The Truth Behind the Steele Dossier
S1: This podcast may contain explicit language and feel free to use explicit language when you review the gist on i-Tunes, it helps other people find the show.
S2: It’s Friday, December 6, 2019 from Slate, it’s the gist.
S3: I’m Mike PESCA. Now, the other day, I praise Chuck Todd. He deserved my praise. But do not think I’m going all wobbly on my general dyspepsia, towards our interlocutors. There is a Chuck Todd tendency and I would like to highlight and thereby eradicate. That’s at least how it works in my brain.
S4: And this is a good time to bring it up, because this pretty much right now. This is the weekend that will determine the college football playoffs. Now, maybe you’re thinking, as I just said, that I don’t care about the college football playoffs. Yeah. Maybe you don’t. Maybe you just like listening to podcasts or watching TV shows about politics. So you feel like what I’m about, say, or what I’m about to highlight? Because what I would like to do is give you some idea of this tendency of Chuck Todd’s. It’s not endemic to Chuck Todd, but it is somewhat of an epidemic with Chuck Todd here.
S5: This just from last weekend, Senator Amy Klobuchar, a Democrat from Minnesota. Sorry about the membership. Minnesota. Yes. Is. Hey, that is tickets. This ball was in our reach and a good elite well ahead of the season.
S4: Rub about that with Democratic Senator Amy Klobuchar. As you can tell, here’s Republican Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana.
S5: We will leave it there. Senator Kennedy. Republican from Louisiana. You guys didn’t get tripped up this weekend. So LSU is clear sailing for next week, but don’t blow it.
S4: College football. Sometimes it’s baseball. Sometimes in other sport. But Chuck Todd, euge Miami Hurricanes fan, always finds a chance to bond over college football. Oh, it settles all disputes. B, Republican, Democrat or crazy conspiracy pro Ukrainian Republican like Senator Kennedy. No matter how tough the questions, Chuck Todd thinks little college football bonding, always the proper tonic. Let me say this. And I vow to you right here, right now, to you, my listeners, that I will vote for any politician who, when confronted with Chuck Todd Solicitude on the topic of college football, says something like, you know, I actually don’t care for college sports. And, you know, just the man to do it. Right. Well, we’ll have to leave it there, Senator Sanders. Thanks for coming on. I see your home state college team is on the ice tonight. Good luck to the cat amounts. Sorry, Chuck, I cannot abide the indentured servitude nature of college sports. Plus, Vermont, one night 2 with Tarbell with Tarbell. Chuck, you would get my vote on the show today. I shpiel about Cory Booker’s explanation for why Kamala Harris dropped out. But first, the researchers who hired Steele to put together the Steele dossier have been dragged through the mud by defenders of Donald Trump. But in truth, Glenn Simpson and his fusion g._p._s partner, Peter Fritsche, are, in fact, top notch researchers who unearthed a lot of info that is deserving of an airing.
S6: Glenn Simpson stopped by to talk about his history as a journalist, a researcher and a participant in a presidential investigation.
S7: The Steele Dossier Fusion g._p._s Ukraine. Paul Manafort, Oleg Dharapak, sky, ostrich skin jackets it’s all there in crime, in progress. Inside the Steele dossier and the Fusion g._p._s investigation of Donald Trump by the men who were the co-founders of Fusion g._p._s who hired Steele to assemble what became known as his dossier, which was actually a collection of over 17 documents. Glenn Simpson and Peter Fresh are those men. Glenn Simpson joins me now. Thanks for coming on, Glenn Beck. So there is a scene in the book when you first get the first report, the first portion of what would become known as the Steele dossier. And you and your partner, Peter Fritsche, are reading it in your room and you say and I can say this on the show. Oh, fuck. Was there ever a moment like that pre Steele dossier, just his dealings that may have convinced you this is not a guy who should be president, but were there any oh, fuck moments that you think either the media or his political rivals didn’t follow up on?
S8: Well, there was definitely an oh or an oh shit moment when Paul Manafort walked onto the scene. This was someone that my partner and I had covered at The Wall Street Journal. We knew about his dealings with various oligarchs in the former Soviet Union from stories we’d written about him at the Journal. So he was certainly not someone who was fit and proper to be helming a presidential campaign. And there was definitely an oh shit moment. What the hell is he doing here?
S7: Was Christopher Steele someone you knew from your days of journalism?
