Trump Colluded With Russia

• Christopher Steele was a former head of the Russia Desk at MI6 who, after leaving British intelligence, founded a private firm called Orbis Business Intelligence. In 2016, he was hired through intermediaries to investigate Donald Trump's ties to Russia, and he produced a series of memos alleging a "well-developed conspiracy" between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin. His prior work, including a corruption investigation into FIFA that led to real arrests, had earned him genuine credibility with FBI contacts, who received his findings with what colleagues described as shock and horror. ^[2][5] Steele himself remained a believer. Years after the Mueller investigation concluded, he told associates he considered the dossier 70 to 90 percent accurate, a claim that required setting aside the fact that its most sensational specific allegations, including the famous "pee tape" and a purported trip by Trump lawyer Michael Cohen to Prague, were never corroborated and in some cases directly contradicted by available evidence. ^[5]
• Glenn Simpson, a former Wall Street Journal reporter who co-founded the opposition research firm Fusion GPS, was the man who brought Steele into the project. Simpson traveled to London to meet Steele and commission human intelligence gathering on Trump's Russia connections, work that was ultimately funded through the law firm Perkins Coie on behalf of the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee. ^[1][2] Simpson and his partner Peter Fritsch later wrote a book defending the dossier as "strikingly right," a characterization that required a generous reading of what "right" means when applied to unverified raw intelligence memos. ^[2]
• Marc Elias, the lawyer who represented both the DNC and the Clinton campaign, was the conduit through which Democratic money reached Fusion GPS after an earlier Republican donor had dropped the project. His firm, Perkins Coie, handled the payments, a financial arrangement that was not publicly disclosed at the time and that the Clinton campaign initially denied. ^[2] The funding structure meant that opposition research commissioned by one presidential campaign became the documentary foundation for a federal counterintelligence investigation into the other.
• Dean Baquet, the executive editor of the New York Times during the years of peak collusion coverage, was among the most prominent institutional champions of the narrative. When the Mueller report landed without a conspiracy finding, Baquet acknowledged the Times had been "a little tiny bit flat-footed" but maintained that "I think we covered that story better than anyone else" and pointed to the prizes the paper had won as evidence. ^[1] He did not commission a formal postmortem. The prizes stayed on the wall.
• Bob Woodward, whose Watergate reporting had made him the patron saint of investigative journalism, was one of the few figures in mainstream media to say plainly what the coverage had been. He called the dossier "garbage" almost immediately after it became public and later said the Russia inquiry coverage "wasn't handled well" and that readers had been "cheated." ^[1][2] His dissent was noted and largely set aside.
• Fiona Hill, a Russia expert who served on the National Security Council under Trump, described the dossier as a "rabbit hole" and suggested that Steele may have been fed disinformation by his own sources, a possibility that intelligence professionals had raised from the beginning and that the institutions consuming the dossier had largely declined to take seriously. ^[2]
• Nina Jankowicz was a disinformation researcher who, in October 2020, used her public platform to amplify the claim that the Hunter Biden laptop story bore the hallmarks of Russian interference. She tweeted during the final presidential debate that Biden had noted fifty former national security officials believed the laptop was a Russian influence operation, framing this as a straightforward factual reference. ^[7] In 2022, the Biden administration appointed her to lead the Department of Homeland Security's newly created Disinformation Governance Board. She had also, in the interim, publicly praised a podcast by Christopher Steele on the evolution of disinformation, apparently without irony. ^[7] The board was disbanded within weeks of its announcement amid a political firestorm, and the laptop's contents were subsequently verified as authentic by forensic analysts.
• Igor Danchenko was the primary sub-source who supplied the human intelligence underlying Steele's memos. His identity, initially concealed, was later uncovered by the Durham investigation. Danchenko had passed along reports from sources whose reliability was, at minimum, unestablished, and in some cases the information appeared to have originated from casual conversations rather than from the kind of cultivated intelligence networks Steele's reputation implied. ^[4] He was indicted on charges of lying to the FBI, though he was ultimately acquitted.

Fusion GPS occupied a peculiar position in the collusion narrative: it was simultaneously a commercial vendor selling opposition research and the organization most responsible for the dossier's entry into the political bloodstream. Founded by former journalists, the firm shifted from public records research to human intelligence gathering after it was retained through Perkins Coie on behalf of the Clinton campaign and the DNC. ^[1][2] Fusion hired Steele, received his sixteen memos, and later published a book insisting the dossier had been vindicated. The firm's founders gave closed-door testimony to Congress and fought subpoenas for years, a posture that did not suggest an organization eager for its methods to receive scrutiny.

The New York Times and The Washington Post drove the collusion narrative through hundreds of stories across their news and opinion sections, and both papers received Pulitzer Prizes for their coverage. ^[3] The Columbia Journalism Review later estimated that mainstream outlets produced over half a million articles during the Mueller investigation's tenure, a volume that generated substantial digital traffic and advertising revenue while the underlying premise remained unproven. ^[1] Neither paper conducted a formal public postmortem after the Mueller report found no conspiracy. The Pulitzers were not returned.

