Eight months into Donald Trump’s second term in the White House, Portuguese president Marco Rebelo de Sousa remarked that the president of the United States was “objectively” acting as a “Russian asset.” That comment brought back the ghosts of the “Russiagate” scandal of Trump’s first term, when he was accused of colluding with Russian agents during the 2016 election.

Two days later, during an interview with the Daily Caller, Trump reiterated his own version of those events—that the “Russia, Russia, Russia hoax” was a conspiracy orchestrated by Hillary Clinton, the Obama administration, and corrupt intelligence chiefs to frame him for Russian collusion. He added that those responsible for his persecution should be in jail, possibly including former CIA chief John Brennan and former FBI director James Comey. And in fact, a grand jury investigation into the matter, ordered by Attorney General Pam Bondi, is already underway.

Claims that Russiagate was a “hoax” and a “witch-hunt” have been made by Trump and his supporters since the scandal first became news. Now, however, those claims are endorsed by top administration officials—director of national intelligence Tulsi Gabbard alleges a “treasonous conspiracy” and an attempted “coup”—and supposedly vindicated by newly declassified documents.

The notion that Trump is knowingly advancing Russian interests has always struck me as far-fetched. Many of his actions—in his first and second terms—have not been favourable to Russia. Those that are can easily be explained by his ego, his affinity for authoritarian rulers, and his susceptibility to Putin’s manipulation. But that does not make the idea that there was a “Deep State” plot to frame Trump any less risible. A careful look at the newly disclosed evidence and the way it has been pitched to the public leaves little doubt that the real “Russiagate hoax” is the one being peddled right now by the Trump administration.

I.

The “Russiagate” story began in the summer of 2016, when a number of major media outlets turned their attention to Trump’s odd relationship with Vladimir Putin, his financial ties to Russia, and the unusual presence of several Russia-connected advisers and operatives on his campaign staff. Around the same time, thousands of emails from the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign were stolen by hackers with apparent links to Russian military intelligence, and then released with a spin calculated to inflict maximum damage on Clinton.

At a press conference on 27 July in Florida, Trump responded to this development by encouraging America’s foe to do more of the same. Complaining that Clinton had deleted thousands of emails from a private server she used while she was secretary of state, Trump looked into the camera and said: “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing.” Almost immediately, Clinton’s personal office and campaign were targeted by Russian phishing attacks.

A few days later, the FBI—already alerted by an Australian diplomat that a Trump foreign-policy adviser named George Papadopoulos had been telling people Russia had “dirt” on Clinton—opened an inquiry into possible links between Russia and the Trump campaign. Several intelligence agencies also began to probe Russian campaign interference. On 31 October 2016, the New York Times reported that no “conclusive or direct link” between Trump and the Putin regime had been found. Nevertheless, investigations continued after Trump’s election victory on 8 November, and Trump was briefed on them in early January 2017.

Then, on 9 January—twelve days before the inauguration—the story got a new boost from the publication by BuzzFeed of a sensational Trump/Russia dossier compiled by retired British intelligence officer Christopher Steele and shared with the FBI earlier. Steele had originally been hired by a private intelligence firm doing opposition research for the Democrats, and the dossier he eventually produced included the scandalous claim that a compromising video from Trump’s 2013 trip to Moscow showed him directing prostitutes to urinate on the bed in his luxury hotel suite where Barack Obama had slept four years earlier.

On 9 May 2017, Trump fired FBI director James Comey and told NBC’s Lester Holt that his decision to do so was related to the “made-up” Trump/Russia story. On 17 May, deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein appointed former FBI director Robert Mueller as special counsel to investigate “any links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump.” Nearly two years later, in March 2019, attorney general William Barr sent Congress a letter summarising Mueller’s main findings: while Russian agents had interfered in the election, both through the hack-and-leak operations and through online propaganda, there was no evidence that Trump or his campaign had conspired to aid this malfeasance. Thirty-four individuals and three Russian businesses were indicted.

When the full report was released about a month later, many observers felt that Barr’s summary had tendentiously downplayed the extent of contacts between the Russians and the Trump campaign documented by Mueller. By that point, the Trump administration had already launched its campaign to discredit the entire “Russiagate” investigation as a political witch-hunt. These efforts, however, yielded virtually nothing at first.