S8: He was not. We sort of live parallel lives. We worked on a lot of the same issues. And then we retired at almost the exact same time in 2009. And so we were introduced by mutual friends in 2010 because they knew of our shared interest in kleptocracy and oligarchs.
S7: Yes. I think in the book you point out, you know, you’re both born in 1964, you both had similar careers. You were both, like you said, parallel lives. What could Christopher Steele find via his methods and connections that you couldn’t via your skills as a journalist or what you were doing at Fusion g._p._s?
S8: Well, so I was a document hound, as they call it, in journalism when I was in journalism. So my specialty really is finding public records. And sometimes, you know, in hidden places, that sort of thing. But generally, it’s a it’s a public records oriented job that became even more so after I left the newspaper. And I was unable to approach people directly to interview them, because most of the time my clients, you know, don’t allow me to do that or allow me to say who I’m working for. So I left behind the interviewing side of journalism when I started my business, Chris. On the other hand, is an expert in finding ways to interview people and gather human intelligence, as it’s called, which is a skill that carries over from his work in the Bush government.
S7: So there’s some stuff, you know, about Romanians running around or whatever that I don’t know that has been proved or disproved. But let’s just take possibly the Michael Cohen visiting Prague. He says he never did it and he essentially turned state’s evidence and was pretty honest about a lot of his misdeeds and served time on that. So that led a lot of observers, fair minded observers of Camus. I just want to say, OK, maybe that wasn’t true. And I’ve heard and read in interviews, but you could characterize it how you’d like. OK, maybe that is likely doubtful. Why was that in there and what’s your analysis of why the dossier got it wrong if he did get it wrong?
S9: Well, what we say about this in the book is that, you know, doubts had been raised about the accuracy of this account. We go on to say, and I still think today that in general we believe that this story, this information was provided to us is credible. We, of course, have a little bit of insight into where it comes from. And we can say that, you know, subsequent efforts to look into this have not dissuaded us or made us think that this is somehow made up. Having said that, is there some noise in their reporting that would be unsurprising? Anytime that you gather information from human beings, there is always some you know, there’s so is some noise in the reporting. So you got witnesses to a car accident. One guy says the car was going 50 miles an hour. He sure of it. The other says, no, no, it was 35. One guy says a car was awkward. The other one says it’s blue. I mean, that’s normal. So is there something enacted about this? Pappi, to accept that, in fact, we would be happy to accept it if it turns out to be not true at all, because this is not, you know, the Bible or the tablets. This is, you know, a piece of field reporting in which you would expect not everything would turn out to be exactly right.
S7: If the P tape, the reports of golden showers which were originally made, you say, oh, fuck. If that forever remains unproved, we don’t know one way or the other. Do you regret that it was in the report?
S9: I regret that it turned out to be the distraction that it was. And I think it really diverted people’s attention from the much more important finding, which was that the government of. Russia was conducting a kohver operation to elect Donald Trump. The present United States, and that at some level Donald Trump was witting to this and encouraging it and cooperating in it. And that really was always the thing that freaked me out and concerned me. And that I thought was the thing that needed to be dealt with by U.S. law enforcement. What we don’t regret is not tinkering with Chris’s work in any way. And we felt that, you know, it would be wrong for us to sort of edit his reports in any way in sort of anticipation of how things might be received. We just you know, he wanted to give this stuff to the FBI. He’s the national security guy. We’re ex journalists. We said, Chris, if you believe that this needs to be done and this is the right thing to do, then you go ahead and do it. And we certainly don’t regret that at all.
S7: Now, the theory of the why why Russia would do these this golden shower exercise is to develop compromise on Trump. I have a few questions about that. Don’t they already have much better compromise? How great compromise would be that? I mean, the allegation that Trump watched it, he stood there while it happened. Okay. I don’t know how horribly embarrassing that is. Does he act like someone who has specific compromise on him vs. maybe some of his other motivations, which is he’d like to do business with Russia?
S8: Well, I mean, not that I agree with a lot of what you just said. It never seemed to me like this was the best piece of blackmail, because Donald Trump is someone who already likes to be known as someone who engages in a lot of sexual activity. So I don’t know how you could really blackmail them with something like this, but the compromise doesn’t actually refer to sexual blackmail. It refers to blackmail in general. It doesn’t have to. And leverage. Right. So your premise here, which is don’t they already have enough other stuff? I would agree with that. I think that’s what’s been proven right, which is they did have compromise. They, too, have compromised on him. He was doing a deal with the Kremlin in the middle of the 2016 election, and he’d kept that secret from the American people. That is all the compromise you would need.