BuzzFeed News made the decision in January 2017 to publish the full text of the Steele dossier, acting against Steele's own wishes and over the objections of journalists who argued that publishing unverified allegations set a damaging precedent. ^[2][4] The publication ensured that every specific claim in the dossier, including those that were later shown to be wrong or unverifiable, entered permanent public circulation. BuzzFeed defended the decision as a matter of public interest; critics called it the moment that transformed raw opposition research into apparent news.

The FBI treated Steele's dossier with a seriousness that his own caveats did not warrant. After Steele alerted his FBI contacts in late summer 2016, the bureau incorporated dossier material into its Crossfire Hurricane investigation and used it to support applications for FISA surveillance warrants. ^[2][4] The FBI's Foreign Influence Task Force later provided classified briefings to executives at Twitter, warning of potential hack-and-leak operations in the weeks before the 2020 election, briefings that contributed to the platform's decision to suppress the New York Post's reporting on the Hunter Biden laptop. ^[8] The bureau's credibility as a neutral investigative institution was a central reason its early embrace of the dossier carried such weight.

The Biden administration appointed Nina Jankowicz in 2022 to lead the Department of Homeland Security's Disinformation Governance Board, an entity whose stated purpose was to counter foreign disinformation threats including Russian interference. ^[7] The appointment of someone who had publicly promoted the laptop-as-Russian-disinformation narrative to lead a federal disinformation office was received as either tone-deaf or pointed, depending on one's politics. The board was shut down within weeks.

The assumption that Donald Trump had colluded with Russia rested on several interlocking pillars, each of which seemed credible in isolation and each of which later proved weaker than advertised. The most important was the Steele dossier itself: seventeen memos labeled by their own author as "raw intelligence, not established facts," which alleged a "well-developed conspiracy" of cooperation between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin. ^[4] The dossier's specific claims ranged from the plausible to the sensational, and its general framing of Trump as unusually friendly toward Putin fit a pattern that was visible in public. The problem was that the memos were treated not as a starting point for investigation but as a body of evidence, a distinction that mattered enormously when the specific claims began to fall apart.

Steele's personal credibility was the load-bearing element of the entire structure. His thirty years of experience dealing with Russia, his prior work on FIFA corruption that had led to real prosecutions, and his reputation within the intelligence community as a serious professional all made it easier to accept his conclusions without demanding the kind of corroboration that raw intelligence normally requires before being acted upon. ^[5] The FBI's own enthusiasm for his work reinforced this: when Steele briefed his contacts, they expressed what colleagues described as shock and horror, and they requested future reports. ^[5] An institution that had found his FIFA work credible was now treating his Trump work the same way, and that institutional endorsement circulated through the media as implicit validation.

The broader context provided additional scaffolding. Russian interference in the 2016 election was real: the DNC was hacked, social media was manipulated, and the intelligence community concluded with high confidence that the operation was directed by the Kremlin. ^[9] This confirmed interference made the leap to confirmed collusion feel like a short step rather than a long one. The distinction between "Russia tried to help Trump" and "Trump coordinated with Russia" was analytically significant but emotionally easy to collapse, and much of the coverage collapsed it routinely. ^[4]

The Hunter Biden laptop episode added a later chapter to the same story. When the New York Post published its reporting on the laptop's contents in October 2020, the FBI had already been briefing social media executives about potential hack-and-leak operations, and fifty-one former intelligence officials signed a public letter stating that the story had "all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation." ^[8][7] The letter did not claim the officials had seen evidence; it said the story had earmarks. That distinction was not prominently featured in most coverage. Nina Jankowicz claimed publicly that an intelligence community report had reached conclusions about Kremlin use of proxies that the report did not actually contain. ^[7] The architecture of the original collusion narrative, now years old, made these claims feel like confirmation rather than speculation.

The collusion narrative spread through mainstream media at a scale that was, by any measure, extraordinary. Estimates placed the number of articles produced during the Mueller investigation's two-year tenure at over half a million. ^[1] The story was commercially valuable: it generated clicks, subscriptions, and television ratings at a moment when digital media economics were punishing outlets that could not hold audience attention. The Washington Post and the New York Times both saw subscription surges during the Trump years, and the collusion story was among their most-read categories of coverage. The financial incentive to keep the story alive and the journalistic incentive to break the next piece of it pointed in the same direction.

