By Maverick
Few modern political sagas have divided the United States quite like Russiagate. What began as an investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election quickly grew into a sprawling drama of intelligence reports, leaked memos, secret warrants, and clashing accusations of corruption. Between 2016 and 2019, the nation’s attention was consumed by a question that hung over the 1st Trump presidency: Did Donald Trump or his campaign conspire with Russia to sway the election? Buckle up, because this one is a good read if you’re unfamiliar with this case.
In early 2016, American intelligence agencies picked up signs of an aggressive cyber campaign emanating from Moscow, Russia. Hackers linked to the Russian military intelligence agency, the GRU, had breached Democratic Party servers, stealing thousands of emails that would later be leaked to the public through WikiLeaks.
At the same time, Russia’s Internet Research Agency flooded social media with fake accounts and divisive propaganda designed to inflame U.S. voters and amplify distrust. The consensus within U.S. intelligence was clear in that this wasn’t random mischief. It was a state-directed effort to influence the outcome of the election, and it sure as hell worked.
While this interference campaign was unfolding, several figures within Donald Trump’s orbit were engaged in questionable contacts with individuals tied to Russia. Among them were George Papadopoulos, a Trump campaign foreign-policy adviser who bragged that Moscow had dirt on Hillary Clinton, which turned out to be false statements, and Carter Page, a U.S. citizen who had past contacts with Russian officials and joined the Trump campaign as a foreign-policy adviser in 2016. He was the named subject of FISA surveillance applications the FBI filed in late 2016, which I will cover more in depth throughout this blog, so stay tuned.
These previously mentioned contacts alarmed U.S. counterintelligence officials. In July 2016, the FBI quietly launched an inquiry called Crossfire Hurricane, aimed at determining whether anyone in Trump’s campaign was coordinating with Russian efforts. That same summer, another piece of the puzzle entered the picture, one that would become infamous in its own right.
Former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele had been hired by a Washington research firm, Fusion GPS, to investigate Donald Trump’s Russia ties. Fusion was working for the law firm Perkins Coie, which represented the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee. See how it all ties together? I’ll explain more about the connections momentarily. Between June and December 2016, Steele compiled a collection of memos known as the infamous “Steele dossier”, which was based on raw intelligence, rumors, and unverified allegations about Trump and his associates’ links to Russian collusion.
So to encapsulate once more, Fusion GPS commissioned and subcontracted Steele after Fusion was hired (via the law firm Perkins Coie) by the Clinton campaign and the DNC for opposition research. That funding link is factual and has been repeatedly reported. The Federal Election Commission (FEC) later fined the Clinton campaign and DNC for misreporting some payments tied to opposition research. The question of whether campaign funding “caused” the FBI’s investigation is central to political narratives, but the FBI says the Crossfire Hurricane opening was based on other intelligence. Fusion had earlier been paid by other clients during the Republican primaries before getting into bed with the Clinton campaign.
The money flow caused political controversy because the dossier’s political funding was not initially public. Some broad claims in the dossier (for example, that Russia sought to help Trump win and that it cultivated people around him) were consistent with the overall assessments in U.S. intelligence and with facts the Mueller team documented. But many specific salacious allegations in the dossier could not be verified publicly, and some lines in the dossier either remain unproven or have been contradicted. The FBI used the Steele dossier as one of multiple inputs, and the Inspector General later criticized the FBI’s handling and vetting of Steele material in FISA applications. It was a complete political dumpster fire, to say the least.
After the 2016 election, the dossier circulated among journalists, intelligence officials, and politicians. When it leaked publicly in January 2017, it became a political flashpoint. Trump and his allies called it a fabrication, while critics argued it justified a deeper investigation. The dossier’s funding by the Clinton campaign fueled claims that the entire Russia probe was politically motivated, a narrative that would persist for years.
In May 2017, President Trump fired FBI Director James Comey, who had been overseeing the Russia inquiry, which seemed politically motivated despite being “confirmed” that it wasn’t. Comey’s firing set off a political earthquake. Within days, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein appointed Robert Mueller, a respected former FBI director, as special counsel to take over the investigation.
For nearly two years, Mueller and his team worked largely in silence, issuing subpoenas, securing plea deals, and charging dozens of Russian operatives with hacking and interference crimes. Several Trump associates, including Michael Flynn, Trump’s first national-security adviser (he pleaded guilty in 2017 to lying to the FBI about contacts with the Russian ambassador but was later pardoned by Trump), Paul Manafort, Trump campaign chairman, convicted in state/federal proceedings tied partly to lobbying and money laundering related to Ukraine (his contacts and debts were central to some investigators’ concerns about foreign influence), Rick Gates, a longtime business associate of Paul Manafort, and served as deputy to and George Papadopoulos, were indicted or convicted on various charges, though not for collusion itself.
