As had become standard practice in the shadowy world of 'oppo' research, the Obama campaign's payments to Fusion GPS were never publicly disclosed the money paid to the investigative firm was reported on campaign disclosure reports as legal bills to the campaign's law firm, Perkins Coie.ĭonald Trump was seen by private investigator and researcher Glenn Simpson as a bigger and more sinister threat than the Clintons during the 2016 presidential campaign. In 2012, Fusion GPS was hired to do opposition research on Mitt Romney for Barack Obama's re-election campaign. The firm's mission often was to ward off damaging media stories and investigate the critics of its controversial clients. It often was hired by corporations entangled in bitter regulatory or legal disputes, such as Herbalife, a supplement company accused of essentially being a pyramid scheme, and Theranos, a health care tech start-up that issued questionable claims about its pioneering blood-testing technology. Simpson once described what his company did as 'journalism for rent'.

The firm, which he later named Fusion GPS, handled jobs for political and corporate clients in the United States and abroad – always under the cloak of secrecy. In 2009, he had quit the paper to form a modest-sized private investigative and research service in Washington.

One of his specialties was scoops revealing that powerful Russian oligarchs and organised crime figures had hired Washington lobbyists and lawyers to exert influence in the nation's capital. The 52-year-old Simpson had once been a renowned investigative journalist at the The Wall Street Journal. They were kindred spirits, each fixated on the machinations of the Kremlin. Across the table was Glenn Simpson, a tall, scruffy American with an intense manner. In his early 50s, Steele still looked the part – a dapper dresser with pale blue eyes and a sombre, no-nonsense demeanour. On one side of the table was Christopher Steele, the British spy who had handled the case of the poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko a decade earlier. They shared a deep passion: uncovering and countering the corruption and misdeeds of Putin's regime. Early in June, two men met for lunch at an Italian restaurant in Terminal 5 of London's Heathrow Airport.

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