters at The Wall Street Journal before this, experts at tracking dirty money. They literally wrote the book on this because they lived it. Michael: They did. And their background is key. They weren't political ideologues; they were shoe-leather reporters who followed the money. And the money, in this case, led them to some very dark places.

Kevin: Okay, so take us back to the beginning. Before the dossier, before the media frenzy. How does an investigation like this even get off the ground? Michael: It all began in August 2015 with something they internally called 'Project Bangor.' And at the start, it had nothing to do with Russia. A Republican client, worried about Trump’s potential to hijack the party, hired Fusion GPS to do standard opposition research. They just wanted to know: what skeletons are in this guy's closet? Kevin: And with Trump, I imagine that’s a pretty big closet. Where do you even start? Michael: Well, that was the thing. They started with his business record, which they assumed was his biggest strength. But what they found was a complete mess. A litigation search that should have been a page or two for a normal businessman spat back two dozen pages of lawsuits. Bankruptcies, stiffing contractors, endless litigation. Kevin: That’s not exactly the master dealmaker image he projects. Michael: Not at all. And then they found the really troubling stuff. His deep, documented ties to mob-controlled entities. We're talking about deals with powerful Italian and Russian syndicates. One of the authors notes that no serious presidential candidate in history has ever had Trump’s depth of connections to organized crime. Kevin: Whoa, hold on. Mob ties? Like, actual Mafia connections? Can you give me an example? Michael: The book is full of them, but the story of Felix Sater is a perfect case study. Sater was a Russian-born real estate executive with a very colorful past. He’d done prison time for stabbing a man in the face with a margarita glass stem and was later convicted in a massive $40 million stock fraud scheme involving the Mafia. Kevin: Yikes. And Trump was in business with this guy? Michael: Deeply. Sater’s company, Bayrock, partnered with Trump on the Trump SoHo hotel project. Sater even had an office in Trump Tower, just one floor below the Trump Organization. He was a senior advisor to Trump. Yet, when Trump was later questioned about Sater under oath, he claimed he barely knew the guy. He said, "If he were sitting in the room right now, I really wouldn’t know what he looked like." Kevin: Come on. That’s a provable lie, right? Michael: A provably false statement, made under oath. And this is the pattern they kept finding. They also uncovered the story of the Trump Tower construction, where he used around 200 undocumented Polish workers—the 'Polish Brigade'—paying them off the books to cut costs. A federal judge later found there was "strong evidence" Trump knew exactly what was happening. Kevin: So he used illegal labor to build his signature tower and then ran on a hardcore anti-immigration platform? The hypocrisy is stunning. How did none of this stick to him? Michael: That was the frustration the authors describe. Trump had this 'teflon' quality. He was a celebrity, a reality TV star. The public seemed to have already priced in the fact that he was a bit of a scoundrel. But for the investigators at Fusion, these weren't just scandals. They were clues. Sater's Russian background and his mob ties started to make them wonder. They had this one quote from Simpson that perfectly sums it up: "Trump’s the perfect host for parasites looking to launder money." Kevin: Ah, so that’s the pivot. The criminal connections start pointing towards a specific country. Michael: Precisely. They started to see that Trump's late-career comeback, after all his bankruptcies in the 90s, might have been fueled by a firehose of cash from the former Soviet Union. The deals were murky, the partners were shady, and it all seemed to lead back to Russia. They realized they were onto something much bigger than just business fraud.

Kevin: Okay, so they suspect there's a Russia connection, but it's all circumstantial—shady deals, questionable characters. How do you get inside the Kremlin to find out what's really going on? Michael: You can't, not with public records. And that's when they realized they needed to change the game. As their Republican client dropped out and a new client, representing the Democrats, came on board, they decided they needed to hire a specialist. They needed someone who could get human intelligence from inside Russia. They needed a spy. Kevin: And this is where Christopher Steele enters the picture. How does a small D.C. research firm even find a former MI6 agent? Michael: It's a great story. Glenn Simpson had actually met Steele years earlier. Steele had left MI6, where he was a top Russia expert, and started his own private intelligence firm, Orbis. They had a shared interest in Russian kleptocracy. So, in May 2016, Simpson flew to London and met Steele at Heathrow Airport. He laid out the situation: they were investigating Trump, they kept hitting these Russian walls, and they needed someone to look into it. Kevin: What was Steele’s reaction? Was he immediately on board? Michael: He was intrigued. Simpson asked him to do a one-month inquiry, just to see if there was any fire to go with all the smoke. As Steele himself said, "Kompromat is a serious issue. It still happens all the time." He knew exactly what to look for. Kevin: And then the first report comes back. This is the moment, right? Michael: This is the moment. The book describes it with such tension. The first memo arrives by FedEx, and Simpson and Fritsch read it. They are absolutely floored. It was far beyond anything they could have imagined. This is where Simpson famously told congressional investigators, "We threw a line in the water and Moby Dick came back." Kevin: Okay, this is the part everyone thinks they know—the infamous "golden showers" allegation. But what was the real bombshell in that first memo? Michael: The salacious details got all the headlines, but the core of the report was terrifyingly serious. It alleged that the Russian regime had been "cultivating, supporting and assisting Trump for at least 5 years." The goal, endorsed by Putin himself, was to sow division in the Western alliance. And it claimed the Kremlin "has compromised TRUMP through his activities in Moscow sufficiently to be able to blackmail him." Kevin: Wow. So it wasn't just a dirty weekend in Moscow. It was an allegation of a years-long intelligence operation to co-opt a U.S. presidential candidate. That's a different universe of trouble. Michael: A completely different universe. It shifted the entire project from political opposition research to a national security emergency. Kevin: But let's be real. A lot of people, including some very respected journalists, later called the dossier "a garbage document." It was unverified. How did Simpson and Fritsch process that? Did they just blindly believe it? Michael: Not at all. They were journalists, so their first instinct was skepticism. They grilled Steele on his sourcing. But they make a crucial point in the book: while they couldn't independently verify every claim, the dossier provided a coherent and chilling explanation for all the bizarre data points they had already collected over the past year. Trump's weird praise for Putin, his business ties to Russian oligarchs, his campaign's pro-Russia policy shifts—suddenly, it all clicked into place within the framework Steele provided. Kevin: So it was less about proving every single detail and more about the overall pattern it revealed. It was a credible theory of the case. Michael: Exactly. And Steele himself was a highly credible source, a man the FBI had trusted and worked with for years on other cases, like the FIFA corruption scandal. They knew he wasn't some crank. He was a professional who was just as shocked by what he was finding as they were.