Lisa Page , an FBI lawyer, and Peter Strzok, an FBI agent, both worked in the FBI during the period of the Mueller investigation. Their private text messages that disparaged Trump and expressed support for Clinton were later leaked and used to allege political bias at the FBI. Strzok was removed from the Mueller special-counsel team once those texts came to light and was later fired. Both he and Lisa Page pursued legal actions over the disclosures of the texts. The Inspector General did not find that their personal views caused the Crossfire Hurricane opening, but the texts fueled public mistrust; that’s for damn certain.
Former CIA Director John Brennan testified publicly that U.S. intelligence had information about contacts between Russians and U.S. persons that were concerning and that these intelligence concerns helped precipitate investigative attention. His public comments and testimony were used to indicate that intelligence (not only the Steele dossier) was motivating the inquiry. All of this turned out to be bullshit, but Brennan still persists today that the intel was sufficient to confirm the Russians had ties to Trump and his campaign.
When the Mueller Report was finally released in April 2019, its conclusions were nuanced. The report documented and confirmed that the Russian government engaged in “sweeping and systematic” interference in 2016 via cyber-operations and influence campaigns. Mueller’s team detailed the Internet Research Agency (social-media effort) and Kremlin-linked hacking and release of Democratic Party materials. Mueller’s formal legal finding was that the investigation did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities. That is the phrase that has often been summarized as “no collusion,” though the report’s language and context are more nuanced. He detailed numerous contacts between Trump’s team and Russian intermediaries but ultimately did not establish a criminal conspiracy between them. The Democrats, of course, didn’t accept that conclusion. Mueller himself even appeared weary and confused when testifying before Congress in 2019, struggling with pinpointing certain findings in his own report. It’s as though he didn’t even write it or know what the hell was in it. The broader probe led to numerous indictments and convictions of people associated with or around the campaign (and Russian nationals). Mueller’s team also referred matters to other prosecutors and described instances where witnesses lied or deleted communications to investigators.
On the question of obstruction of justice, whether Trump had tried to impede the investigation, Mueller laid out evidence of possible obstruction but declined to make a prosecutorial judgment, noting that the Justice Department policy barred indicting a sitting president. His report famously stated that it “does not exonerate” the president. Perfect timing, wouldn’t you say? Trump obstructed justice, but conveniently couldn’t be indicted due to his holding the office of President of the USA. Attorney General Barr and Deputy AG Rosenstein later concluded the evidence was insufficient to charge obstruction. Sure. The Russiagate scandal just seemed like nothing more than an ongoing political theater distraction to bifurcate the public.
As Mueller’s probe wound down, another controversy came to light. The Inspector General of the Justice Department, Michael Horowitz, released a 2019 report scrutinizing how the FBI had illegally obtained Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrants to monitor Carter Page. Horowitz found that while the investigation itself had a legitimate factual basis, the FBI made 17 significant errors and omissions in its FISA applications, including failure to fully disclose contradictory evidence and overreliance on Steele’s unverified reports. The findings gave fuel to critics who claimed that political bias had tainted the process, though the Inspector General explicitly stated he found no evidence that the investigation was opened for partisan reasons. Of course, they’re always going to say that wasn’t their agenda all along. Their actions during the investigation prove it was a political theater witch hunt, regardless of whether the historical record says Crossfire Hurricane wasn’t conducted for political reasons. How does the FBI make 17 errors and omissions when obtaining a FISA warrant if it wasn’t in fact political or theatrical? Was it incompetence or intentional?
The Mueller investigation and its aftermath produced a series of criminal cases involving both Trump associates and foreign actors. As mentioned earlier, George Papadopoulos, a former Trump campaign foreign-policy adviser, pleaded guilty to making false statements to the FBI about his contacts with individuals linked to Russia. Michael Cohen, Donald Trump’s longtime personal attorney, was convicted on multiple charges, including campaign-finance violations related to hush-money payments, as well as separate tax and fraud offenses. Paul Manafort, Trump’s 2016 campaign chairman, and Rick Gates, his deputy, were charged with an array of financial crimes connected to their earlier consulting work in Ukraine; both were convicted, with Gates cooperating as part of a plea deal. Alex van der Zwaan, a Dutch lawyer tied to Manafort’s Ukraine work, also pleaded guilty to lying to investigators. Mueller also indicted numerous Russian nationals and intelligence officers in absentia for hacking, election interference, and disinformation operations.
Additional high-profile cases emerged outside the core collusion question. Roger Stone, a longtime political operative and Trump ally, was convicted in 2019 of obstruction, witness tampering, and lying to Congress about his efforts to obtain information related to WikiLeaks. Michael Flynn, Trump’s first National Security Advisor and a retired three-star general, pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his conversations with the Russian ambassador, though the case later became embellished by political controversy, leading to a dismissal effort by the DOJ and Flynn’s eventual presidential pardon. Overall, the probe uncovered substantial wrongdoing, which included false statements, obstruction, and extensive financial crimes. Many of the charges filed were not directly tied to the legal standard of “collusion” but rather arose from the investigation’s scrutiny of unrelated criminal conduct.
