Russiagate claims about Trump remain suspect

In the window of calm between Michael Cohen’s testimony and the allegedly almost-at-hand delivery of Robert Mueller’s report, it’s worth returning for a moment to the document that established the darkest interpretation of all the Russian weirdness swirling around President Donald Trump: the intelligence dossier created by Christopher Steele, late of MI6, on behalf of Trump’s political opponents.

The Steele dossier made four big claims. One of them, soon well corroborated, was that Russian intelligence was behind the hacks of the Democratic National Committee and the release of stolen emails through WikiLeaks.

The next possibility was that a Russian project to cultivate Trump, supported and directed by Vladimir Putin, had been going on for many years, and included both offers of “sweetener real estate business deals” (which Trump supposedly declined) and “a regular flow of intelligence from the Kremlin” (which he supposedly accepted).

The third possibility was that this relationship dramatically influenced the 2016 campaign. According to Steele’s sources, there was possibly “a well-developed conspiracy of co-operation” between Trump’s campaign and Russian intelligence, managed by Paul Manafort with Michael Cohen playing go-between in Prague.

The final possibility, of course, was that Russia had so-called “kompromat” on Trump.

Since its BuzzFeed publication in early 2017, the dossier’s prominence has varied. It’s probably cited more often in the defensive, pro-Trump press, where it’s depicted as discredited gossip that tainted the Russia investigation’s credibility from the start. But Russiagate enthusiasts and would-be honest brokers have also returned to it frequently — and for good reason, since it establishes a bar for Mueller’s investigation that, if cleared, would absolutely deserve to end Trump’s presidency.

If the DNC hack took place with Trump’s cooperation as part of a long-standing exchange of favors, then he would be guiltier than Nixon, having participated in a Watergate with a foreign power as the burglar. If Mueller could prove that something like that happened, impeachment would be inevitable, and resignation or removal reasonably likely.

But will Mueller prove it? While retaining an official agnosticism, my sense after Cohen’s testimony is that the odds are as low as they’ve been since this whole affair started, and the increasing likelihood is that the Steele dossier was, in fact, as Trump’s defenders have long described it — a narrative primarily grounded in Russian disinformation.

That’s because Cohen’s testimony dovetailed with the always-more-plausible narrative in which Trump and his circle weren’t collaborators but fools and wannabes, who might have been willing to play games with spies and hackers, but who mostly just bumbled around haplessly on the sidelines.

Is it possible that a real conspiracy was run without the knowledge of the president’s trusted and then-proudly shady fixer? In theory, yes; it could have all happened through figures like Manafort. But if the dossier’s claim of a years-long Trump-Kremlin entanglement and its claim of Cohen’s direct involvement are both looking implausible or false, then its claims about a sustained Manafort-managed collaboration should be treated skeptically.