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The Current Transcript for December 6, 2019

Host: Laura Lynch

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Prologue

[Music: Theme]

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I would describe her as one of the great songwriters in American history. Hell, one of the great songwriters in world history on the little of a Mozart.

LAURA LYNCH: Who do you think podcaster Jad Abumrad is talking about? Joni Mitchell. Nope. She's Canadian. Taylor Swift? Uh oh. Jad is giving that title to the one and only Dolly Parton. She's having a moment thanks to his podcast. A new Netflix series and her star factor. In a half an hour, we'll talk about the enduring phenomenon and mystery that is Dolly. After that:

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It does appear that Donald Trump is getting ready to cheat in the next presidential election and is laying the groundwork to do that and is likely to do that if he isn't stopped.

LL: It started with the so-called Steele Dossier, a document that detailed some salacious tales about Donald Trump and prostitutes in Moscow. Now, the team behind that investigation has written a book, and co-author Glenn Simpson says American voters have been warned. First, though, remembering that tragic night three decades ago at a crowded Polytechnique for what it was. I'm Laura Lynch and this is The Current.

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Montreal Massacre survivor welcomes new recognition it was an 'anti-feminist attack'

Guest: Susan McKenzie

[Music: Theme]

LL: This evening, just after sunset, 14 beams of light will shine over Montreal's Mount Royal Park, one beam for every woman killed, 30 years ago today, at Ecole Polytechnique in an anti-feminist massacre in the shadow of the mountain, just a few steps from the campus, there's another tribute to the women.

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NATHALIE PROVOST: Place de 6 Decembre 1989. Cette place a ete nommee en memoire de 14 femmes assassinees lors de l'attentat antifeministe survenu a L'Ecole Plytechnique le 6 December 1989.

LL: Those are the words on a new sign commemorating the women killed, the woman reading it is Nathalie Provost. On December the 6th, 1989, she was a 23 year old engineering student and in the classroom, when a gunman came in, separated the men and the women and started shooting the women. Nathalie was shot four times in the head, legs and foot. CBC producer Susan McKenzie went with Nathalie to see the commemorative sign for the first time. Hi, Susan.

SUSAN MCKENZIE: Hi, Laura.

LL: This sounds powerful. Can you describe the sign for us?

SUSAN MCKENZIE: The sign itself is pretty nondescript. You wouldn't even notice it unless you were looking for it. But the setting is really what makes it special. Place de 6 Decembre is a small park. It's really long, skinny park lined with trees and sculptures, 14 metal sculptures, actually, each spells out the name of a woman killed in the shooting. The installation is called Nef de 14 Reines or the nave of the 14 Queens. And right now, the sculptures, the names, they're frozen in ice and snow. And when we were there, someone had laid a white rose at each of the names. It's actually quite beautiful. And just being there with Nathalie was something. We'll tweet out some photos, too, so people can really see what it looks like.

LL: And I have had a look at those photos and it just really is quite striking. But but the sign there, that is new?

SUSAN MCKENZIE: Yes, it was just changed in time to mark the 30th anniversary. The original sign went up in 1999, 10 years after the attack, when the park itself was actually dedicated, the wording was vague, though it talked about the, quote: "tragic events of December 6" and called for "respect and non-violence". But over the years, there's been a lot of lobbying for that sign to better reflect what actually happened. And I asked Nathalie to read the English translation.

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NATHALIE PROVOST: This park is named in memory of the 14 women assassinated in an anti feminist attack at the Ecole Polytechnique on December 6, 1989. It serves to recall the fundamental values of respect and equality and condemns all forms of violence against women.

LL: Now, I got to say, that surprises me that it's taken 20 years for that memorial to recognize the massacre at an anti-feminist attack.

SUSAN MCKENZIE: But, you know, it's interesting. Not only did it take all this time for this official recognition, even for Natalie, her thinking about feminism and the attack has changed over time. So when we went to see the new signs, she had a lot to say about that. But it was freezing cold out that day. So we had to duck into a cafe across the street from the park to warm up. And it was full of students there working on their laptops, reading textbooks, really just the kind of place Nathalie said she might have been in 30 years ago. So we grabbed some hot drinks and took off our many layers of clothes. Nathalie warmed her feet on the heater. And as we talked, she remembered being in the classroom when the gunman came in and those moments after he had the men leave.

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NATHALIE PROVOST: When we were all the girls in front of him and then he said that he was against feminist and that was why you were there. And I answered them back and it was so quick. You know, he shot 30 bullets and it was done. And it's very, very quick. You know.

[Sound: Tapping]

NATHALIE PROVOST: It's that quick. Not that soft, but that quick. The life is gone in a minute.

SUSAN MCKENZIE: I have to say, Laura, it gave me chills to watch her tapping her hand on the table that way when I realized what she was doing, because like you said, four of those shots hit her. It's remarkable she survived.

LL: And that gave me chills through listening to all of those taps and then just thinking about them rattling off of all the bullets. What did what did Nathalie answer back when he said he was targeting feminists?

SUSAN MCKENZIE: Well, she told him they weren't feminists. They were students. And and then he shot her and the others. And she's become so well-known for that, for engaging with him that way. But what I had never heard before was how that conversation for her had actually begun earlier in the day.

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NATHALIE PROVOST: At lunch on December 6. I had lunch with a feminist, another feminist, sorry, a woman engineer. She is a feminist, by the way. But we had a discussion about being a woman in Polytechnique, and she was 15 year older than myself. And we were saying that we felt pretty comfortable at school and, like in sports, Polytechnique is not that judged discipline. The answer is right or wrong. So we didn't have the feeling that there was any difference being evaluated as a man or as a woman. I had that conversation at lunch and that we felt and accepted as women that we felt like one of the boys. So when Marc Lepine told us that he was there because we were feminists, that was so far from what I've been through, what I've lived, what I believe and the discussion of that day.

SUSAN MCKENZIE: But people criticize do at the time for saying you weren't feminists. Did you understand that?

NATHALIE PROVOST: I think that there was so many emotions from my point of view of from my actual point of view. I realized that it was so emotional that people were- What is this deception?

SUSAN MCKENZIE: Disappointed.

NATHALIE PROVOST: Disappointed that after what they've done, all the feminists, after what all they have done, the possibility for me to be in Polytechnique that I was not reconnaissant of the fact that I was there. That was it. And I was able to do that. But, I spontaneously- did I answer dad also to save my life? Maybe a bit. I will never be able to know.

LL: It's hard to blame anybody for saying something like that, something that she thought could save her life.

SUSAN MCKENZIE: Absolutely. But even though she was a survivor of the massacre, she was really criticized in Quebec for saying that. So I asked her if she meant it. Did she consider herself a feminist in 1989?