In 2019, Attorney General William Barr appointed John Durham to examine the origins of the Russia probe. Durham’s multi-year investigation culminated in a 2023 report critical of the FBI’s early decisions and some aspects of the intelligence community’s assessments. Durham concluded that the Clinton campaign and its affiliates pushed opposition-research-based allegations portraying Trump as tied to Russia. Two major pieces of that effort were the Steele Dossier (funded by the campaign through Fusion GPS) and the Alfa Bank allegations (the claimed secret communication channel between the Trump Organization and Russia’s Alfa Bank).
Durham’s report said the FBI relied too heavily on uncorroborated political research connected to the Clinton campaign when launching the 2016 Trump-Russia investigation. Michael Sussmann, a cybersecurity attorney associated with the Clinton campaign, met with FBI General Counsel James Baker in September 2016. Durham alleged that Sussmann presented data suggesting a Trump–Alfa Bank secret communication channel, that Sussmann told the FBI he was not acting on behalf of any client, but Durham claimed he was representing the Clinton campaign and tech executive Rodney Joffe (IT guy), a tech executive with access to specialized internet data at the time. Durham found that Joffe and cybersecurity researchers examined DNS (internet traffic) logs involving Trump-related servers. They believed patterns might indicate odd or suspicious connections, in they passed this data to Michael Sussmann, who brought it to the FBI. Durham argued that the researchers were not neutral analysts but were instead trying to appease the Clinton campaign to get positions in a future administration. How the fuck is this not election interference, by digging up dirt or uncorroborated research on a political opponent? Politics really is a dirty and shady business.
This was the claim that the Trump Organization had a covert communication channel with Russia’s Alfa Bank through unusual DNS lookups. Durham found the allegation was ultimately not supported. The FBI later concluded the data likely had benign explanations, and Durham criticized how quickly the FBI acted on the data and how the Clinton campaign pushed the narrative to media outlets. Durham’s finding was not that the Clinton campaign created Russiagate per se, but the FBI opened and pursued the Trump-Russia investigation too aggressively and relied too much on politically funded information, eliminating objectivity. What’s even more odd is how easy Durham still took it on Hillary Clinton and her campaign. He did not claim the entire investigation was fabricated, and he also did not find the Clinton campaign criminally responsible.
Instead, he charged the Clinton campaign and Perkins Coie attorney Michael Sussmann with lying to the FBI for allegedly hiding that he represented campaign interests when he delivered that data. Sussmann was later acquitted in May 2022. Igor Danchenko was a Russian-born analyst/researcher who worked as a primary source for the Steele dossier, providing intelligence to Christopher Steele, the former British spy who compiled the dossier. Durham indicted him on charges of also lying to the FBI about the identity of his sources in the dossier, stating that much of the information he provided was based on unreliable rumors and hearsay. A jury acquitted him on all counts in October 2022. As for the tech executive and IT guy, Rodney Joffe, he was not charged. Just more slaps on the wrist, essentially.
Durham did not call for sweeping structural changes or new laws. Instead, he recommended that the FBI adopt stricter internal controls for politically sensitive investigations, especially those involving campaign figures. He said FBI leadership must “maintain strict fidelity to the law” and apply consistent standards across political lines. It was basically a refresher course and tips on policies they should’ve been enforcing already. The FBI became a total laughing stock. Despite years of work, Durham’s criminal prosecutions yielded few results.
Still, the report served as a formal rebuke of FBI procedures, not as a declaration of criminal conspiracy. Durham’s report reaffirmed what the Mueller Report had already established: while Russia did interfere in the 2016 election, investigators found no evidence that the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in those efforts.
For Trump’s defenders, Russiagate represented a historic abuse of power, an attempt by the intelligence community and political rivals to delegitimize a presidency. For his critics, it exposed the alarming vulnerability of the U.S. political system to foreign influence and the disturbing willingness of campaign figures to welcome that help. The truth lies somewhere in between Russia’s interference, the FBI made so-called “mistakes”, and America’s institutions strained under the weight of distrust. The investigation did not prove a criminal conspiracy between Trump and Moscow, but it revealed how fragile democratic norms can become when politics, espionage, and misinformation collide. It’s a recipe for disaster.
This is the part of the blog where I point out the hypocrisy and double standard. While serving as Secretary of State from 2009–2013, Hillary Clinton used a private email server located in her home in Chappaqua, New York, for official government communications, rather than a government-issued “state.gov” account. She said it was for “convenience,” so she could use one device for both personal and professional emails. However, this setup bypassed government security systems and federal record-keeping requirements, which would make one who is versed in federal law say that’s completely illegal.
