#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - "I've read kind of all the books
on this subject . . . and this is the one you want to read."--Rachel
Maddow
Before Ukraine, before impeachment: This is the never-before-told inside
story of the high-stakes, four-year-long investigation into Donald
Trump's Russia ties--culminating in the Steele dossier, and sparking the
Mueller report--from the founders of political opposition research
company Fusion GPS.
Fusion GPS was founded in 2010 by Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch, two
former reporters at The Wall Street Journal who decided to abandon the
struggling news business and use their reporting skills to conduct
open-source investigations for businesses and law firms--and opposition
research for political candidates. In the fall of 2015, they were hired
to look into the finances of Donald Trump.
What began as a march through a mind-boggling trove of lawsuits,
bankruptcies, and sketchy overseas projects soon took a darker turn: The
deeper Fusion dug, the more it began to notice names that Simpson and
Fritsch had come across during their days covering Russian
corruption--and the clearer it became that the focus of Fusion's
research going forward would be Trump's entanglements with Russia.
To help them make sense of what they were seeing, Simpson and Fritsch
engaged the services of a former British intelligence agent and Russia
expert named Christopher Steele. He would produce a series of
memos--which collectively became known as the Steele dossier--that
raised deeply alarming questions about the nature of Trump's ties to a
hostile foreign power. Those memos made their way to U.S. intelligence
agencies, and then to President Barack Obama and President-elect Trump.
On January 10, 2017, the Steele dossier broke into public view, and the
Trump-Russia story reached escape velocity. At the time, Fusion GPS was
just a ten-person consulting firm tucked away above a Starbucks near
Dupont Circle, but it would soon be thrust into the center of the
biggest news story on the planet--a story that would lead to accusations
of witch hunts, a relentless campaign of persecution by congressional
Republicans, bizarre conspiracy theories, lawsuits by Russian oligarchs,
and the Mueller report.
In Crime in Progress, Simpson and Fritsch tell their story for the
first time--a tale of the high-stakes pursuit of one of the biggest,
most important stories of our time--no matter the costs.