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NATHALIE PROVOST: No, no, no, no. That's why I answered Marc Lepine I was not a feminist. But from my point of view that time, I cannot say that I was assuming this because I didn't have it in my perception. I didn't have to fight to be where I was. That was my mother's. My mother combat. My mother, bring something new to my society. And they were engaged. I wasn't. And I calling myself a feminist would have been something like an usurpation? Is it an English word?

SUSAN MCKENZIE: Yes.

NATHALIE PROVOST: I would have usurped a status that I did not deserve.

LL: Really? She thought she would have been usurping the word and she didn't have a right to say. That's an interesting perspective to question who deserves to be a feminist or to call themselves a feminist. However, thoughts evolved on that over the years.

SUSAN MCKENZIE: Well, she told me she realized that she didn't have to be officially engaged, as she put it, didn't have to be a full time activist to be a feminist. And she did come to the realization that she was a feminist in her day to day life. But it took her about 10 years after the shooting, to name it, to actually call herself a feminist.

LL: All right. So let's say that I love Nathalie Provost is a feminist. She's also an engineer. And now she's a vocal gun control advocates. She's a mother, too. So I'm wondering, does she talk to her children about what happened to her at Ecole Polytechnique.

SUSAN MCKENZIE: Yes, she does. And her kids are grown now. But she says it's an ongoing conversation in the family. In 2017, her daughter Leah and her friends invited Nathalie to march with them in the march for women here in Montreal. And then in 2018, something else happened. The march for women in Montreal called and asked her to be a spokesperson for the event. And she said she was really touched by that. It was the first time in her life she'd been invited to be one of the Montreal feminists, and it was with her daughter and her daughter's friends. So she finally felt she could put that fight behind her. That fight of was she or was she not a feminist. And it's not lost on her that it took 28 years to get there.

LL: 28 years. And now, 30 years later, the tragedy is finally being officially and permanently recognized as an attack against women and an attack against feminism. And you also ask Natalie Prosvost about that.

SUSAN MCKENZIE: Yes, I did. And she told me it means a lot to her.

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NATHALIE PROVOST: Well I'm very happy that it clearly say what happened. I haven't realized. It was not obvious. Because for me it's so obvious that Marc Lepine was there because it was against feminists. So I think it's important that we say, we present things for what they were. And December 6 is an attack against women. That's clear. In my opinion, we have to remember what we are to be able to grow. I don't know if grow is the right word, but to evaluate as a society, if we want to live a better life and to live in a better world, we have to know what's wrong with us, not just what's good, what's wrong, too, because we have to heal. We have to improve. We have to find what happened to create that [unintelligible]. And Marc Lepine was raised in Quebec. He could have been in my class room when I was so much younger. And I'm not sure I would have been a friend to my kid. And I think he needed friends. I think he needed compassion. I think he needed help. And maybe today, tomorrow, in two days, there will be a guy as he desperate as he was, and he may again do something like that because our society now is not an easy one.

LL: I'm wondering after all of us. How does Natalie mark the anniversary of the shooting?

SUSAN MCKENZIE: Well, in some ways, she doesn't need a day to market because her body reminds her all the time. She told me when she does yoga and balance poses her left foot or when she skis and her right leg is weaker than her left. And even when she looks in the mirror and sees the scars, she told me it's a melancholic day for her. And she's attended many official ceremonies over the years. But she's also tried to mark the day with happy memories. On the tenth anniversary, December 6, 1999, she made it official that she was pregnant. On another anniversary, one of her children took their first steps.

LL: That's actually a really good way to shake off the bad memories associated with that damage. It's 30 years ago. I remember it so clearly. I was working in Ottawa on Parliament Hill and I watched the news unfold with absolute horror on the news network because it's something like that I'd never seen in Canada before. And I remember in the days that followed having so many discussions, debates and quite frankly, disagreements with people, mainly men, about whether this was indeed an attack on women, whether this was at one end of a spectrum of violence against women. And there was deep disagreement about that. I'd like to think that the discussions moved on since then.

SUSAN MCKENZIE: Well, you know, there are still people who question whether it was anti-feminist or not. Over the weekend, the Burrow Mayor Sue Montgomery was at an event, a march. And in a tweet, she called it an anti-feminist attack. And someone replied, yes, it was an attack on women, but they weren't sure if it was an anti-feminist attack.

LL: Well, I think it bears discussing then still 30 years on then what this represents to different people. Unlike Nathalie, I've never had a problem saying I'm a feminist. So tonight we're going to hear Montreal mark that event with what's become a tradition. 14 beams of light are going to shine from Mount Royal over the city. Thanks, Susan, for this.

SUSAN MCKENZIE: Thank you, Laura.

LL: Susan McKenzie is a CBC producer based in Montreal. Well, my next guest says it's important to recognize the Montreal massacre and other attacks on women for what they are. Hate crimes. Farrah Khan is the manager of consent, comes first at Ryerson University in Toronto, and she joins me in our Toronto studio. Hello.

FARRAH KHAN: Hello.

LL: What went through your mind as you listened to Nathalie Provost?

FARRAH KHAN: First, great sorrow about what happened? I think we can never move away from the idea that there's grief of what happened that day on December 6 in 1989, and then also just great pride and love for her and the way that she speaks about her own experience and how she has become in of itself an activist around this, sadly, because of the circumstances. The way that she speaks about feminism, this idea that she couldn't see yourself as one, I think speaks to a lot of women's experiences for a lot of different reasons. And so it resonates with me hearing that.

LL: Why is it important for Canadians to understand the Montreal massacre as an attack on feminists?

FARRAH KHAN: Because he named feminists. He did not just say women. He said feminists. And we cannot move away from that idea that there was an ideology behind the choice that he made to separate women from men and that engineering classroom and kill women.

LL: I was going to ask you why you think it's taken this long for society to reckon with the nature of the attack. But maybe the question should be, do you think society is recorded with the nature of the attack?

FARRAH KHAN: Absolutely. I don't think people we're talking about it being an anti-feminist attack for so long. I think the fact that it took this long to make us any memorial that spoke to that, that we have people that are nervous about using the word feminist. And the thing is, is that in 1989 and still today, feminism is oftentimes seen as a problem or you're being difficult if you're saying you're a feminist. So there is an idea in 1989 that feminism, they'll still think today, that we are man haters, that we are all lesbians. And as a queer woman, I'm cool with that. And the idea, you know, that we don't want to have any fun. And the thing is, we have to keep pushing as feminists to kind of open up that dialogue and conversation. But the pushback from it is oftentimes that we don't care about men, we don't care about the community. And so I thought was interesting. Nathalie also talked about how she knew that Mark needed support, like she thought about that, the need for that. And that's a part of feminism, is that we need equity in the world. And a part of that is ensuring that men get support from mental health, that men actually get their needs met around being vulnerable and tender, too.