Yes, a December 2019 report from US Department of Justice inspector general Michael Horowitz was highly critical of some of the FBI’s actions, particularly “errors and omissions” in applications for wiretap warrants on former Trump campaign aide Carter Page. In particular, FBI attorney Kevin Clinesmith had altered a CIA liaison’s email concerning Page’s cooperation with the agency by adding that Page was “not a source” for the CIA—an egregious act, even though Clinesmith insisted the addition was not intended to mislead and merely clarified Page’s status. However, Horowitz also concluded—despite pressure from Barr—that the overall investigation was appropriate and was not influenced by political bias.

While the IG probe was still under way, Barr appointed John Durham, a career prosecutor and the Trump-appointed US attorney for Connecticut, to lead a broad review of the Trump/Russia investigation. In December 2020, Barr also granted Durham special-counsel status so that the inquiry could continue after Joe Biden took office. The Durham Report, released in May 2023, concluded that there had been an insufficient basis for a “full counterintelligence investigation” into Russian interference and its possible connections to the Trump campaign in the summer of 2016, and that the leads warranted only a “preliminary inquiry.” This was the position that Barr had urged Horowitz to take in 2019.

However, Durham failed to produce any real evidence of criminal activity or conspiracy. He brought charges against Clinesmith—who pled guilty with no jail time—and two other people: cybersecurity lawyer Michael Sussman (for allegedly concealing his work for the Clinton campaign when he tipped off the FBI about possibly suspicious Trump organisation/Russia contacts) and think-tank analyst Igor Danchenko (for allegedly lying to the FBI about the information he provided for the Steele dossier). Both cases ended in acquittal.

II.

When Trump returned to the White House this past January, not many people doubted that exposing the supposed “Russia hoax” would be high on his agenda. Moreover, this time, he would have an administration staffed with loyalists who would either actively carry out this agenda or, at least, not try to block actions that could be reasonably seen as illegal, unethical, or harmful—as the so-called “adults in the room” had done in the first Trump administration.

The first anti-Russiagate move came from the new CIA director, John Ratcliffe, who had been part of the effort to discredit the Russia investigation during Trump’s first term when he served as director of national intelligence. At the height of the 2020 campaign, Ratcliffe sent a letter to Senator Lindsay Graham, a close Trump ally, along with snippets of classified material intended to suggest that, in 2016, Barack Obama had been briefed by then-CIA chief Brennan about an alleged Hillary Clinton plan to “vilify” Trump by linking him to the Russian hacking operations. The letter was publicly released by Sen. Graham over the objections of other intelligence officials. In fact, Brennan’s handwritten notes show that he was briefing Obama about Russian attempts to plant such a story.

On 2 July 2025, Ratcliffe unveiled an internal CIA “note” with the subject heading “Tradecraft Review of the 2016 Intelligence Community Assessment on Russian Election Interference.” The note was strongly critical of some aspects of that assessment, noting that it was too rushed, that the personal involvement of intelligence chiefs created unusual pressures, and that there was some jumping to “weakly supported” conclusions—in particular, that Vladimir Putin’s intent in authorising interference in the US election was not just to hurt Clinton but to help Trump. However, it also noted that the “overall assessment was deemed defensible,” that it relied on “fundamentally sound analysis,” and that much of it was “robust and consistent” with the intelligence community’s analytic standards.

In an analysis for the Bulwark, Atlantic Council fellow and CIA veteran John Sipher points out that the “unconventional” way in which the assessment was carried out was due to extremely unusual circumstances: the strong likelihood that an adversarial power had interfered with a just-completed presidential election. Furthermore, the conduct of the President-elect gave cause for concern that he would try to cut off the investigation once he assumed office. But more importantly, Ratcliffe’s presentation of the “tradecraft review” completely misrepresented its findings.

In an exclusive interview with New York Post columnist Miranda Devine, Ratcliffe said that the 2016 investigation was “politically corrupted,” that it was essentially about Barack Obama, FBI director Comey, CIA director Brennan, and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper “deciding ‘We’re going to screw Trump,’” and that Brennan, Clapper, and Comey “manipulated [and] silenced all the career professionals and railroaded the process.” After Devine’s column appeared, Ratcliffe promoted it on social media.

