Agents of Chaos

We've all been through a lot together.

It was corrupt, it was dirty cops,

it was leakers and liars.

I don't know that other presidents would have been able to take it.

Some people said no, they wouldn't have.

Dirty cops. Bad people.

For over three years, we went through hell.

We first went through "Russia, Russia, Russia".

We had the witch hunt.

We then went through the Mueller Report.

I did nothing wrong.

It was all bullshit.

TRUMP ACQUITTED

AGENTS OF CHAOS PART 2

YOU GET WHAT YOU NEED

The long shadow of Vladimir Putin falls on Capitol Hill tomorrow.

We now count at least nine figures in the Trump campaign

who have met with the Russians.

Collusion.

The word does not exist in the legal books.

There's no evidence of collusion.

There is circumstantial evidence of collusion.

How is it not collusion?

Overt, knowing collusion. That's what the dossier says.

It's hard to say when the word collusion took over our minds.

But it was probably around the time we first heard about this dossier,

a secret document compiled by an ex-British spy,

painting a lurid picture worthy of a James Bond movie.

The allegations in this dossier that the Russians have got

compromising material on Donald Trump...

To some, the dossier promised hard evidence that Trump was in bed,

literally, with the Russians.

The pee pee tape supposedly took place on that bed.

Hallelujah! It's comedy Christmas!

To others, it was a dangerous hoax, created by Trump's opponents

to destroy his presidency.

...infamous, salacious Trump dossier.

Piece of garbage.

Fusion GPS, that was the firm behind the infamous Steele dossier.

Everyone knows Fusion GPS was the political strategy firm

paid for by the Clinton campaign to dig up Russian dirt on Donald Trump.

Fusion GPS Co-Founder Glenn Simpson pleading the fifth...

A few weeks after Trump's inauguration, my phone rang.

It was someone who knew about the mysterious dossier.

But this person wasn't just a source.

His company had commissioned the document itself.

He wanted me to meet him at a secret location in California.

Alright, we're rolling.

I was becoming concerned that if I didn't tell some people this story,

and something did happen to me, it would never get out.

Glenn Simpson is a former reporter who now does investigations

for private clients, including politicians.

Early in 2016, Simpson was looking into Donald Trump

on behalf of Trump's opponents.

Simpson hired Christopher Steele, the author of the dossier,

to help investigate Trump's ties to Russia.

What we were seeing, from both Chris' reports

and also from all the other work we were doing,

was what appeared to be a full blown conspiracy

between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin.

If he's really conspiring with the Russians,

does that mean I'm in danger from the Russians?

I had scary conversations with the wife and kids

about moving to Canada.

He didn't move to Canada.

Instead, Fusion GPS continued to investigate Trump.

And Trump aimed his Twitter fire straight back at Fusion.

Simpson and his partners had the tweets framed like badges of honor

from their wars against the President.

Mr. Simpson, why are you taking the Fifth?

Mr. Simpson, are you facing legal or criminal exposure?

There's been a lot of extreme and laughable versions of this.

Most extreme is that, knowing in June of 2016,

that Donald Trump would score a hundred to one upset victory

over Clinton, we began to frame him,

so that we could ensnare him in a Vladimir Putin scandal

and ruin his presidency.

Which definitely gives us more credit than we deserve.

It doesn't do us any good to mislead or make anything up.

We weren't trying to prove anything about Donald Trump's connections

to Russia. We wanted to know what they were.

COLLUSION

- So you're not a journalist? - I am not a journalist.

- You're a gun for hire. - Call me what you want.

I'm a consultant. I work for clients.

Sometimes they're from this country.

Sometimes they're from other countries.

Sometimes they're Republicans. Sometimes they're Democrats.

In 2012, we had been hired to look into Mitt Romney.

We were asked to do that because I had been a business reporter

at the Wall Street Journal.

Romney's a self-made tycoon with a very opaque financial history,

it wasn't clear how much taxes he paid.

When 2016 rolled around, we had another tycoon,

and I figured no one would know how to do the work on him.

You're fired.