LL: The Globe and Mail columnist Elizabeth Renzetti recently wrote that cases like Montreal or the Toronto Man attack, which killed eight women and two men, result from an extreme ideology that is similar to right wing terrorism or Islamist extremism. Do you agree with that?

LL: I don't think it's just Islamic. I think all religious terrorism. I think absolutely. We know misogyny is about punishing and persecuting women who challenge male dominance. And so this ideology permeates so many of the mass murders that have happened in North America. Oftentimes when a mass murder happens. Usually we see once the research comes out about the story of the person who commits the harm is that they have a history of domestic violence. So these things actually add up. So oftentimes, you know, people be like, oh, it's just a joke or that was a personal situation, that was inside the household, that domestic violence piece. But domestic violence can be a canary in the coal mine for other forms of violence. It can occur by the person who's committing that harm, by the man. And we need to talk about men's violence against women. You know, there's a nervousness of talking about that even. The fact that we continuously call it violence against women as if a ghost or a boogey man is doing all of the harm. Well, what we know is that majority of perpetrators are men that commit domestic violence.

LL: And some people argue that anti-feminist or misogynist ideology is being fuelled by populist politics around the world. And wondering what you think of that.

FARRAH KHAN: I think that's a part of it. Absolutely. There's a fuel of across the world, right now of right wing politics that are really focussed on harming minority communities, so migrants, talking about the idea that certain communities shouldn't be in countries. Right. And also part of it is also curbing women's rights and stifling women's rights. And we have to know that. So when we see populist governments come up, are they anti-abortion? Are they not going to be funding women's services and programming when we see that in Canada even, with a past conservative government they decimated status women's offices across Canada. They cut and slash women's funding for services. We're only seeing that kind of instrumentally come up now.

LL: I just want to turn the attention to guns in the throne speech yesterday, the Liberal government acknowledged the effects of gun violence and said it's time to show courage and strengthen gun control. That's a quote. How hopeful are you anything will change on that front?

FARRAH KHAN: I have to be hopeful because I need to see the change. And they're making that commitment in the throne speech. So the expectation is that they'll follow through with what they're going to say. There's gun activist folks from across Canada specifically, that around the December 6th that have been calling for gun control for so long. The gun registry should have never been dismantled by the conservative government. And we need a government that's going to push forward. I have to have hope because we need that right now. But change needs to happen.

LL: We have 30 seconds, but the liberals promising to ban military style assault rifles. Municipalities should be allowed to restrict handguns. How much would that help?

FARRAH KHAN: It's a part of helping it because we know that handguns are used and military assault rifles are used in violence, but it's one part of it. We also need to have a continuous conversation and action taken to support violence organizations, women's organizations. We need to name misogyny for what it is, a hate crime. We need to actually take action when violence occurs and name it for what it is for a.

LL: Farrah Khan, thank you for coming in.

FARRAH KHAN: Thank you.

LL: Farrah Khan is manager of Consent Comes First at Ryerson University. She was in our Toronto studio. The CBC News is next. Then to her legions of fans, she's a living legend. We examine the legacy of Dolly Parton and why her music says so much to so many. I'm Laura Lynch, and you're listening to The Current.

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The unifying force that is Dolly Parton

Guest: Jad Abumrad

LL: Hello, I'm Laura Lynch, and you're listening to The Current.

[Music: Theme]

LL: Still to come

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The headline finding, which I still think is the most important, is that there was a concerted effort by the Russians to infiltrate the Democratic campaign and to sway the outcome in favour of Donald Trump.

LL: I'll speak with the man who commissioned the infamous Steele Dossier and find out what it and the rest of their research can tell us about what Donald Trump may do in the next U.S. election. That's in 30 minutes. But first, the magic of Dolly.

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Please join me in welcoming the next president of the United States of America Senator Elizabeth Warren.

[Music: Song by Dolly Parton].

LL: When Elizabeth Warren walked out on stage to announce her candidacy for U.S. president last February, she was met with the predictable chorus of chants and cheers. But it's the other chorus, the one blasting out of the stage speakers that we're going to talk about today.

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[Music: Song by Dolly Parton].

LL: Dolly Parton's 9-to-5 has become a staple of Miss Warren's campaign. And that's not the only place Dolly has been popping up lately. There's the new Netflix series, Dolly Parton's Heartstrings and the popular podcast Dolly Parton's America. We will talk to host Jad Abumrad in a moment. But first, let's stop by a drag club in Toronto where Jordan Leuthel is preparing to transform into Dolly Parton.

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JORDAN LEUTHEL: Full Dolly, I am roughly about six foot four. So therefore you get a little plus sized Dolly, which is nice. Diversity.

[Music].

JORDAN LEUTHEL: First, Dolly I was very stressed. To be honest, it's a lot of pressure on someone to like do another character that's not your drag persona, especially a character like Dolly, who is so well known. When you're doing her, you need to remember like the joy that Dolly brings to the stage. So you got to be like in that energy element, which is like this quirky little 73 year old lady. Brows are the hardest things, but especially Dolly's. Dolly has very strange brows. They kind of look like semicolons, but they are the hardest thing to do because they will never match. Dolly kind of has these lips that almost look like the Joker. And that's not in a rude way, they're great. With drag you kind of have to be unapologetically you. So you kind of have to be like, hi, this is me and this is what I'm doing. You're gonna like it. Just like, how Dolly with that one on one interaction you want to give every person. You interact at that one on one production. Get the wig on. You have their makeup on. You have the lashes. You start doing little Dolly faces that you didn't think you were going to do. I'm just going to toss a little, be a little Dolly with it, have a little fun and then... So some of the songs they use as Dolly are a lot of her live versions of songs, just because with that you're getting dialogue, her breathing, you're getting her laugh [laugh]. It's like Tickle Me Elmo, but like adorable. You're also getting the nice touches of elements she shares with audiences.

DOLLY: Come on. Let's do it again. [Starts singing]

JORDAN LEUTHEL: So when you do that at a bar setting or brunch setting or [unintelligible] audiences, you get them singing back to you. It's kind of really cute.

[Music Dolly song]

JORDAN LEUTHEL: Two, three, four or five pairs of tights and two body shapers, hip pads, breast pads, huge bra, which is I believe a double E. It's a 40 triple D plus a corset. So it's a lot of deals. Dolly is kind of like universal saint. She kind of brings everyone in, whether you are religious, non-religious, gay, hetero, normative. Dolly has always stood for acceptance, love, being who you are. She is a very famous quote: find who you are and do it on purpose. I think that kind of really relates to the LGBT community, but also just humans in general. She's just kind of accepts everyone for who they are and however they want to live their life. And you kind of have your full Dolly fantasy complete. You're ready for the stage.

