Narrator: On January 11, 2017, the political world detonated. BuzzFeed News published a 35-page collection of raw, unverified intelligence memos. The document, soon known as the Steele dossier, contained explosive and salacious allegations about President-elect Donald Trump’s ties to Russia, including claims of long-term cultivation by the Kremlin and the existence of compromising tapes. The fallout was immediate. Glenn Simpson, a partner at the investigative firm behind the dossier, was on the phone, furious. He yelled at the BuzzFeed reporter who published it, "Take those fucking reports down right now! You are going to get people killed!"

How did a private research firm, hired to do routine opposition research, end up at the epicenter of a global political firestorm, in possession of information that suggested a U.S. presidential candidate might be compromised by a hostile foreign power? The inside story is laid bare in the book Crime in Progress, where authors Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch, the founders of Fusion GPS, recount their journey from a simple investigation into a businessman's past to a high-stakes battle against the most powerful office in the world.

Narrator: The investigation didn't begin with Russia. It started in 2015 with a project codenamed "Bangor," funded by a conservative Republican donor who wanted to stop Donald Trump from securing the party's nomination. Fusion GPS, a firm of former investigative journalists, was hired to do what they did best: dig into Trump's past. Initially, the focus was on his well-documented and chaotic business history. They uncovered a staggering number of lawsuits—two dozen pages worth from federal court databases, far more than any typical businessman. They revisited Trump’s numerous bankruptcies and his history of partnering with questionable figures.

A key thread quickly emerged: Trump’s relationship with Felix Sater and the Bayrock Group. Sater, a Russian-born real estate executive with a criminal past and ties to the Mafia, had worked out of an office just one floor below the Trump Organization. He was a central figure in the Trump SoHo hotel development, a project plagued by accusations of fraud where sales figures were allegedly inflated to lure in more buyers. As Fusion dug deeper, they saw a pattern. Trump’s late-career comeback seemed to be fueled by a river of cash from the former Soviet Union, often from anonymous buyers paying well above market rate. This connection to Sater and the flow of Russian money was the turning point. The investigation, once focused on domestic business failures, began to pivot eastward, toward Moscow.

Narrator: A core part of Fusion's strategy was to expose what they saw as the central hypocrisy of Trump's public persona. He campaigned as a self-made, ultrapatriotic tycoon who would put American workers first and crack down on illegal immigration. Fusion’s research painted a starkly different picture. They unearthed the story of the construction of his signature building, Trump Tower. To cut costs, Trump had employed a team of about 200 undocumented Polish workers, known as the "Polish Brigade," who were paid under the table and worked in grueling conditions. A federal judge later found "strong evidence" that Trump knew exactly what was happening.

This hypocrisy extended to his other businesses. While he railed against immigrants, his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida was one of the country's largest importers of foreign guest workers. And while he attacked China on the campaign trail, his own son-in-law, Jared Kushner, was using a controversial visa-for-cash program to finance a Jersey City real estate project with hundreds of millions of dollars from Chinese investors. Fusion believed that exposing Trump as a charlatan who exploited the very people he claimed to champion was key to revealing his true character to voters.

Narrator: As Trump secured the Republican nomination, Fusion's original funding dried up. But a new client emerged: the Democratic Party, represented by the law firm Perkins Coie. With this new mandate, the investigation intensified, and the Russia angle became paramount. Fusion's team had amassed a mountain of open-source data suggesting a troubling affinity between Trump and Russia, but they had hit a wall. They couldn't see inside the Kremlin.

To bridge this gap, they turned to Christopher Steele. A former MI6 agent who had run the agency's Russia desk, Steele was a seasoned, respected intelligence professional with a deep network of sources. Fusion hired him for what was initially a modest, one-month inquiry: to use his human intelligence network to find out what was really going on between Trump and Moscow. They didn't share their own research with him, wanting his work to be completely independent. They simply asked him to look into Trump's activities in Russia.

Narrator: In June 2016, the first of Steele's memos arrived at Fusion's office. The contents were stunning. The report alleged that the Russian regime had been cultivating Trump for at least five years, aiming to sow division in the Western alliance. It claimed the Kremlin held compromising material, or kompromat, on him, including the now-infamous "golden showers" incident at the Ritz-Carlton in Moscow. The memo also alleged a well-developed conspiracy of cooperation between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin.

The Fusion partners were shocked. As Simpson later told investigators, it was as if "we threw a line in the water and Moby Dick came back." The claims were raw and unverified, but they offered a terrifyingly coherent explanation for all the disparate data points Fusion had collected over the past year—Trump's praise of Putin, his campaign's pro-Russia policy shifts, and the unexplained flows of Russian money. The project was no longer just political opposition research; it had crossed into the realm of a national security emergency.

Narrator: Alarmed by his findings, Christopher Steele felt a professional and patriotic duty to inform the authorities. With Fusion's reluctant blessing, he contacted his old colleagues at the FBI. This act set off a chain of events that would eventually bring the dossier into the public eye. The information was deemed credible enough that the intelligence community briefed both President Obama and President-elect Trump on its contents in early January 2017.

Meanwhile, a copy of the dossier had made its way to Senator John McCain, who, deeply concerned, personally delivered it to FBI Director James Comey. McCain's associate, David Kramer, however, shared the document more widely than agreed upon, including with BuzzFeed reporter Ken Bensinger. On January 10, 2017, after CNN first reported that the president had been briefed on the dossier's existence, BuzzFeed made the fateful decision to publish all 35 pages. The secret was out, and the firestorm began.

Narrator: The publication of the dossier triggered a ferocious counterattack from the Trump administration and its allies. Trump immediately labeled the dossier "fake news" and the entire Russia investigation a "political witch hunt." A new narrative was born: the real crime wasn't potential collusion with Russia, but a "deep state" conspiracy to undermine the president.

Fusion GPS found itself at the center of this new narrative. Republican-led congressional committees, particularly under Devin Nunes of the House Intelligence Committee, turned their investigative power not on Russia, but on Fusion. Nunes engaged in what the authors describe as a sham investigation, colluding with the White House to create the impression that the Obama administration had illegally spied on the Trump campaign. Fusion GPS was buried in subpoenas, their bank records were targeted, and their partners faced threats and harassment. The investigators had become the investigated, a tactic designed to distract, discredit, and exhaust anyone who dared to scrutinize the president's ties to Russia.

Narrator: Ultimately, Crime in Progress is the story of how a private investigation into a candidate's past stumbled upon a threat to national security and was, in turn, targeted by the very power it sought to hold accountable. The book's most critical takeaway is its stark illustration of how modern political warfare is waged. It's a battle where information is weaponized, where government power is used to attack private citizens, and where the goal is not to find the truth, but to create a counter-narrative so loud and confusing that the truth becomes impossible to discern.

The book leaves us with a chilling question that extends far beyond the Steele dossier. In an era where the media is labeled the "enemy of the people" and investigations are dismissed as "witch hunts," how do we protect the institutions of accountability? When the act of seeking facts is itself framed as a crime, the foundations of democracy begin to crack.