HIRE THE BEST:

Simpson left the Journal at a time two forces were changing what he did as an investigative reporter: the distressed economics of journalism was shrinking the budgets available for the free-wheeling, spend-anything fly-anywhere style of investigative reporting for which he was known; and Rupert Murdoch, the paper's new owner, wanted spot scoops and not the deeply reported investigations that were his trademark. Fritsch, by now an editor in the Journal's Washington bureau after coming home from abroad, followed and joined up with Simpson for the same reasons.

I have no idea what Simpson and Fritsch charge, but I understand it's a lot, and that seems to be driven by the market: They are seriously savvy at finding extremely hard-to-locate -- and even more difficult to understand and contextualize -- documents and other intelligence on globally powerful people and organizations. People who know what they are talking about want to speak with them, in large part because they understand that -- either immediately or some time in the future -- they themselves can learn something from them.

Their expertise is rare. Most people in the investigative game, whether reporters or former government agents, are more skilled at name-dropping or sounding scary than at actually knowing something telling. [...]

In September 2015, the Washington Free Beacon, whose main funder is Republican hedge fund manager Peter Singer, at the time a Rubio backer and a fierce Trump critic, hired Simpson and Fritsch to look at Trump, according to a person familiar with the investigation. They began with a document dump -- collecting all the voluminous legal papers related to Trump's four bankruptcies. Using Pacer, the federal government's repository for legal cases, they began to track lawsuits naming Trump, and companies and people close to him. And they tracked cases and firms to Iceland, the Cayman Islands and Ukraine.

Among the key companies that surfaced was Bayrock, a Kazakh- and Russia-connected New York-based real estate firm with an intriguing Trump connection: its former chief operating officer, Felix Sater, was a mob-connected, Russian-born Trump adviser, and former manager of Trump Soho, a later foreclosed condominium project on Spring Street.

Help from a former British intelligence agent came in spring 2016, when Simpson and Fritsch sought some more specialized expertise on Russia, and hired an old acquaintance -- Christopher Steele, the former premier Russia expert for British intelligence, and now a private investigator. The documents were suggesting that Trump's businesses were heavily weighted to Russia and Russians; could Steele ask around for some details? [...]

What Steele emerged with makes up what is now known as the Trump dossier: a 35-page document of raw intelligence out of Moscow on Trump and his businesses. In September 2016, Fusion summoned reporters from top media organizations. Before them was Steele, visiting the U.S. from London. They introduced him by his credentials, and let him explain what he had found.

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