[Music: Dolly song]

LL: Jordan Leuthel on the Power of Dolly Parton. Jad Abumrad is also to thank, or blame, depending on your preference for giving Dolly Parton another moment in the spotlight, not that she's ever really left. Like Dolly. Judd grew up in Tennessee and liked Dolly's music, his career as a journalist has explored the things that connect us. He's the host of Dolly Parton's America, a new podcast about Dolly's decades long influence in the world. And he joins me from New York City. Jad Abumrad, hello.

JAD ABUMRAD: Hello.

LL: Now, this might seem like a ridiculous and huge question, but for someone who's never heard her name or her songs, that's not me, but maybe some of our listeners, how would you describe Dolly Parton?

JAD ABUMRAD: Oh, my gosh. Wow. It's hard. It's hard to describe. Cause she has been in the public eye for the last 60 years. So she's gone through so many phases. But I would describe her now, having spent two years studying her as one of the great songwriters in American history. You know, on the level of a Gershwin, Hale, one of the great songwriters in world history, on the level of a Mozart, she is. She's written 5000 songs, 9-To-5 chief among them, which you played, but also their songs, songs going back to 1967. And she's still writing practically a song a day now. So I would describe her as as a great, great songwriter who grew up in the mountains of East Tennessee and has come to represent the south. I think she's come to represent the LGBTQ community as you as Jordan sort of pointed out. She represents so many things to so many different people. But I think at her core, she is an epically and epically amazing songwriter.

LL: Well, something we learned through the course of the podcast is that your father had a relationship with Dolly Parton. Tell me about that.

JAD ABUMRAD: Yeah, it's just one of those weird twists of fate. I mean, it's it's the reason I could actually do the podcast at all is because he has a personal connection to her. I mean, it really sort of is anchored in this thing that happened in 2013. She got into a car accident in Nashville and was taken to Vanderbilt Hospital where he happens to work. And, you know, he's just a doctor. He's like he's not like a doctor to the stars kind of doctor. He's just a normal doctor. But he happened to be there when she was brought in and he helped her, gave her some medical advice for reasons that are still a little bit mysterious to me. They've just got to be friends. And so that was sort of happening in the background and I kind of knew about it. But, you know, living in New York, I wasn't really sort of fully aware of it. And then when I finally got really interested in her as a character and possibly like the subject of a story, I was able to call my dad and say, Dad, can you introduce me? So I you know, I was able to sort of draw on that nepotism and get my foot in the door.

LL: Okay. So this unfolds really nicely in the episode. We will talk about your father again, because part of this is in this episode as you go to see Dolly's Tennessee mountain home. Tell me about that day. What did it look like?

JAD ABUMRAD: Well, you know, we had been at Dollywood, which is on one part of the mountain. And it is this kind of like Disneyland-esque theme park where everything is magical and nothing is quite real. And there is a replica of her of her Tennessee mountain home at the centre of the park. And we had been looking at that. And the Tennessee mound home, just sort of like frame it for people, it's where I grew up, it's like it's like hallowed ground.

SOUNDCLIP

[Music: Song by Dolly Patron]

JAD ABUMRAD: Because Dolly has sung, I don't know, I'm going to say 20 songs about, if not that home, but about the Smoky Mountains. That's just song after song after song that sort of mythologized as this little home where she grew up and has turned it into kind of this epic American story of growing up in a tiny place and then conquering the world. It's all connected to that house. And I didn't think it was real. I just thought it was- I mean, obviously, it was real at one time, but I didn't think it still existed. But we were scheduled to interview her bodyguard, Bryan Seaver, who's also her nephew. In the beginning of the interview, like he wanted to do the interview outside rather than sit inside somewhere. He was like, 'y'all want to go see the Tennessee mountain home?' And we were like, 'the real the real home?' And so he said, yes. So we jumped in his pickup. We drove around the mountain up to the backside of the mountain, up 20 minutes into the Smoky Mountains, which are the most magical mountains I've ever experienced. Like just there's that they call them Smoky Mountains because there's a kind of a mist that rises off the leaves that that is like the by-product of photosynthesis. It just creates this spooky as most ghostly feel. And we drove up into the hills and turned off on a dirt road, drove through this tunnel of trees, got to this giant wooden gate that was straight out of Game of Thrones. And then it opened up and we drove in and there it was, the actual Tennessee mountain home. And it's really like just a tiny shack. But there's something really powerful and moving about seeing this thing that has been mythologized and sung about and had movies made about that. It is actually a real thing that's still there and connected to the land and the actual place where she grew up. And it very much hit me in that moment that it looked exactly like my dad's home in the mountains of Lebanon. It was the same size, the same shack. It was at the same elevation. The air felt the same, being there. And one of the things I go into in the podcast is just how spooky it was to be there in this kind of iconic place, but to also have layered in your mind this other place that you've been to. And to realize those places which you'd always held a separate, those cultures which you'd always held as separate - the South and Lebanon - actually aren't as separate as you think that there is a commonality there, a commonality of experience that really caught me off guard. And it really led me to sort of upend some assumptions I'd always held as a person who's grown up in the south.

LL: And it was also by way of having conversations with your father about what home once to him.

JAD ABUMRAD: Yes, exactly. I mean, you know, it led me to have a very personal conversation with my dad about his journey. And I'd always taken my dad to be somebody who didn't care about his home, that he was one of these kind of relentlessly forward marching immigrants who you come to a new place where you're not entirely accepted and you just keep your head down and you plough forward, and you don't think about where you came from, particularly when you came from a place like Lebanon, which was completely torn apart by civil war. But we had a conversation where I realized that's not my dad at all, that he cares about his home just as much as Dolly, but didn't feel like he could talk about it. And so in some sense she became - as she I think she is for so many people - a surrogate songstress of that longing in some way. So many of her songs are about that longing. And I think she sings it now, not just for her and for people who come from where she comes from, but for anyone who's had to leave their home and moved to a new place.

SOUNDCLIP

[Music: Song by Dolly Parton]

LL: We started the segment off with Elizabeth Warren's presidential campaign announcement and the use of Dolly's hit 9-To-5. I'm wondering how hot Dolly responded to Warren's use about song.

JAD ABUMRAD: Oh, I mean, her and her manager shut it down. I mean, that's what's sort of amazing is it's a deeply political song that is very literally about a union. That movie of which the song was a part was made to promote a union. Elizabeth Warren is very pro-union. But Dolly and her team sent a letter saying we don't we do not approve of this usage and have done that any time any candidate has tried to use the song on either the left or the right.

