Crime in Progress: Inside the Steele Dossier and the Fusion GPS Investigation of Donald Trump: Summary & Key Insights

Fusion GPS was born out of journalistic instincts—an effort to continue investigative work at a time when newsroom budgets were shrinking. Both Peter and I had spent decades pursuing corruption stories at The Wall Street Journal; when we left, we wanted a structure that preserved that rigor while serving clients who required deep, factual research in legal, corporate, and political realms.

In those early days, we examined financial frauds, lobbying networks, and foreign influence cases. Our reputation grew among law firms and nonprofits because we didn’t produce rumor or spin—we traced documents, interviewed sources, and verified evidence. This foundation of credibility is critical to understand before our name ever touched partisan politics. Our methodology was grounded in data, not ideology.

Gradually, the line between corporate and political research blurred. As money and influence flowed across borders, understanding corruption demanded tracking political figures and oligarchic networks together. It’s in that environment that our work began to brush against global power structures—including the Kremlin’s complex web of influence.

Our involvement in what became known as the Steele dossier began modestly. Initially, we were retained by a conservative firm working for Republican interests to conduct opposition research on Donald Trump during the Republican primaries. When that contract ended, the Democratic-aligned law firm Perkins Coie engaged us on behalf of the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign to continue the research. The goal was simple: to understand Trump’s background, his business connections, and potential vulnerabilities derived from foreign entanglements.

As we sifted through public records and financial data, troubling connections emerged—patterns of Trump’s deals with figures tied to post-Soviet wealth flows. Given our prior experience in Russian matters, we recognized the warning signs of Kremlin-connected influence networks. At this juncture, we sought help from someone with firsthand expertise in Russian intelligence: Christopher Steele.

Nothing about the commission was extraordinary from a research perspective. The unusual part was what followed—the discovery that Trump’s relationships, in some cases, overlapped with circles known to Western intelligence as conduits of Russian influence. Those signals demanded deeper scrutiny, not for political advantage, but because they indicated an unprecedented intersection between business, politics, and geopolitics.