The issue surfaced during the House Select Committee on Benghazi’s 2014 investigation into the 2012 attack in Libya. On September 11th, 2012, militants attacked two U.S. compounds in Benghazi, Libya, killing four Americans, including U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens. The attack triggered intense scrutiny of the State Department’s security decisions and Clinton’s leadership as Secretary of State. In the process of requesting records, investigators learned Clinton had never used a government email system during her tenure. The plot thickened.
In 2015, the State Department asked her to turn over all work-related emails. Clinton’s team reviewed approximately 60,000 emails and handed over about 30,000 to the department. The remaining 33,000 emails were deleted, and Clinton’s lawyers said they were personal and unrelated to government business. This deletion sparked years of controversy and speculation that some of those emails may have contained classified or sensitive material. In July 2015, the FBI, led by Director James Comey, opened an investigation into whether Clinton or her aides had mishandled classified information. The FBI analyzed the recovered emails and found 110 emails in 52 email chains contained classified information, and 8 of those chains contained “Top Secret” information. The FBI concluded that there was no evidence that Clinton or her staff intentionally mishandled classified data or sought to violate federal law. That’s pretty fucked up, right? A true miscarriage of justice indeed. It gets even better.
On July 5th, 2016, just months before the presidential election, James Comey made an unprecedented public statement announcing the FBI’s findings: “Although there is evidence of potential violations of the statutes regarding the handling of classified information, our judgment is that no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case.” Comey called Clinton’s conduct “extremely careless”, but said there was no clear intent to break the law, even though she technically broke the law. Attorney General Loretta Lynch accepted Comey’s recommendation, and no charges were filed. How is that not a prime example of corruption? Bryan Pagliano, a State Department staffer who set up and maintained Hillary Clinton’s private email server during her tenure as Secretary of State, helped configure the email system in Clinton’s home and managed its technical operation. He was granted immunity by the Justice Department during the email investigation, invoked his Fifth Amendment right before Congress, and was not charged with any crimes. And folks wonder why many lost faith in the justice system. That’s why.
Donald Trump and many Republicans argued that deleting the 33,000 emails constituted the destruction of evidence. Clinton’s lawyers maintained that they were personal emails. Why delete them then if they were “harmless”? I mean, it wasn’t like it was a few hundred emails; we’re talking about 33,000 emails to be exact. The FBI’s forensic teams were able to recover some deleted emails from servers and devices, but supposedly, none contained classified material. In late 2016, WikiLeaks released hacked emails from Clinton campaign chair John Podesta, fueling more controversy and suspicion, though that was a separate leak unrelated to the server itself.
Congress launched multiple investigations into the Benghazi scandal between 2012 and 2016. The longest-running one was the House Select Committee on Benghazi, led by Rep. Trey Gowdy of South Carolina. While the investigations found no direct wrongdoing by Clinton, they concluded that the State Department failed to provide adequate security for the Benghazi facility, and that Secretary Clinton and top officials underestimated the threat level in Libya at the time.
In late October 2016, just 11 days before the election, Comey announced that the FBI had reopened the Clinton email investigation after finding new emails on a laptop belonging to Anthony Weiner, the husband of Clinton aide Huma Abedin. Two days before the election, the FBI again closed the case, finding no new evidence of wrongdoing. You can’t make this shit up if one tried. Did they even thoroughly look through those emails, or did they help Hillary cover her tracks yet again? It’s like, why even bother announcing this news other than to toy with the American public? One would think Comey wanted Trump to win; otherwise, why bring this up at the last minute? To convince us that Comey and the FBI weren’t in Hillary’s pocket? Clinton herself later argued that Comey’s last-minute announcement hurt her campaign and influenced the election outcome.
Russiagate is not a simple story with a single clean ending. It’s a knot of three things that happened simultaneously: a genuine Russian interference campaign, a U.S. counter-intelligence and criminal investigation that produced real indictments and evidence of troubling contacts, and political warfare over how the investigation began, how it was conducted, and how the story was narrated in public, including disputed documents (the Steele dossier) and procedural failures (FISA errors). Each piece has facts that are established, and each piece has areas of dispute and interpretation.
Nearly a decade later, the scars of the Russiagate era remain. It reshaped partisan media, fueled endless online battles, and left lasting skepticism toward both government investigations and foreign-interference claims. It also sparked internal reforms within the FBI’s FISA process and reinforced the need for transparency when politics intersects with intelligence. In the end, Russiagate was not just a scandal about what Russia did or didn’t do. It was a mirror held up to America’s own partisan division and polarization by the political uniparty industrial complex. The lessons of that period still echo today, and trust me, it hasn’t gotten any better. This blog serves as a reminder that truth can become the first casualty in a war of narratives, where emotions are pervasive and influence the status quo. Please share your thoughts in the comment section. Be well.