BuzzFeed News published the full dossier in January 2017, a decision that immediately made every one of Steele's unverified allegations available to any reader with an internet connection. ^[2][4] The publication was controversial within journalism: many reporters argued that publishing unverified allegations about a private citizen, even a president-elect, violated basic standards. BuzzFeed's editors argued the public had a right to know what intelligence officials were discussing. Whatever the merits of that argument, the practical effect was that the dossier's specific claims, including those that were later shown to be false, became permanent fixtures of public discourse. Carl Bernstein at CNN had helped break the news of the dossier's existence days earlier, giving the document its initial news peg. ^[2]

Steele's credibility was propagated through institutional channels as well as media ones. His prior Russia and Ukraine reports had been shared widely within the State Department, reaching Secretary John Kerry and Under Secretary Victoria Nuland. ^[5] That circulation meant that when the Trump dossier appeared, it arrived in a context where Steele was already known and trusted by senior officials. Luke Harding of the Guardian, who wrote a book called "Collusion," quoted Steele's claim that the dossier was 70 to 90 percent accurate and presented his background as grounds for taking that self-assessment seriously. ^[5] The book reached a large general audience and framed the dossier as something that a special counsel investigation would eventually vindicate.

The FBI's back-channel relationship with Twitter executives in 2020 represented a different kind of propagation: institutional rather than journalistic. The bureau's Foreign Influence Task Force held regular meetings with platform executives, including Yoel Roth, Twitter's head of trust and safety, warning of hack-and-leak operations. ^[8] Separately, the Aspen Institute ran a tabletop exercise with executives from Twitter and Facebook and with journalists, rehearsing how to handle a scenario in which hacked materials about a candidate appeared before an election. ^[8] The exercise concluded roughly a week before the New York Post published its laptop story. When the story appeared, the frameworks for dismissing it as potential Russian interference were already in place.

The most consequential institutional response to the collusion assumption was the appointment of Robert Mueller as special counsel in May 2017. Mueller's investigation lasted nearly two years, employed nineteen lawyers and approximately forty FBI agents and other staff, issued more than 2,800 subpoenas, executed nearly 500 search warrants, and interviewed approximately 500 witnesses. ^[1][2] It was the largest and most resource-intensive federal investigation of a sitting president in modern history, and it was predicated on the assumption that there was a conspiracy to investigate. The investigation confirmed that Russia had interfered in the election. It did not establish that the Trump campaign had conspired or coordinated with that interference.

The dossier's most direct policy consequence was its role in the FBI's Crossfire Hurricane investigation and in applications for surveillance warrants under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. ^[4] The FISA warrants targeted Carter Page, a Trump campaign adviser, and the applications relied in part on dossier material. The Justice Department's Inspector General, Michael Horowitz, later found significant errors and omissions in the warrant applications and criticized the FBI's handling of its relationship with Steele. ^[2] The bureau had continued to use Steele as a source even after he had been warned not to speak to the media, and after he had done so anyway.

In October 2020, Twitter invoked its hacked materials policy to block users from sharing the New York Post's reporting on the Hunter Biden laptop, preventing the story from spreading on one of the country's largest social media platforms in the final weeks of a presidential election. ^[8] The decision was made by executives who had received FBI briefings about potential hack-and-leak operations and who had participated in the Aspen Institute exercise. The FBI had possessed the laptop since December 2019 and had not informed the platforms that the materials were authentic. The Biden campaign and allied media figures dismissed the story as Russian disinformation, citing the letter from fifty-one former intelligence officials. ^[7] The suppression lasted long enough to shape the pre-election information environment; the laptop's contents were later verified as genuine.

The assumption collapsed in stages, each one quieter than the coverage that had built it up. Robert Mueller's report, delivered in March 2019 and followed by his congressional testimony in July of that year, found that the investigation had not established that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities. ^[1][3] The finding was unambiguous. The media response was not a reckoning; it was, as Dean Baquet later acknowledged, a moment of being "a little tiny bit flat-footed." No major outlet published a formal postmortem examining how the coverage had gone wrong. ^[1]

The Inspector General's report, released in December 2019, documented the specific ways in which the FBI had mishandled its relationship with Steele and its FISA applications. ^[2] The report found seventeen significant errors and omissions in the warrant applications, including the alteration of an email by an FBI lawyer to make it appear that Carter Page had not been a CIA source when he had been. The Durham investigation, which continued for years afterward, further exposed the unreliability of the dossier's sourcing. Igor Danchenko, Steele's primary sub-source, was identified and indicted, and the investigation revealed that key dossier claims had originated not from cultivated intelligence assets but from casual conversations and, in some cases, from a source with connections to the Clinton campaign. ^[4]

The Hunter Biden laptop's authentication arrived through a combination of forensic analysis and official acknowledgment. Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe stated publicly that there was no intelligence indicating the laptop was a Russian fabrication. ^[7] The Twitter Files, a series of internal documents released by Elon Musk after his acquisition of Twitter and reported by journalist Michael Shellenberger and others, revealed the specific internal debates at Twitter about the laptop story and the FBI briefings that had preceded the suppression decision. ^[8] The documents showed that some Twitter executives had doubted the hacked-materials rationale even as they applied it. The DHS Disinformation Governance Board, whose director had promoted the Russian-interference framing of the laptop story, was disbanded within weeks of its creation. ^[7] The assumption had not been disproven by a single dramatic revelation; it had been worn down by the accumulation of things that turned out not to be true.

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