S7: There were so many parts of the dossier and your reporting that seemed to come tantalizingly close to proving a crime. I think of all these condo deals in Florida where Russian oligarchs get paid, you know, four times the amount that the going rate, like the set records for sales. And it looks like I don’t know, there’s just a weird end around to get Donald Trump a line of credit. I think of all the dealings that The New Yorker reported on of possible Foreign Corrupt Practices Act violations in, say, Baku, which reading between the lines, maybe you were the ones who put that in Remnick’s here? I don’t know. We were not used to it, but we weren’t. But it just I was thinking, hoping that the Mueller report would look at one or two of these strands and really nail it down. Right. And it seemed to me that he focused on the big strands, the Trump Tower meeting, the euge strands that weren’t a hundred percent now down, but certainly they seemed to be smoke. He found more smoke. But I don’t know that he ever found fire anywhere. Well, I thought he could have.
S9: Well, so we obviously were disappointed by that, too. What we say in the book, our interpretation of this and I was going to actually mention this, we were discussing the Praag issue with Michael Cohen. There seems to be another investigation. Mueller claimed there is a counterintelligence investigation that is looking into some of these deeper issues that weren’t really part of Mueller’s mandate. So we don’t know what’s going on with that investigation, but presumably that’s where they are trying to figure out whether Russian money has compromised the president and sort of longer term, deeper way. And it may well be where they are addressing this whole Prague issue. I mean, the Prague issue is really weird, given all the attention that it’s gotten for Mueller to not really address it is just change.
S1: Didn’t get an injury of the president.
S9: Right. So but the money thing, obviously something that we spent a ton of time on and found deeply disturbing. And as you say, there was lots of indications of some sort of money laundering activity in his properties, whether or not he was directly complicit in it.
S7: So then the way that the Steele dossier was taken and BuzzFeed over your strenuous objections, your whole firms and Steele’s strenuous objections, BuzzFeed puts it online and it’s all out there. The way it was taken was there were caveats. This isn’t we’re not swearing that it’s true, but it is just as you described, a document that is credible and could provide leads. But it was being vetted, I think, in the public as every time something in it was confirmed as reflecting on. Good work by Fusion and we could trust this narrative. And anytime something in it was non confirmed or as with the case of, say, Michael Cohen’s visit to Prague, essentially disproved, it was taken as a real knock on the credibility of the overall exercise. But I’m hearing it shouldn’t have been like I’m hearing that you’re saying you don’t stand by. You never claimed everything was true. And even if the Michael Cohen stuff wasn’t true, which we could talk about, but that shouldn’t matter. It’s not like it’s now 90 percent true that that’s not how this documents should be examined.
S8: It was certainly misinterpreted widely when BuzzFeed, you know, decided to put it on the Internet. And I think that whole fair, you know, remains regrettable in some ways. In others, it was probably salutary in that it did bring a lot of these issues to light in a very urgent kind of immediate way for which we should all be, I guess, thankful the document itself has a great deal of credibility. Key allegations from the documents, such as the fact that the Kremlin was, in fact, trying to intervene in our politics to elect Donald Trump have proven to be true. And we’re way out ahead of the U.S. intelligence. And so, you know, over time, you can say that much of this document has borne out and remains credible. We are as confident in Chris’s professional abilities and the credibility of his work today as we ever were, in fact, more so.
S1: Has this been good for business?
S8: It’s been a wash, I’d say.
S1: We know we’ve continued to great for brand extension. I guess. I mean, if Trump’s stake can fail but still help the Trump brand, what are you guys doing?
S9: Yeah. I mean, the thing that we don’t really love is being depicted as some sort of appendage of the Democratic Party. You know, there’s not really a bunch of Democratic partisans at the company. All the principles are former journalists. And so we find that a little annoying. And in fact, you know, up until this, we had a lot of Republican oriented clients. We still have some. But, you know, we have lost a few.
S1: Yeah. Are you not going to take political, democratic political business going forward?
S9: It depends. I mean, you know, we’re a business. So who will see what people bring in and whether it looks like it’ll be fun? I mean, you know, we run a business, but we’re also in it for the fun. So, you know, we’ll do things that we think are interesting and worthwhile. And certainly we think that the president should not be reelected. And if someone were to come along and ask us to help in that effort, we would very seriously consider that crime in progress.
S7: Yes, it is inside the Steele dossier and the Fusion g._p._s investigation of Donald Trump, written by the co-founders of that company, Peter Fritsche and Glenn Simpson.