LL: Why do you think she's so reluctant to get involved in politics? She's relentlessly apolitical.

JAD ABUMRAD: You know, I think there are two things happening there. I mean, first of all, when you go to a Dolly Parton concert, you look at the audience and you see it's one of the few spaces in America left where people from the left and the right just stand side to side, shoulder to shoulder, sing the same song and are very polite to each other. I mean, the garbage fire that is American politics right now, you realize it's not the only America that exists. There is the America of the Dolly Parton concert where those divisions are there. They're certainly not healed, but people are polite. I think that Dolly understands her audience and she sees that if I say one thing that can be perceived as partisan, I'm immediately alienating 50 percent of my audience. But I also think it's as much a spiritual stance is anything. I think the reason that she can draw such a diverse crowd is because she has modelled a kind of like radical welcoming-ness. Like she will not cast anyone out. And yet it means she can't make political statements. But, you know, in a moment where we're all yelling and shouting each other, do I need her to do that as an American? Maybe out of moral vanity, we want our icons to believe exactly as we believe. But I think it's more important to me personally, and I'm just seeing this personally, to see somebody who doesn't speak out, who actually chooses not to, because that that choice creates a space where people can just stand next to each other. That feels more important at this moment in America than anything.

LL: But let's go on with this, because there's also some controversy over her not wanting to be called a feminist. And here's how an artist, Red Segalow, responds to that in your podcast.

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RED SEGALOW: There's this idea of what feminists are supposed to look like. They're supposed to like not shave. They’re supposed to like burn their bras and all this bull [bee]. And it's like, no, feminism can be whatever [beep] it is you want it to be as a woman. You want to have big hair and big boobs and wear rhinestones, then do it.

LL: Okay. I'd like to say it affects there, Jad. How does Dolly react to being called a feminist?

JAD ABUMRAD: Oh, she shut it down. I mean, I walked into that question thinking, oh, of course she would identify as a feminist because everybody around me here in New York sees her as a feminist icon. But no, she said, I am not a feminist. I forget her exact response, but it was unequivocal. And then we go on to explore that with her a little bit and to explore like, well, how did the word feminism become such a politically charged, dividing word when clearly if you look at Dolly Parton's life, the life she has led — even going back to 1967 and becoming this pioneering musician at a moment when there were no roles for female musicians, and yet she was determined to be that — that's a feminist act. And yet she didn't want to take on the label. And maybe there's some sort of cynical business reasons for that. But we went on to explore like why? Why wouldn't she? And ended up talking with one of her fans who is exactly her same age, mirrors her life in many ways and has lived as feminist a life as Dolly but also wouldn't take it on. And we really tried to explore the way in which, like those kinds of words are somehow lost in the class divide in America right now. But yes, it's a complicated issue.

LL: Really it is. Me being somewhat of that generation, I would call her a feminist from my eyes and wouldn't have any hesitation about that. But it's interesting that she seems to want to retain this label free dolly for the world to imprint their own stamp on.

JAD ABUMRAD: Yes, I still am mystified by how she does it, but she seems to exist in this space between all of those labels.

LL: So let's talk about the music then. I just want you to listen to musicologist and Dolly Parton, expert. I love experts. Lydia Hamessley.

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LYDIA HAMESSLEY: When I was studying Dolly songs, I spend a lot of time just listening and listening to the elements that she uses to make them so powerful. For instance, she will really manipulate the form of a piece. How many verses and choruses does she do? Say a song like Down from Dover on her album Little Sparrow that doesn't have any chorus at all. It's a song about a young woman who's gotten pregnant and abandoned by the baby's father, and she's been thrown out of her home and is destitute, but still waiting for the baby's father to come back.

[Music: Down from Dover by Dolly Parton]

LYDIA HAMESSLEY: It's just one verse after another after another, and it just feels relentless.

LL: This is interesting, Jad, because the song writing can actually be seen as Dolly making a political statement in a sense. And I'm wondering if you see that in her songs.

JAD ABUMRAD: Oh, absolutely. Yes, that's super interesting, what she just said. I mean, take a song like Jolene. This is something that we go into. Jolene is like there's an entire genre of songs in country music called The Cheating Song, which is about generally it's sung by a man talking about a woman cheating on him. And then there's a subgenre within that called the other woman song, which are women singing about the other woman that's trying to take their man. Take a song like Jolene. On one level, it's situated neatly within the other woman genre. It's a woman, Dolly, singing about another woman, Jolene, who's trying to take her husband. But on the other hand, if you actually listen to the words none of the other woman songs ever name the other woman. They always talk about 'you'. They're unnamed. In this case, Dolly name's Jolene, and it's the single most repeated word in the song.

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[Music: Jolene by Dolly Patron]

JAD ABUMRAD: So she's giving the woman a name. Then she sings rhapsodic glee about the woman's hair and her eyes and her breath that's like spring.

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[Music: Jolene by Dolly Patron]

JAD ABUMRAD: And in it, she sings almost lovingly, almost. It's almost like a song that is much more about the affection or the love between Jolene and the woman singing, than it is about competition. And so there's some way in which you could almost read Jolene in terms of Homo erotics, right, and a lot of people have. At the same time, there's that line at the end of the song.

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[Music: Jolene by Dolly Patron]

JAD ABUMRAD: Which is a devastating line. It's like, it's just a dark, dark line. And so you have this kind of like amalgam of like beauty, poetry, a kind of rhapsodic love, but also a very dark line that's laced with power. So, yes, I completely agree with the guest you just had on, that there in her song writing she makes almost an infinity of spaces for people to get what they want.

LL: Jad, you've been so generous with your time, your insight. It seems fitting that we end with a Dolly Parton song. I'm wondering what song you would choose and why.

JAD ABUMRAD: Wow. Well, I have a very specific Dolly Parton favourite, which is a song called Mule Skinner Blues. It is the moment when Dolly's kind of went from her, quote, "sad ass" songs period. That's sort of how she refers to it, from her sad ballads to like real up tempo stuff. A great 70s drumbeat. But also, I like it because the way the song is structured. It begins with her yodelling. She does this yodel and she holds this high note and she holds it for as long as she wants. And the band has to wait until she finishes the note. And then and then they kick into the next section. And I love that metaphor because on some level, this is the song where she began to take control of her career. And so she took control of the band on some literal level. She, like you, will wait until I'm ready. And I don't know. I like listening to that song and thinking about that and where it falls in the arc of Dolly.

