Former Wall Street Journal journalists, Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch, who founded the Intelligence firm Fusion GPS are set to release a book from their perspective of Russiagate. In the book, they release details on “how they commissioned the British ex-spy Christopher Steele to write his dossier on the future president” reported the Guardian.
The book, titled Crime in Progress: The Secret History of the Trump-Russia Investigation, will be released in December. According to the Guardian, Fusion GPS began investigating Trump in the summer of 2015 “for a rival Republican candidate” and in 2016, “the Democrats took over the contract.”
Penguin is publishing the book and describes it as “a march through a mind-boggling trove of lawsuits, bankruptcies and sketchy overseas projects.” While the book does not identify “human sources behind the dossier” it does argue that Steele’s memos were correct.
“It feels like time to explain our work in our own words…We were witnessing what we thought was a crime in progress that needed to be investigated” said Fritsch. He added “I think we give a pretty careful exegesis of the [Steele] dossier, what is in it and what has been substantiated. We conclude it’s a pretty prescient document.”
Steele was deemed an authoritative figure on Russian intelligence for the United States. He was sent to Moscow in 1990 as an undercover M16 officer who was working under the guise of “the second secretary in the UK chancery division at the embassy.” Steele left Moscow in 1993 and later took a senior position on MI6’s Russia desk in London in 2006. In 2009 he started an intelligence firm with a former colleague and not long after began working with Fusion GPS on multiple projects relating to Russia.