Then on 17 July, director of national intelligence Tulsi Gabbard—one of Trump’s most controversial nominees, partly because she habitually regurgitates Russian propaganda narratives about the war in Ukraine—released her “Russia Hoax memo” accompanied by a set of declassified documents. The memo was so shoddy that even vehement critics of the Trump/Russia investigation—like National Review columnist and former prosecutor Andrew McCarthy and Free Press columnist Eli Lake—described it as “frivolous” and unsupported by evidence. 

Gabbard’s memo stressed that intelligence assessments in the fall of 2016 found that Russia lacked the capacity and even the intent to alter or tamper with the election results via cyberattacks. But post-election, in early December, Obama directed a new assessment with a focus on Russian election-meddling. Gabbard’s conclusion? Obama knowingly misled Americans with help from Comey, Brennan, and Clapper, who cooked intelligence data to promote a bogus narrative. But in reality, as Lake and others have noted, the pre- and post-election intelligence assessments essentially said the same thing. There was “Russian meddling” via the hacking and leaking of documents for the purpose of damaging the Clinton campaign (and, to some extent, via pushing propaganda and disinformation on social media), but no “cyberattacks on election infrastructure”—i.e., actual tampering with the vote. Neither the Obama administration nor Hillary Clinton ever claimed that the vote count was altered.

Five days later, Gabbard unveiled another previously classified document: a report on the intelligence assessment of Russian interference in the 2016 election, prepared by the House Permanent Select Intelligence Committee in 2017 and finalised in the fall of 2020 by what was, by then, the committee’s Republican minority. (Current FBI director Kash Patel played a major role in its drafting.) On the website of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the report was listed, with the Trump administration’s characteristic subtlety, as “Declassified HPSCI Report on the Manufactured Russia Hoax.”

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In fact, the report—which still contains a lot of blacked-out classified information—does not allege a “hoax” at all. Rather, it faults the intelligence agencies for jumping to the conclusion that Russian election interference was intended to help Trump rather than sow general chaos. Despite occasional suggestions that high-level Russian officials were divided on whether a Trump or a Clinton victory would better serve Russia’s interests, its main argument is that Putin didn’t think Trump could win; hence, his goal was to bruise Clinton during the campaign and then promote disinformation that her victory was stolen, just as the Russians had done after she defeated Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primaries.

A more dramatic claim is that Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service, the SVR, chose not to release the worst of the compromising material on Clinton in its possession—presumably saving it “for post-election use against the expected Clinton administration”— and that American intelligence knew this. This alone, the report says, should have cast serious doubt on the conclusion that Russian “active measures” during the 2016 campaign were intended to help Trump win.

That sounds compelling—until you get to a description of this allegedly explosive kompromat. Namely: purported DNC communications indicating that “President Obama and party leaders found the state of Secretary Clinton’s health to be ‘extraordinarily alarming’ and felt it could have ‘serious negative impact’ on her election prospects”; that Clinton suffered from “intensified psychoemotional problems, including uncontrolled fits of anger, aggression, and cheerfulness”; that she was “on a daily regimen of ‘heavy tranquilizers’”; and that she was “obsessed with a thirst for power.”

The most likely reason that the Russians did not release these materials is that they don’t exist. First, no hint of them has surfaced in the nine years since the election. Second, do they even pass the smell test as actual DNC internal messages, as opposed to SVR fabrications? Finally, these lurid claims are remarkably similar to the anti-Clinton “fake news” that circulated online during the campaign and was actively pushed by Russian trolls and bots. (Anyone remember the #SickHillary hashtag?) The Russians, in other words, didn’t “hold back” this alleged information: they helped to spread it through their troll network.

And then there’s this bombshell:

The SVR possessed a campaign email discussing a plan approved by Secretary Clinton to link Putin and Russian hackers to candidate Trump in order to “distract the [American] public” from the Clinton email server scandal.

If you think that also sounds like a Russian fabrication... read on.

Lastly, the House Intelligence Committee report tries to rebut the idea that Russian meddling favoured Trump by pointing out that DCleaks.com—a website with ties to Russian military intelligence, which had publicised many of the stolen DNC and Clinton campaign emails—had also leaked material damaging to Trump: namely, emails sent by George W. Bush’s secretary of state Colin Powell attacking Trump as a “national disgrace and an international pariah.” But any comparison between the Powell emails and the troves of leaks intended to portray Clinton as corrupt and crooked is laughable. By 2016, Powell—a figure associated with the increasingly unpopular war in Iraq—was hardly influential; if anything, his disparagement of Trump could boost Trump’s self-cultivated image as the populist rebel hated by the “establishment.”