A Republican friend of mine, who's involved

with a lot of dark money, is the best term for it,

reached into one of the pockets that he knew about

and found some funding for us.

It was the centrist establishment wing of the Republican Party.

They definitely didn't want someone who had a lot of nontraditional views

for a conservative.

Simpson wouldn't say it, but they were working on behalf of Marco Rubio.

In the beginning of any new project,

you want to read everything that's already been written about that subject.

So I ordered a used copy of every Donald Trump book.

Sliced them up, pull apart the spines,

and put them into a two-sided scanner.

And then you run it through an optical character recognition program.

And that allows you to index the books

and, therefore, when you're looking for everything about Melania,

you just type in Melania.

After books comes lawsuits.

I've been investigating wealthy people and big companies

for most of my adult life.

In the case of Donald Trump, the number of lawsuits was off the charts.

I've never seen anything like it.

I'm a Washington person. Trump is a New York person.

Washington is about government and policy.

Donald Trump is about real estate and girls and things like that.

I never really paid much attention to Donald Trump.

He was just a kind of buffoonish character from another city.

And I was surprised, when I did start reading up on him,

to have all these gangsters coming up.

We gathered a lot of string on his connections to the Italian mafia.

But the gangster that most interested me was Felix Sater

because he was Russian.

What was the old quote by Winston Churchill?

"Russia is a riddle trapped in..."

"It's a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma."

Felix is a bit of an enigma himself.

He was a tough kid, born in the Soviet Union,

who grew up in Brooklyn,

with a father who was muscle for the Russian mob.

Felix worked briefly on Wall Street before serving time

for attacking a broker with a broken margarita glass.

But children are not their fathers.

Sater's ties to Russian intelligence made him a valuable FBI informant,

who even played a role in tracking down Osama Bin Laden.

When he emerged from prison, Sater went to work

in the only industry less regulated than Wall Street, real estate.

And that's where he met Donald Trump.

Did you have any insight in what his motivation was?

"I could win, I could be president."

"But if I lose, I'll make a lot of money."

Do you think he saw it that way?

Maybe. I don't know.

There'd be nothing wrong with him thinking

that running for president could enhance his business.

The other people that ran, it was good for business for them.

Their business happens to be politics.

Is there a different standard for a businessman?

This is not a cage match.

Aren't they all running to see what happens?

There's no downside, 'cause they get a better name recognition.

There's always another election later.

There's always a new post to be filled.

And the higher your name recognition, the better the post.

In business, better the name recognition,

the more possibility to build more towers or sell more things.

Everyone wants to create a huge conspiracy

in how inappropriate and improper everything is.

Give me a break.

I walked into his office and told him

that I'm going to be the biggest developer in New York

and he needs to get on board now before it's too late.

He started laughing, and I started doing business with him.

I thought it would benefit me.

And, obviously, he thought it would benefit him.

Which is why people do business in the first place.

How many times have you conversed with Mr. Sater?

- Over the years? - If you could estimate.

Not many.

If he were sitting in the room right now,

I really wouldn't know what he looked like.

There was plenty of pictures of him and Felix.

There was plenty of first-hand accounts of them being together.

Anytime someone doesn't want to answer a question

you have to ask why. When they lie, you have to ask why.

I'm pretty sure he'd recognize me.

Our first project was Trump Phoenix.

And then we did Trump Fort Lauderdale.

We did the Trump Soho. We looked at doing Trump London,

Trump Paris, Trump Istanbul.

We were developing real estate. We were developing Trump Towers.

And if Russian buyers had bought some units...

Well, you know what they say,

"any customer whose check clears is a good customer".

But I wasn't bringing Russian money into the Trump Organization.

Never have. Not one dollar.

Or not one ruble.

I will suspend my campaign.

... deeper faith that the Lord will show me the way forward.

There's a lot of people who love me, they just won't vote for me.

But it's okay. It's not a problem.

But let's be honest.

The media has given these personal attacks that Donald Trump has made

an incredible amount of coverage.

The press wouldn't stop writing about him.