Kevin: So they're sitting on this political atom bomb. What on earth do you do with that information? You can't just tweet it out. Michael: That's the dilemma that defines the rest of the book. Steele, feeling a profound sense of duty, decides he has to go to the FBI. He tells Simpson, "This was not... part of the work... This was like, you know, you’re driving to work and you see something happen and you call 911." He saw it as a five-alarm fire for U.S. national security. Kevin: Did the FBI take it seriously? Michael: Initially, yes. Steele met with his FBI contact in Rome. The Bureau already had its own investigation open, codenamed "Crossfire Hurricane," partly based on a tip from an Australian diplomat about Trump aide George Papadopoulos bragging that Russia had dirt on Clinton. So Steele's information landed on fertile ground. But then, things got complicated. Kevin: How so? Michael: As the election got closer, the FBI seemed to be dragging its feet. Then came the October surprise: FBI Director Comey publicly re-opened the investigation into Hillary Clinton's emails, while saying nothing publicly about the active investigation into the Trump campaign's ties to Russia. Steele and the Fusion team felt completely betrayed. Kevin: That's when they decide to go to the media, right? To try and force the issue. Michael: It was a Hail Mary. They decided to brief a handful of trusted, top-tier journalists from places like The New York Times and The Washington Post. They shared the general findings, hoping someone would dig in and break the story. But the real explosion happened almost by accident. Kevin: The BuzzFeed leak. Michael: The BuzzFeed leak. After the election, Senator John McCain, deeply concerned, got a copy of the dossier and gave it to Comey. But McCain's associate, a man named David Kramer, also started sharing it around Washington. He gave a copy to a BuzzFeed reporter, Ken Bensinger. And on January 10, 2017, just after CNN reported that the President-elect had been briefed on the dossier's existence, BuzzFeed published the entire, unredacted thing online. Kevin: Oh man. All of it? The unverified, raw intelligence? Michael: All of it. The book describes the sheer panic. Simpson called the BuzzFeed reporter and screamed, "Take those fucking reports down right now! You are going to get people killed!" He was terrified for Steele's sources in Russia. But it was too late. The dossier was public, and all hell broke loose. Kevin: And that's when the narrative flips. The story is no longer about Trump and Russia. It becomes about Fusion GPS and the "fake" dossier. Michael: Exactly. Trump and his allies launched a massive counter-offensive. They branded it a "political witch hunt." Fox News and conservative media went into overdrive, painting Fusion GPS as villains in a deep-state conspiracy. The investigators became the investigated. Devin Nunes, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, was caught colluding with the White House to create a bogus counter-narrative about illegal surveillance. Kevin: It's an upside-down world. The people trying to warn the country about a potential national security threat become the "enemies of the people." Michael: That's the core tragedy of the story. They were facing threats, massive legal bills, and a relentless smear campaign orchestrated from the highest levels of government. They had to fight for their reputations, their business, and in some ways, for the truth itself.

Michael: When you step back from all the chaos, Crime in Progress is about so much more than just a dossier. It's a story about how our information ecosystem is fundamentally broken. You have professional, credible investigators uncovering a pattern of behavior that poses a serious threat to democracy. They follow the rules, they go to the authorities. Kevin: But it almost doesn't matter. In a hyper-partisan world, the counter-narrative, the 'witch hunt' story, can become more powerful than the facts. It's weaponized information. Michael: Precisely. The book shows that the Mueller report, when it finally came out, actually corroborated the central thesis of the dossier: that Russia ran a sweeping and systematic interference campaign, and that the Trump campaign welcomed the help. Many of the specific events Steele reported were confirmed. But by the time the report was released, the political battlefield had been so muddied that many people just shrugged. Kevin: It really leaves you with a chilling question, doesn't it? In an age of 'fake news' and political information warfare, can the truth still win? The authors clearly believe it's a fight worth having, or they wouldn't have written this book. Michael: They definitely believe it's a fight worth having. They end the book by making it clear that the crime is still in progress, that these threats to democracy haven't gone away. It’s a powerful and, frankly, unsettling conclusion. Kevin: It’s a complex and polarizing story, and we’d love to hear what you think. Find us on our socials and share your take on this. Michael: This is Aibrary, signing off.