Ironically, as the Associated Press has pointed out, the information in the House Intelligence Committee report actually refuted a key claim of the “Russia hoax” narrative: that the main source for Russiagate was the infamous Steele dossier. The report confirms that information on Putin’s plan to meddle in the US presidential election came from a human source inside the Kremlin—someone, in fact, with direct access to Putin. That asset, who had provided intelligence to the US for over a decade, had to be exfiltrated to the US in 2017 because of concerns that Trump could blow his cover.

III.

The last alleged bombshell in the “Russia hoax” narrative was dropped on 31 July by FBI director Kash Patel, about whom a few words of introduction are in order. As previously noted, Patel was instrumental in compiling the House Intelligence Committee report on the 2016 intelligence assessment of Russian interference. During the first Trump administration, Patel—who had been a junior attorney in the Obama Justice Department, and by his own account, had deeply felt grievances against the Obama administration—had earned his reputation as a dogged Trump loyalist with a penchant for norm-breaking. His reputation was so bad that when Trump tried to appoint Patel deputy director of the FBI and then the CIA, Attorney General Barr and CIA director Gina Haspel blocked his attempts with “over my dead body”-level responses.

After Trump left the White House in 2021, Patel remained his national security adviser and worked as a consultant for the parent company of Truth Social, Trump’s social-media network. He also wrote a children’s book titled The Plot Against the King, in which an evil plot by “Hillary Queenton” to overthrow “King Donald” by accusing him of stealing the throne with help from the “Russionians” is thwarted by “Wizard Kash.” For grown-ups, Patel wrote Government Gangsters, a purported exposé of “the Deep State” complete with an “Appendix” listing its minions, including Trump officials he had clashed with (such as Barr, Haspel, and Rosenstein). He also publicly vowed to “go after” alleged anti-Trump conspirators, not only in the government but in the media.

Patel’s contribution to the supposed unmasking of the “Russia hoax” was to declassify an annexe to the 2023 Durham Report. This material, he announced in a dramatic social-media post, was “uncovered … buried in a back room at the FBI” and amounted to “evidence that the Clinton campaign plotted to frame President Trump and fabricate the Russia collusion hoax.” That evidence is two emails supposedly sent by Leonard Benardo, a staffer at the George Soros-funded Open Society Foundation, obtained by Russian intelligence and then passed to the US by Dutch spies:

A cursory glance should be enough to determine that these emails are crude fabrications concocted by people who are not especially proficient English speakers. (As numerous social-media posters pointed out, “put more oil into the fire” is a verbatim translation of the Russian idiom podlit’ masla v ogon’.) Indeed, as the declassified annexe notes, Durham’s investigation found that Benardo had no recollection of sending these emails, and found no trace of them on the Open Society servers. More importantly, Durham discovered that the first two paragraphs of the 25 July email were lifted verbatim (except for the inserted, clunky sentence, “At the same [sic], politicization is on the table”) from an email written on the same date by Tim Maurer, a cyber expert at the Carnegie Endowment for Democracy, in response to a query about media reports on the Russian connection in the DNC hack.

The Durham annexe does note that some CIA analysts in 2017 did not regard the purported Benardo emails as Russian fabrications—a fact touted in a press release by Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), who collaborated with Patel to authorise the public disclosure of the document. That doesn’t say much for the competence or linguistic skills of those CIA analysts; but also, that was before the discovery of the Maurer email, which surely clinched the matter. Durham points out that Clinton staffers really did discuss strategies to attack Trump by highlighting his Putin-friendly statements, the Russia-linked people on his campaign, and the Russian hacking attacks apparently intended to help him. But that’s hardly a big reveal: the Clinton campaign quite openly pursued such a strategy and even ran a video ad on Trump’s Putin connection. However, unlike the fake Benardo emails, none of the real messages implied that this connection was a deliberate smear—let alone that its purpose was to distract the public from Clinton’s email scandal.

In any case, the Durham annexe makes it clear why the explosive charge that the Clinton campaign wanted to frame Trump for collusion with the Russians to distract attention from her email scandal was not included in the main body of the Durham report but relegated to a classified supplement. Durham knew that the emails purporting to reveal this conspiracy were almost certainly SVR forgeries stitched together with portions of a hacked email by an American think-tank staffer.