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[Music: Mule Skinner Blues by Dolly Parton]

LL: Jad Abumrad is the host and creator of Dolly Parton's America. It's available wherever you get your podcasts. He was in New York City. Well, coming up in our next half hour, what Trump and Russia 2016 can tell us about Trump and Russia 2020. I'm Laura Lynch. This is The Current.

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Fusion GPS

Guests: Glenn Simpson, Peter Fritscher

LL: I'm Laura Lynch, and you're listening to The Current.

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The president has engaged in abuse of power, undermining our national security and jeopardizing the integrity of our elections. His actions are in defiance of the vision of our founders and the oath of office that he takes to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States. Today, I am asking our chairman to proceed with articles of impeachment.

LL: That was U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi yesterday calling on the House Judiciary Committee to drop articles of impeachment against President Donald Trump. The impeachment scandal centres around President Trump allegedly holding up military aid to Ukraine in an effort to coerce its government to investigate Democratic rival Joe Biden. It's not the first time Donald Trump has been accused of looking for foreign help to win an election. Earlier this year, a special counsel, Robert Mueller, reported on Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and contacts between Russian operatives and the Trump campaign. Peter Fritsch and Glenn Simpson's investigation into Trump's Russian connections hangs over both scandals. They're the founders of Fusion GPS and their new book is called Crime in Progress: inside the Steel Dossier and the Fusion G.P.S. investigation of Donald Trump. They're in our Washington, D.C. studio. Hello.

GLENN SIMPSON: Great to be with you.

PETER FRITSCH: Good morning.

LL: Glenn Simpson, I'm going to start with you. What is your reaction to what you been hearing in the impeachment hearings?

GLENN SIMPSON: The general reaction is that this is of a piece with everything else that we've seen and done since we first came across Donald Trump in September of 2015 and started looking into his business career. You can draw a line from the Ukraine episode directly back to Russia's involvement in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

LL: Peter, first same question to you.

PETER FRITSCH: I mean, Donald Trump does not like a fair fight and he's never won a fair fight in his life. He's a privileged kid from the outer boroughs of New York City who cuts corners and has cut corners in every aspect of his life. What he did in 2016 negotiating to build the Trump Tower, Moscow while running for president. Lying about it, covering it up, is of a piece has gone said with what we're seeing play out in the House of Representatives and in hearings on Capitol Hill today.

GLENN SIMPSON: And I know when you played Nancy Pelosi's statement there, I mean, the thing that's really foremost in my mind and I'm sure Peter's, too, is it does appear that he, Donald Trump, getting ready to cheat in the next presidential election and has laid the groundwork to do that and is likely to do that if he isn't stopped.

LL: All right. We will get to more about. But I'm also wondering, Peter Fritsch, should these articles of impeachment just focus on the Ukrainian issue or should they go wider and look at some of the issues raised in the Mueller report?

PETER FRITSCH: I mean, we're former journalists. That's a little bit beyond our pay grade or our area of expertise. You know, that said, there is a lot that we looked at during our investigation in 2015 16 that has not been treated by the Mueller report, the extent to which Russian money/compromise was coursing through Donald Trump's real estate ventures and projects in places like Panama City, in places like Toronto, in places like Vancouver. Right. So, you know, a lot of that remains on excavated.

GLENN SIMPSON: As you know, as stated, there is there's a unity to all of these events. That means whether we think they should do it one way or another way. It's going to be infused in whatever they do. The Russia issue is going to be infused in the impeachment, regardless of whether they explicitly add impeachment counts related to it.

LL: OK, well, then let's talk more about your company and the work that you did. Glenn Simpson, what exactly is Fusion GPS. and why did it start investigating Donald Trump?

GLENN SIMPSON: Fusion GPS. was formed in 2010 by Peter Fritsch and myself, we're both refugees from the media. We worked together to Wall Street Journal in the mid-2000s after the journal's ownership changed and their focus shifted a little bit towards spot news more than investigative and future stuff that we'd like to do. We looked around for something new to do and I really love, you know, more than anything sort of deep, in-depth reporting. And so I thought about coming up with a business that essentially charged private clients to do the same style of work that I did when I was at the journal, which is investigative reporting.

LL: And why start investigating Donald Trump?

PETER FRITSCH: Well, Donald Trump is a real estate magnate. Putatively. He is also a person with a complex business record. The Democratic National Committee and its. attorneys thought that our particular skills, having been trained at the Wall Street Journal, would be valuable in pulling apart and looking at that record.

GLENN SIMPSON: And prior to the Democrats, of course, we were originally hired by a Republican donor who was interested in the same thing. We're not really political opposition researchers. That's very little of what we do.

PETER FRITSCH: What we do is most akin to a deep document dive. It's what you would do if you had a well-trained team of lawyers pulling apart a public record.

LL: And in the context of all of this, you got someone to help, you know. Christopher Steele, he creates what is now known as the Steele dossier. What is that?

GLENN SIMPSON: Right. Well, so we started this project in September of 2015. And it was originally, as we said, looking at his business career, looking at Donald Trump's business career. But we quickly began to come across connections to Russia in looking at his business activities. And, you know, that the connections accumulated over the course of something like eight months. And by the time we got to the spring of 2016, we began to be very curious and a little worried that there was something going on between Trump and Russia that we didn't understand. So when we transitioned over to the Democratic side, we had the budget to go out and hire some new contractors in various parts of the world. And so we did. We commissioned work looking at Trump's activities and projects in various regions of the world. In Russia, we asked Christopher Steele, who is someone that we had worked with over the years, to see what he could find out about Donald Trump's trips to Russia and why he seemed to go there for, you know, over a period of five years and never come back with any kind of a business contract.

PETER FRITSCH: And it's important to add that when we hired Chris, we didn't share with him the identity of our client because we wanted his reporting to be pure in that sense. We didn't want him to approach the task with preconceived notions about what we were looking for or hoping to find. You know, we found various Russian mafia figures involved in Trump properties, Trump Soho living in Trump Tower. And then finally, in March of 2016, Paul Manafort, an American lobbyist closely tied to the Kremlin backed oligarchs and president in Ukraine, got involved. And that raises a serious red flag for us.

GLENN SIMPSON: So Chris was a veteran of British intelligence. He served in the Soviet Union during the collapse of the Soviet Union. He eventually rose to become the lead Russianist MI6, which is the foreign intelligence service for the UK. And he and I were introduced in 2010 by some mutual friends because we had a shared interest in Russian kleptocracy and Russian oligarchs. And so it was sort of a natural choice for us to go to him when we came and when we had this interesting mystery that we were trying to pursue.

LL: And then so can you remind us, perhaps you Peter Fritsch. What was some of the some of what was in the steel dossier for listeners who may not recall?

