Photo: Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP
In May 2016George Papadopoulos, a foreign policy adviser to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, told Alexander Downer, an Australian diplomat, that Russia had damaging information about Trump’s political rival Hillary Clinton.
That conversation in a London bar eventually triggered the Trump-Russia case, a sprawling counterintelligence and criminal inquiry into Russia’s attempt to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election to help Trump win.
The Russian covert operation included the hacking of emails and related documents from Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic Party, and the spreading of anti-Clinton disinformation on social media.
The Russians worked hard to try to get Trump elected, and Trump and his campaign knew about it and welcomed the help. Famously, Trump used his platform at a campaign event in 2016 to publicly ask Moscow to provide even more help.
Today, the U.S. intelligence community believes that Russia wants to help Trump win again in 2024. That means that it is vital that Americans finally understand the truth about the Trump-Russia case, and about the dangerous relationship between Trump and Russian autocrat Vladimir Putin.
The truth about the Trump-Russia case is outlined in a series of government inquiries and court cases, which when taken together show that Russian intelligence, acting on orders from Putin, launched a cyber war against American democracy. They also show that Trump enthusiastically welcomed the help from Russia, a country where he had previously sought out major business deals and financial support. During the 2016 campaign, Trump hired a campaign manager who had previously worked for a pro-Putin political leader in Ukraine and had also developed close ties to a Russian intelligence agent, with whom he shared inside information about the Trump campaign.
In the years since the Trump-Russia inquiry began, it has become obvious what Putin has been trying to accomplish by intervening in American elections to help Trump. He is determined to rebuild a Russian empireone similar in scale to the Soviet Union and its satellite states in Eastern Europe during the Cold War. He has been steadily working at his imperial project since he consolidated his power in Moscow in the early 2000s and has already sabotaged attempts to build a democracy in Belarus, helping to install a pro-Russian dictator there, while he has also engaged in a long-running campaign to do the same in the nation of Georgia.
His main target now is Ukraine, a democracy that is eager to join the European Union and NATO.
In 2014, Putin caught the West by surprise by suddenly seizing Crimea from Ukraine, and in 2022 launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, a brutal war that has already cost hundreds of thousands of lives.
Putin never got over Russia’s defeat in the Cold Warand his ambition is to make Russia a true superpower once again. That means that the reconquest of former Soviet republics like Belarus, Georgia, and Ukraine is just the first part of his long-term plan. Putin also wants to regain control over the Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, which were once part of the Soviet Union, and ultimately, he wants to expand Moscow’s sphere of influence over the old Warsaw Pact satellite countries in Eastern Europe: Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, Albania, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia. If he stays in power long enough, he may even go for the grand prize: retaking that portion of Germany that was once East Germany. All of that may sound far-fetched, but it has only been 35 years since the Berlin Wall fell, a time when Putin was a young KGB officer stationed in East Germany and was forced to watch the Soviet empire dissolve around him.
Putin’s ambitions require that he makes certain that the United States doesn’t try to stop him from rebuilding his empire. So he has sought to aid Trump, who has created damaging political chaos in America and who opposes U.S. involvement in NATO and Ukraine and who has proven to be easily manipulated by the Russian dictator. At the same time, Putin has also sought to intervene in elections in Western Europe, backing right-wing extremists who also oppose European support for Ukraine.
Putin has been aided in his efforts by the rise of Christian nationalism in the United States and Europe; Christian fundamentalists see Putin as their champion in a global culture war. They see Ukraine as allied with the liberal and secular European Union and thus want Putin to win the war.
Trump would likely go along with the Christian nationalists, who are a key part of his base, and side with Putin against Ukraine. That would represent the end result of Putin’s decadelong efforts to install Trump in the White House.
To hide the truth about Trump’s ties to Putin and Russia, Trump, his lieutenants, pro-Trump pundits have all worked hard to persuade voters that he is not in Putin’s pocket. A key part of that effort has been a long-running propaganda campaign designed to convince the public that the original Trump-Russia investigation was a hoax. Trump has then used that argument to try to discredit every other investigation conducted into his actions, from his two impeachments to his four criminal indictments.
To muddy the waters, they have focused on the so-called Steele dossier, a report put together by a former British intelligence officer which became public after the 2016 election. Trump has pointed to the Steele dossier’s flaws to claim that the entire Trump-Russia investigation was based on false information. But that is not true; the Steele dossier was not the basis for the FBI’s decision to open the case and played no role in its 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 were aided by William Barr, his own attorney general, who preemptively made misleading statements about the findings of Mueller’s investigation before Mueller’s final report was made public, and then later appointed a pro-Trump special counsel to investigate the government’s own investigation of the Trump-Russia case. That blatantly politicized effort failed spectacularly.
Now, no amount of disinformation can hide the truth about the Trump-Russia case. The truth is staring us in the face. It can be seen in the dead of Ukraine.