S10: Glenn has joined me here today. Thank you so much, Glenn. Thanks, Mike.
S4: And now the schpiel New Jersey Senator Cory Booker was on Pod’s Save America. The other day, maybe even today, and he was asked to assess why California Senator Kamala Harris dropped out of the presidential race graciously. Senator Booker didn’t say well with me in the race. She knew she couldn’t win. No, he did not say that. He did not say that. He did say this.
S11: We are, as Democrats now have a system where clearly a black woman dropped out of this race because she she didn’t have the resources she needed to continue.
S1: And I have to say, this analysis seems quite deficient. First of all, yes, Kamala Harris is of African-American ancestry. And, yes, African-Americans as a whole have much fewer resources and access to, say, moneyed channels than white Americans. I don’t think a high maternal mortality rate among black women has much bearing on Kamala Harris specifically. I don’t think a high incarceration rate that has much bearing on Kamala Harris except the fact that she was a fairly tough prosecutor, but quite a few people in jail. But I will interpret these two points as some factoids that Booker was using to illustrate accurately illustrate that in the United States, yes, African-Americans face challenges in general, that their challenges go beyond the economic, but also that they are economic. But if you want to examine, let us also fully note some other facts that Kamala Harris, whose father was a Stanford economics professor, he’s from Jamaica, but her mother was a cancer researcher. Sharmila. Gopalan was born in what is now India than it was under the British flag. She is ethnically South Asian and Harris was raised pretty much solely by her mother. Some and some family members. Her father was, according to her sister, not very present in the girls lives. I am not suggesting for a second that Kamala Harris, who attended Howard University Han, who identifies and certainly is part of the black community, very similar background in some ways to Barack Obama. I’m not suggesting that she’s not part of the black community that shouldn’t apply the label. The experiences African-American on her or to her. But what I am saying is that the explanation of her failed campaign as hinging on her status as an African-American and further extrapolating that because of that she had a hard time raising money, it seems really tenuous to me. Among factors that get in the way of that narrative is that she is quite connected to the South Asian community and the medium how as long as we’re talking about the deficits of the black community, at least economically, we should note that the median household income among Asians is thirty nine percent higher than that of the median. American and Indian Americans have an income of almost double the national median income. Also, Kamala Harris, whose husband is a well-connected corporate lawyer, he’s white. And Kamala was a prestigious fund raiser in California when she was a senator. And as a Bay Area native, she’s tapped into a lot of Silicon Valley wealth and is really important before her campaign stopped connecting with voters. She showed a really profound fundraising propensity.
S12: Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders claims to have raised the most money so far. Eighteen point two million dollars in the first six weeks of his campaign, followed by California Senator Kamala Harris, 12 million. South Bend Mayor Pete Bhuta, Judge 7000000 and businessman Andrew Gang 1.7million.
S1: That was in the first quarter and Harris didn’t really improve on that. So I would suggest that her lack of connection with voters stymied her fund raising more than her lack of fundraising, stymied her connection with voters. And it all goes back to the further point that there were a variety of factors way, way down on the list. If it even belongs at all is the fact that Kamala Harris is African-American. But let us think about Cory Booker’s diagnosis for a second. It’s of an African-American candidate without built in avenues to fundraising and access to family wealth. You know who that description does apply to? Yeah, it’s Michael Bloomberg. No, it’s not. It’s Cory Booker. So I’m not calling Cory Booker disingenuous. I’m just saying that Cory Booker in that assessment was being opportunistic. He used a neutral question to highlight a talking point that he would like highlighted.
S4: He took it as an opportunity to talk about himself. Cory Booker is, after all, a good politician. Just maybe not good enough or fortunate enough to raise all of the money of some of his more advantaged rivals.
S10: And that’s it for today’s show. Daniel Shrader is just producer, but you might remember him as the compiler of the infamous intelligence documents about former Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulrooney. The Tungsten File of Facts. Christine and Joseph Gist, producer, thanks for coming in. I see the Presbyterian Blue Hoser in action against Ferman. And while I know you have no connection to the team, the state of South Carolina, you are Presbyterian. Is that really the point? I just like saying the blue hose, the jest. I see my old alma mater, the Oceanside sailors, are facing off against their tough East Nassau County opponent, the Farmingdale dabblers. You know, whenever the Daimler’s face, the sailors throw the records out the window. But this time it’s personal. Whooper adepero do pro. And thanks for listening.