PETER FRITSCH: Sure. This deal I say, first of all, just a backup, half a step. It was not a dossier per say. It was a series of contemporaneous human intelligence reports that Chris shared with us for the sole purpose of informing our understanding.

LL: In that sense, it was raw information.

PETER FRITSCH: Correct. And it was not a document ever meant to be shared with the public. Well, so the headline finding, which I still think is the most important, is that there was a concerted effort by the Russians to infiltrate and the Democratic campaign, the electronic means and others and to sway the outcome in favour of Donald Trump. So there are other details in the dossier that, you know, are a little bit more colourful. But that really is the key finding that people need to him to remember.

LL: I think maybe we do need to just mention, though, one of those salacious things that was in the dossier. Perhaps you can share that with us, Glenn Simpson.

GLENN SIMPSON: Sure. Well, what the original memo said was, and subsequent memos, was that the Russians had compromised on Trump. And compromised is a Russian word that that encompasses any kind of a blackmail material. One of the aspects of the blackmail file on Donald Trump was an alleged encounter that he had with a couple of prostitutes in the Ritz Carlton Hotel in 2013 in which he watched them urinate on a bed that had been slept in by Michelle and Barack Obama, allegedly. But I'd add that, you know, the original memo described a much broader situation in which the Kremlin had compromising information on Trump. Compromise doesn't have to be sexual blackmail. It can be financial blackmail. It can be any kind of a secret that they know about you that you don't want out there. It could be that you beat your neighbor's dog. You know, anything.

PETER FRITSCH: But Chris included it in his reporting because he thought, in his judgment as an intelligence professional, it was highly relevant.

LL: And this may sound obvious, but for your clients, what was the purpose of collecting all that information?

PETER FRITSCH: Well, so the purpose is not necessarily to inform Clinton campaign decisions in any sense. You know, our task was really, really broad at the outset, which was to understand and map the relationships and businesses history of Donald Trump. Chris's report, Christopher Steel's reporting, is meant to supplement and meant to be an adjunct to what we understood. So we knew a lot about people like Carter Page, who was a Trump foreign policy adviser. Chris didn't. So when he came back with some reporting on that, it added to our knowledge. But it wasn't meant to supplant it.

GLENN SIMPSON: Right. And to be clear that, you know, that the project evolved necessarily in the spring of 2016 when it was discovered that our clients had been the victim of a very serious crime. And suddenly, you know, we weren't so much working on a campaign dossier or brief as we were trying to help our clients deal with the fact that they were the victim of a Watergate style break in.

LL: Which is the hack.

PETER FRITSCH: Correct.

GLENN SIMPSON: Right. And so, you know, one of the one of the references in the title, Crime in Progress is to that, which is that there was an ongoing crime in progress in the summer of 2016, spring and summer 2016, through the fall that we reported to the government or that Chris reported to the government with our assent, which we believe feel, have always felt, was an act of citizenship rather than an act of politics, and that anyone similarly situated who is a conscientious citizen of their country would report an attack on their country of this sort.

LL: Again, just for the sake of the listeners who may not recall that the hack refers to Russians hacking into the Democratic National Committee's emails and I believe handing them over to WikiLeaks.

PETER FRITSCH: Among other things. They set up their own Web site called DC Leaks and they put some stuff out via that. And then later they passed them to WikiLeaks. That's correct.

LL: Last month, the House Intelligence Committee held its public hearings into the Ukraine scandal as part of the impeachment process. And the Republican Congressman Devin Nunes grilled White House national security advisor Fiona Hill. Listen to this.

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DEVIN NUNES: Do you do, you know who paid Christopher Steele to do, to generate the Steele Dossiers or several of them?

FIONA HILL: At the time, I did not know. I understand from the media that it was through GPS fusion. If that's not correct...

DEVIN NUNES: Do you know who was and there was a law firm involved? Do you know who the source of the money was?

FIONA HILL: I didn't at the time. No, I did not. I've read and reports and thanks to your colleagues as well, that it was the DNC, as I'm led to believe.

DEVIN NUNES: And the Clinton campaign?

FIONA HILL: I don't know that for sure.

LL: Glenn Simpson, how accurate was Devin Nunes description of the origins of what became known as the Steele Dossier?

GLENN SIMPSON: Half accurate at best. I mean, first of all, that we're not GPS fusion. We're Fusion GPS, and it's a weird kind of it tech that they always get it wrong. But we were hired originally by a Republican critic of Donald Trump's. And a lot of the work that ended up going into this investigation was paid for by that side of the aisle. So the inference or the implication that this is some kind of a Democratic conspiracy is nonsense. That's what he was pursuing there.

PETER FRITSCH: It's also you he's asking Fiona Hill questions that she's not actually competent to answer and are, by the way, a matter of copious public record. We've testified for many, many hours as to the origins, provenance and funding of this project. So Devin Nunes, as is his [unintelligible], is trying to create a spectacle and criticized messengers rather than exploring the underlying message.

LL: What do you think republicans trying to defend the president, continuously bring up the field off here?

GLENN SIMPSON: Because it is there's a strategy behind it, which is if the seed of all of this is a political project, political opposition research project. Then it taints everything. Or at least that's what they're hoping is that it's the fruit of a poisoned tree.

PETER FRITSCH: The problem with their theory, of course, is really, really simple, which is that the dossier was not known to the world until two months after the election. So the notion that this was somehow wielded or used to influence an outcome in elections is just false.

GLENN SIMPSON: It's part of the larger strategy of confusing and deceiving people and increasingly falling apart. In just this week, it was disclosed that Devon Nunes had numerous telephonic contacts with the president's lawyer, Rudy Giuliani. And one of the indicted Ukrainians in the Ukraine scandal have partners in the spring of this year, which he neglected to disclose in the course of his efforts to defend Donald Trump in the Intelligence Committee.

LL: Now, we talked to earlier about the fact that the so-called dossier, as it was raw information and detailed the steal documents published unedited by BuzzFeed Online. How did you respond when that happened?

PETER FRITSCH: We're really unhappy with that. First of all, you don't actually need to publish that document to make the point. In fact, CNN hours earlier or minutes earlier had reported that the information in the Steele Dossier had been briefed to President Obama.

GLENN SIMPSON: Yes, we were horrified. I mean, it didn't seem appropriate to us.

PETER FRITSCH: Well, yes, I mean, the concern there is the protection of Christopher Steel's sources methods network individuals. So to have that kind of pushed out onto the Internet without having a more sober discussion of the downstream impact of it was to us irresponsible.

GLENN SIMPSON: Right. And then there's secondary fallout was the widespread misinterpretation of this document, which was not a finished product and was subject to misinterpretation.

LL: Well, this life been like for both of you and Christopher Steele since your names became associated with the dossier?