So Patel’s bombshell is a dud. Furthermore, the annexe he declassified undercuts a key claim of the House Intelligence Committee report he helped to draft: that Russian spies possessed an email exposing a Clinton plan to frame Trump for Russian collusion but refrained from leaking it. That email was a fake, and the Russians probably knew it would be identified as such if it were publicly released and that back-channel circulation would be far more effective. In his hurry to prove the plot against the king, Wizard Kash torched his own story.

IV.

The new Russiagate revelations are nothing-burgers, but they have successfully reinforced the “political witch-hunt” narrative among those predisposed to embrace it. “Beginning with the spurious Russiagate investigation in his first term,” writes Eli Lake in a recent Free Press column, “[Trump’s] political and bureaucratic enemies abused their power to mire his first administration in investigations and lawfare.” In his earlier piece criticising Gabbard’s memo, Lake also asserts that the FBI opened the Trump/Russia investigation “on a paper-thin pretext” and relied on “bogus opposition research generated by the Clinton campaign” (i.e. the Steele dossier) to keep it going after the election. Lake also points to Inspector General Horowitz’s criticism of the Carter Page surveillance warrants, but does not acknowledge that Horowitz affirmed the overall validity of the investigation.

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Russiagate critics rarely mention the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee report on Russian interference in the 2016 US election, released in August 2020 and described by the committee’s acting chairman Marco Rubio as the most “exhaustive” Russiagate probe. Rubio’s statement stressed that there was “absolutely no evidence that then-candidate Donald Trump or his campaign colluded with the Russian government to meddle in the 2016 election” and criticised the FBI for its reliance on the Steele dossier. However, the report itself clearly showed that there was Russian meddling and that key members of the Trump campaign actively and assiduously tried to procure material stolen by Russian hackers.

Has there been Russiagate hype and hysteria, including a widespread belief among Democrats that Clinton’s loss was due to actual vote-tampering by the Russians? Yes. Has there been sloppy and biased reporting? Also yes. (For the record, I cautioned against all these back in 2017 and 2018.) Assorted Trump foes have sometimes made hyperbolic and unsupported claims about Trump’s involvement with Russia, including allegations that he was literally recruited by Russian secret services decades ago and/or that he was literally taking orders from Putin. Some mainstream journalists and Democratic politicians also overstated the evidence.

But when you strip away the feverish speculation and sensationalism, a number of facts remain:

• In 2016, Russian agents (some of them working for the “Internet Research Agency” troll farm run by late Putin crony Yevgeny Prigozhin) conducted extensive “active measures” operations to interfere in the American presidential election, primarily by targeting Hillary Clinton. These operations included hacker attacks on the DNC, the Clinton campaign, and other political organisations, and the public disclosure of stolen emails.
• While we don’t know for sure Putin’s principal goal was to help elect Trump, we do know that he wanted to damage Clinton. This was particularly obvious in the campaign’s final weeks: the 7 October 2016 release of the Access Hollywood tape with Trump’s infamous comments about groping women was quickly followed by a dump of hacked emails to the Wikileaks site and then a steady trickle of leaks, most of which were embarrassing rather than shattering. This stream of bad news was enough to create the impression that the Clinton campaign was having to clean up one mess after another. During the Robert Mueller probe, right-wing author Jerome Corsi testified that Republican operative Roger Stone, a key member of Trump’s inner circle, told him on 7 October that “we’d like to have [Wikileaks founder Julian] Assange begin releasing emails now.”
• In the summer and fall of 2016, Stone made dogged efforts to get advance information on what kompromat Wikileaks—by then well-known to be a vehicle for material stolen by Kremlin-connected Russian hackers—had on Clinton or her campaign and when it would be made public. In 2019, as part of the Mueller investigation, Stone was convicted of making false statements about his contacts with Wikileaks and encouraging another person to corroborate his false accounts. Trump commuted his forty-month prison sentence in July 2020 before he had served a single day, and then pardoned him in December of that year before leaving office. By then, the Senate Intelligence Committee report had presented evidence that Stone’s contacts with Wikileaks were more extensive than Mueller was able to establish—and had the approval of senior Trump campaign officials.
  
