Brett Williams's Reviews > Crime in Progress: Inside the Steele Dossier and the Fusion GPS Investigation of Donald Trump

Mesmeric as the Warren Report and Pentagon Papers, the Steele Dossier is the bombshell that pulled back the covers on Trump and Putin in bed together. What was first dismissed, even by the New York Times, as wide-eyed paranoia, The Guardian called “one of the most explosive documents in modern history.” Amply referenced and packed with endnotes for the amateur sleuth, this text tells how the Steele Dossier came to be, how it got inside D.C., and what it told that would be validated by media, House investigations, Senate investigations, and even admitted piece-by-piece along the way by Trump himself. This book chronicles the dossier’s amazing life story, wider investigations into Trump’s mafia scams that led to it, and the thrilling corruption that Republican lie factories engaged in with their struggle to destroy the dossier, its creator, Christopher Steele, and its initiator, Fusion GPS. This book reads like a spy novel without fiction. There’s sex with attractive red-headed spies, Russian penetration of the NRA, hundreds of millions of dollars changing hands for favors and influence, even Putin’s hunt for snitches inside his sanctum to kill. Ultimately, this text registers perhaps the #1 most successful hostile foreign infiltration (Russian) into a target government (the U.S.) in the human record. A comprehensible record of what felt like trying to sip from a firehose while we lived it.

As one of Britain’s top MI6 agents stationed in Moscow during his career, Steele knows where the skeletons are. His raw intel comprising memos of the dossier (PDF available on Buzzfeed) reads like a revelation—now that we know the players we’d not heard of before—and a shock at what Putin honed on Ukraine then unleashed on the West with the U.S. his biggest prize. Aside from Trump (cultivated by Russia for decades), FOX, and talk radio, who engaged in the cover-up, it’s California Representative Devin Nunes and Iowa Senator Charles Grassley, who most proved their worth to Putin. We even find that in 2019 as Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell helped lift Russian sanctions on oligarchs, he got a “shiny new aluminum factory back home in Kentucky courtesy of [Russian oligarch] Oleg Deripaska,” a major player in the espionage. See the Washington Post and The Moscow Project for validation.

Thanks to the Steele Dossier, the 4th Estate did what it was meant by our Founder to do, strive to protect America from despots by reporting truth to power. Steele tipped us off. Fusion GPS got him started. This makes Fusion one of America’s greatest heroes, and Steele, an American hero who’s not an American. What a fantastic piece of history as we live out the consequences of what it revealed.