PETER FRITSCH: There's been a lot of stress over the past three years. Everything from, you know, legal fees. We've been sued by the likes of Michael Cohen.

LL: Who was President Trump's lawyer at one point and is now in prison, I believe.

PETER FRITSCH: He is in prison. He is a guest of the federal prison bureau and no longer suing us.

GLENN SIMPSON: He's no longer suing us.

PETER FRITSCH: You know, so the lawsuits are one thing. We obviously received our fair share of, you know, sort of blind threats from Trump supporters over e-mail. You know, there is a concern for our business not being able to survive it. We're a small company of about 14, 15 people. So it's been super stressful.

LL: I want to play some more tape for you. South Carolina Republican Senator Lindsey Graham also spoke about the Steele Dossier. Have a listen.

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But what did happen for sure, I know, is that Christopher Steele was hired by Fusion GPS, was paid for by the Democratic Party, and his dossier was salacious and unverified to this day and used to get a warrant, maybe start a counterintelligence investigation. Someone look at all of it. And I want us to come out of the 2016 election with some real bright lines that no party should be hiring foreign agents to look at their opponent.

LL: Peter Fritsch, what do you think of what Lindsey Graham said?

PETER FRITSCH: His history is not going to be kind to Lindsey Graham. This is an individual who when John McCain thought it was important to share the Steele Dossier with James Comey, the former FBI director, Lindsey Graham, his supposed good friend, agreed that that was the right thing to do. Now, when the dossier becomes the one battering ram, the Republican Party has to counter this Tsunami of fact that is actually swamping the Trump administration right now, he sings a different tune. He should be ashamed of himself.

GLENN SIMPSON: I'd also add that there's going to be a report by the independent inspector general of the Justice Department coming out next week that directly contradicts what you just played, which is Lindsey Graham and Devin Nunes and all the Trump's defenders want you to think that the Steele Dossier was the entire predicate for the FBI investigation of the Trump campaign. And that is simply not true. And there will be an official finding to that effect, we understand, next week.

PETER FRITSCH: By Trump's own Justice Department.

LL: Right. Interesting. Okay, Glenn, in its investigation, Fusion GPS, focussed on connections. We talked you touched on this earlier between Donald Trump and Russian organized crime. Tell me about some of the connections.

GLENN SIMPSON: One of the first things that happened when we started looking at Trump's business career was I was flipping through old New York Times stories and there was a story about how Trump had a relationship with a guy named Felix Sater who was a Russian émigré who grew up in New York and he was a convicted criminal. He had assaulted someone with a broken glass in a bar, in a bar fight for which he had served prison time and he had engaged in more sophisticated organized crime, stock fraud in, along with someone whose appears to be an Italian organized crime figure. This was a guy who Trump seemed to still be working with and was prone to lying about, sometimes under oath in terms of his relationship with this guy. So that was the first in many discoveries of organized crime figures working with or in close proximity to Donald Trump from convicted drug traffickers to Russian mafia guys who ran poker rings out of Trump Tower and fixed Olympic competitions. It went on and on and on. And so that was really the original reason why we decided in the spring of 2016 that we could not walk away from this project and we had to keep going. Went out and found a new client after the Republican primaries were winding down.

LL: So what do you think when you hear Trump and his supporters continuously say there was no collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign?

PETER FRITSCH: The Mueller Report found something like 140 contacts. I believe that's about right, between the Trump campaign and Russia. The report also copiously documents the extent to which Donald Trump and his administration have refused to and frustrated, confuse the issue and tried to cover up these contacts.

GLENN SIMPSON: It's a mantra. It's also really an object lesson in sort of modern propaganda and the way the president and his associates have been able to manipulate public opinion and mislead people about what the real facts are. Really scary.

PETER FRITSCH: Let's also be clear that, you know, Donald Trump also has his own media outlet in Fox News to parrot his every dictum.

LL: Are you still investigating President Trump?

PETER FRITSCH: So we're not investigating President Trump. We're investigating Russian influence on Western and efforts to disrupt Western democracies. So whether that is, you know, their efforts to influence the Brexit campaign in the UK, whether it's their co-option, the Kremlin's co-option, of Viktor Orban, the president of Hungary, and his administration. Those are the sorts of things that we're continuing to look at.

GLENN SIMPSON: One of the things that we talk about in the book a lot is, you know, are our gradual understanding over the course of 2016 and 2017 that this was not really an attack on America that the Russians launched. It was an attack on the West and it was attack on free elections and democracy, NATO, the Atlantic alliance, the European Union, you know, they're trying to destabilize our world. And it's a much broader, scarier phenomenon than just an effort to elect Donald Trump President of the United States.

LL: Regardless of what happens with the impeachment, next year will be a presidential election year. How prepared do you think the United States is to counter any meddling by Russia or any other government in the election?

PETER FRITSCH: I mean, the social media platforms have taken some steps in the wake of the revelations of 2016, but they still remain woefully unprepared to address a lot of these issues.

GLENN SIMPSON: And the government is sort of almost wilfully unprepared.

LL: Wilfully?

GLENN SIMPSON: Well, you can certainly see that Donald Trump is not interested in doing anything that would prevent the Russians from coming back and getting him another round.

PETER FRITSCH: The Republican leader, Mitch McConnell, earned the sobriquet at Moscow Mitch, for his actions, in part to block measures that would ensure free and fair vote counts in The States.

LL: Well, then, in that sense, what do you think is at stake for the United States when Americans do go to vote in November?

GLENN SIMPSON: Our entire democracy, constitutional government.

LL: Pretty high stakes.

GLENN SIMPSON: Couldn't be higher.

PETER FRITSCH: And as our number one trading partner, you in Canada should care, too.

LL: I believe that most people, especially people listening to this program, do so. I thank both of you for coming in and talking to us about all of this.

PETER FRITSCH: Thanks so much.

GLENN SIMPSON: Thank you.

LL: Peter Fritsch and Glenn Simpson are the founders of Fusion GPS and the authors of Crime and Progress: Inside the Steal Dossier and the Fusion GPS investigation of Donald Trump. They were in our Washington, D.C. studio. That's our program for today, stay tuned to Radio One for Q. Legendary musician and Talking Heads frontman David Byrne joins Tom Power to talk about his Broadway show, American Utopia. Earlier in the program, we discussed all things Dolly. One of the reasons the legendary country singer seems to be everywhere these days is the new Netflix series Dolly Parton's Heartstrings. That show has spawned its very own online challenge called the #JoleneChallenge. People are sharing their renditions of the Dolly classic. And we picked a few to leave you with today. I'm Laura Lynch. Thank you for listening to The Current.

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[Song]

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