  The Committee also assessed that, despite his statements to the contrary to Mueller’s office, “Trump did, in fact, speak with Stone about WikiLeaks and with members of his Campaign about Stone’s access to WikiLeaks on multiple occasions.” (The same report concluded that the people behind Wikileaks almost certainly knew they were aiding a Russian intelligence operation.) Even the Republican-controlled House Intelligence Committee noted, in its 2018 “Report on Russian Active Measures,” that the “Trump campaign’s periodic praise for and communications with Wikileaks—a hostile foreign organization—[was] highly objectionable and inconsistent with U.S. national security interests.”
• The praise for Wikileaks wasn’t just limited to the Trump campaign. Trump’s own enthusiastic hyping of the Wikileaks “scandals” was far more than “periodic,” especially in the month before Election Day. During that period, he mentioned WikiLeaks a total of 141 times at 56 campaign events and positively gushed about it: “Boy, I love reading those WikiLeaks!” “It’s been amazing what’s coming out on WikiLeaks!” “This WikiLeaks stuff is unbelievable. It tells you the inner heart; you gotta read it.”
• Earlier, in June 2016, Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr., his son-in-law Jared Kushner, and Trump campaign adviser Paul Manafort (who had previously worked for pro-Kremlin Ukrainian politico and Putin crony Viktor Yanukovych) had a meeting at Trump Tower with a Russian lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, in the hope of getting “dirt” on Clinton. The meeting was set up after Don Jr. received an email telling him that a Russian oligarch with whom Trump had a past association was offering “official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia and would be very useful to your father.” This, he was told, was being done as “part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.” Don Jr. responded, “[I]f it’s what you say I love it especially later in the summer,” and then contacted her by phone to follow up.
  
  The meeting took place on 9 June but it turned out to be a bust. Veselnitskaya offered nothing on Clinton, mentioning only a Russian tax-fraud scheme allegedly connected to American Democrats. She mostly talked about lifting sanctions on Russia. Russiagate minimisers routinely dismiss the Trump Tower meeting because it yielded nothing useful for Trump’s campaign. But even investigative journalist Jeff Gerth’s Columbia Journalism Review report excoriating the media for being too credulous about Russiagate acknowledged that the incident “showed a receptiveness by Trump’s world to dirt from Russia.” Mother Jones reporter David Corn is more scathing, seeing it as proof of nothing less than the Trump campaign’s “complicity” with Russian election interference—a signal of willingness to “accept Putin’s covert assistance,” compounded by the failure to report the Russian overtures to the FBI or other American authorities.
  
  Trump’s former attorney Michael Cohen has claimed that Trump knew in advance about the Russian offer of “dirt” on Clinton and the subsequent meeting. This has never been proved or disproved; however, in between calls to set up the meeting, Don Jr. had conversations with a number that blocked identification and that may have belonged to his father.
• After the election, Trump consistently denied and downplayed Russian election meddling despite being briefed on it. This culminated in the disastrous 2018 Helsinki Summit press conference with Putin, at which Trump said he believed Putin’s denial of Russian interference in the 2016 election, implicitly taking his word over the assessments of the US intelligence community. In a 2022 interview with Gerth, he admitted that he was disparaging the Obama-era intelligence chiefs: “Who would I trust more? Comey, Clapper, Brennan, and the American sleaze or Putin?” (While Russiagate sceptics will no doubt argue that Trump’s position is justified by the new revelations of supposed malfeasance by these officials, even the new reports—flawed as they are—do not deny that Russian interference did occur.)

All of this taken together suggests that Corn’s assessment is correct: “This may not have been collusion; it was complicity.” Trump apologists like National Review editor Rich Lowry have hand-waved the significance of this conduct by arguing that (1) Trump’s willingness to take advantage of Russia-produced “dirt” on Clinton was no different from Clinton’s willingness to accept “Russian-sourced research”—the Steele dossier—as a weapon against Trump; and (2) Russian meddling did not affect the outcome of the election.

But this is egregious sophistry, on both counts. Whatever the defects of the Steele dossier—which, by the way, was never used by the Clinton campaign and did not become public until two months after the election—it was opposition research commissioned by an American political organisation and compiled by a well-respected retired intelligence officer from an allied power, the United Kingdom. That’s hardly comparable to an American candidate accepting or even courting assistance from an adversarial regime offering to help him get elected. (If the use of Russian sources is an offence, then American intelligence-gathering is also guilty.)

