The Trump campaign’s ties to Russia were not a hoax

US President Donald Trump, left, and Russian President Vladimir Putin, right, shake hands at the start of a meeting at the Presidential Palace in Helsinki, Finland, on July 16, 2018. — President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin shake hands at the presidential palace in Helsinki, Finland, on July 16, 2018.
Photo: Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP

In May 2016George Papadopoulos, a foreign policy adviser to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, told Australian diplomat Alexander Downer that Russia has damaging information about Trump’s political rival, Hillary Clinton.

That conversation in a London bar eventually sparked the Trump-Russia affair, a sprawling counterintelligence and criminal investigation into Russia’s attempt to influence the 2016 US presidential election to help Trump win.

The Russian covert operation included the hacking of emails and related documents from the Clinton campaign and the Democratic Party, as well as the distribution of anti-Clinton misinformation in social networks.

The Russians worked hard to get Trump elected, and Trump and his campaign knew it and welcomed the help. Trump has been known to use his platform during the campaign event of 2016 to to publicly ask Moscow to provide even more aid.

Today, the US intelligence community believes that Russia wants to help Trump win again in 2024. That means it’s critical that Americans finally get the truth about the Trump-Russia affair and the dangerous relationship between Trump and Russian autocrat Vladimir Putin.

The truth about the Trump-Russia affair is laid out in a series of government requests and court cases that, taken together, show that Russian intelligence, acting on Putin’s orders, launched cyberwar against American democracy. They also show that Trump has enthusiastically welcomed help from Russia, a country where he has previously sought major business deals and financial support. During the 2016 campaign, Trump hired a campaign manager who previously worked for a pro-Putin political leader in Ukraine and had close ties to a Russian intelligence agent with whom he shared inside information about the Trump campaign.

In the years since the Trump-Russia investigation began, it has become clear what Putin was trying to accomplish by meddling in the American election to help Trump. He is full of determination to rebuild the Russian Empiresimilar in scale to the Soviet Union and its satellite states in Eastern Europe during the Cold War. He has been working steadily on his imperial project since consolidating his power in Moscow in the early 2000s, and has already sabotaged efforts to build democracy in Belarus by helping to install a pro-Russian dictator there, and has engaged in a long-running campaign to do the same in Georgia. .

Right now, his main target is Ukraine, a democracy that aspires to join the European Union and NATO.

In 2014, Putin caught the West off guard by suddenly seizing Crimea from Ukraine, and in 2022 he began a full-scale invasion of Ukrainea brutal war that has already cost hundreds of thousands of lives.

Putin never survived Russia’s defeat in the Cold Warand his ambition is to make Russia a real superpower again. This means that reconquering former Soviet republics such as Belarus, Georgia, and Ukraine is only the first part of his long-term plan. Putin also wants to regain control of the Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, which were once part of the Soviet Union, and ultimately he wants to extend Moscow’s sphere of influence to the old Warsaw Pact satellite countries in Eastern Europe: Poland. , Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, Albania, Czech Republic and Slovakia. If he stays in power long enough, he may even win the grand prize: taking back the part of Germany that was once East Germany. All this may seem far-fetched, but it’s only been 35 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall, when Putin was a young KGB officer stationed in East Germany and forced to watch the Soviet empire dissolve around him.

Putin’s ambitions require him to make sure that the United States does not try to prevent him from rebuilding his empire. Therefore, he tried to help Trump, who created a destructive political chaos in America and which opposes US participation in NATO and Ukraine and who proved that the Russian dictator is easy to manipulate. At the same time, Putin has also tried to interfere in elections in Western Europe by supporting right-wing extremists who also oppose European support for Ukraine.

Putin was aided in his efforts by the rise of Christian nationalism in the United States and Europe; Christian fundamentalists see in Putin their champion in the global culture war. They see Ukraine as an ally of the liberal and secular European Union and therefore want Putin to win the war.

Trump is likely to agree with Christian nationalists, who are a key part of his base, and side with Putin against Ukraine. It would be the end result of Putin’s decade-long effort to install Trump in the White House.

To hide the truth about Trump’s ties to Putin and Russia, Trump, his aides, pro-Trump experts everyone worked hard to convince voters that he was not in Putin’s pocket. A key part of that effort has been a sustained propaganda campaign designed to convince the public that the initial investigation into Trump and Russia was a sham. Trump then used this argument to try to discredit any other investigation into his actions two impeachments on his four criminal charges.

To muddy the waters, they focused on the so-called Steele dossier, a report compiled by a former British intelligence officer that became public after the 2016 election. Trump pointed to the flaws in the Steele dossier, saying the entire Trump-Russia investigation was based on false information. But this is not true; Steele’s dossier was no basis for the FBI’s decision to open the case and played no part in his main investigation; Special counsel Robert Mueller, who took over the investigation from the FBI in 2017, did not rely on the Steele dossier at all.

Trump’s efforts to discredit the Trump-Russia investigation have been aided by William Barr, his own attorney general, who prematurely made misleading statements on the results of Mueller’s investigation until the release of Mueller’s final report, and then appointed a special adviser who supports Trump investigate the government’s own investigation into Trump and Russia. What openly politicized the attempt failed spectacularly.

Now, no amount of disinformation can hide the truth about the Trump-Russia affair. The truth is staring us in the eye. This is visible in dead Ukraine.