As for the outcome of Russian interference, there is some evidence in national polling data that the WikiLeaks disclosures may have contributed to Clinton’s loss in narrowly contested states. Their effect in October may have neutralised that of the Access Hollywood tape and persuaded many Bernie Sanders supporters to stay at home on Election Day or vote a third-party candidate by portraying Clinton as a corporate shill and promoting the false claim that the DNC “rigged” the primaries against Sanders.

In an election as closely contested as the 2016 US presidential race, teasing out the various factors that played a role in the outcome is a nearly impossible task. What’s more relevant, perhaps, is that Trump and many of his associates clearly believed the fruits of the poisonous tree of Russian interference could help Trump win—and they were ready and willing to make use of them.

V.

Given these facts, the claim that the FBI’s investigation into Russian election interference and its possible links to the Trump campaign was unjustified is odd, to say the least. Obviously, surveillance of a political campaign—especially one in opposition to the party in power—is not something to be undertaken lightly. But the evidence the intelligence agencies had in the fall of 2016 surely qualified as probable cause. (If the FBI had known about the Trump Tower meeting—which was first reported by the New York Times a year later—it would have justified far more drastic measures.)

Since a lot of the criticism centres on the Steele dossier, a few words about it are in order. While even journalists who take Russiagate seriously tend to regard the dossier (in fact, a collection of memos) as “discredited,” other commentators like Claire Berlinski—a conservative in the Reaganite mould—believe that Steele has been unfairly maligned because people unfamiliar with intelligence don’t understand that it summarised raw and unverified data, which is what the early stage of an investigation does. That may or may not be the case; Igor Danchenko, who gathered the information for Steele, told the FBI in 2017 that Steele wrote up this information with more confidence than was warranted—including the rumours about the “pee tape.” And that salacious detail aside, other key claims—for instance, that Michael Cohen, Trump’s lawyer, had travelled to Prague for secret meetings with Russian officials in 2016—ended up being disproved.

On the other hand, the dossier was not simply a partisan hack job. Yes, Steele was hired to conduct research paid for by a law firm working on behalf of the DNC. (In a complicating wrinkle, the company that hired him, Fusion GPS, was originally contracted to do opposition research on Trump for the conservative online magazine the Free Beacon, on behalf of a Marco Rubio donor. But that project was shelved after Trump clinched the Republican nomination, and Fusion GPS was under contract with the DNC-linked law firm by the time Steele became involved.) However, Steele, a former MI6 agent, seems to have been public-spirited rather than partisan and sincerely appalled by what he learned about Trump’s activities. And it was the late Republican Senator John McCain who passed the dossier to the FBI after one of his aides was alerted to its existence.

One can certainly argue that the dossier should not have been published, especially since its sensationalist, obscene, and apparently fact-free details ended up overshadowing the real substance of the “Russiagate” story. But it is equally true that proponents of the “Russia hoax” narrative have vastly inflated the dossier’s importance to the investigation. Recently, they have seized on the revelation in the declassified documents that the 2016 intelligence community assessment included a two-page summary of the dossier in an annexe—despite CIA chief Brennan’s 2017 statement to Congress that it “was not in any way used as a basis” for the assessment. It gets tricky: the CIA “tradecraft review” notes that the summary was included “with a disclaimer that the material was not used ‘to reach the analytic conclusions.’” Yet the assessment also had a four-point bullet list of evidence “supporting” the conclusion that the purpose of Russian interference was to “help [Trump’s] chances of victory”—and the fourth bullet-point referenced the annexe with the dossier summary and analysis as “additional reporting.” Is this semantic sleight-of-hand by the intelligence officials—or nitpicking by their detractors? Either way, it certainly seems that the dossier was at most a minor source.

For now, it is hard to tell if Trump will succeed in sending his supposed Russiagate persecutors to prison. Even if he fails, legal harassment can cause someone plenty of pain. But aside from Trump’s vendettas over Russiagate, the “Russia hoax” narrative has plenty of other damaging consequences. Internationally, it downplays or discounts the danger of subversive Kremlin activities around the world. Domestically, it undermines trust in national-security and intelligence professionals and institutions. It also provides a convenient excuse for lawless and authoritarian actions by Trump, with a “they started it” rationalisation—and the accusations of “insurrection” and “coup” shifted to Democrats and the “Deep State.”

That makes it particularly important to set the record straight.