The Steele dossier. A formerly unknown document commissioned first by Republican benefactors during the early stages of the 2016 campaign and then by Democrats concerning any weaknesses in the Donald Trump candidacy, it surfaced into the mainstream media with the FBI's investigation of the current Republican president's potential collusion with Russia. Named after the former MI6-spy-turned-private-contractor Christopher Steele, it was a product of years of intelligence gathering starting in the 1980s first by various Western spy agencies and then by Steele's non-state spying company Fusion GPS. And it sure stirred up the hornet's nest of American politics. Former Guardian journalist Luke Harding's 2017 book Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win explores the events contained in the dossier in a chronological fashion in an attempt to separate the fake news from the real facts as they are understood.
Since this book necessarily scratches an iceberg, it is not definitive proof by any means (stay tuned for the outcome of the Mueller investigation), but the substantial circumstantial evidence provided nonetheless makes for a compelling narrative right out of a spy thriller. In other words, Trump and members of his campaign made direct and indirect contact with Russia fairly often, enough to cause suspicion among actors like Steele that the Russian spy agency, the KGB, was trying to "cultivate" U.S. targets in order to provide information in a broader mission to undercut Western solidarity (Harding, 2017, p. 169). However, they weren't looking for just any contacts. Harding brings up a Soviet document from 1984 that outlines a new strategy of recruiting people that were greedy, vain, prone to flattery and adultery (and so on), as a big source of traditional leftist oriented subjects had dried up with the dissolution of the USSR. (Dare I say it, but does this sound familiar?)
Our story begins when Donald Trump marries in 1977 to his first wife, Ivana, a native of the former Soviet satellite state Czechoslovakia. Believing they had found an ideal subject to cultivate, the Russians then in 1987 apparently used a pretext of a potential Moscow real-estate development by the Trump company to bring him state-side. However, this transaction, like potential future formal business proposals between Trump associates and Russian business entities, did not go past the "potential" stage. Yet, Steele traces multiple instances of Russian money filtered through offshore tax havens and banks around the world targeted towards Trump-connected business entities while subtle nudges were being made to convince Trump to get involved in a potential presidential run by a series of intermediaries, like Englishman Rob Goldstone, Paul Manafort, Wilbur Ross, Russian oligarch Aras Agalarov and Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya (to name a few of the major players; the dizzying web of characters presented in this narrative is somewhat overwhelming). These intermediaries soon extended into Trump's close family like Trump Jr. and son-in-law Jared Kushner, who all were being subtly played by the offer of so-called opposition research into Hillary Clinton in exchange for making premature foreign policy promises (like the rescinding of the 2012 Magnitsky Act, which imposed new sanctions on Russia because of new and flagrant human rights violations). Meanwhile, American divisions were being stoked by social media and conspiracy news sites somewhat backed by Russian cyber actors during the 2016 election.
And the rest is history, as they say. Except it's no doubt also the present, as we are all now only catching up with this semi-hidden history contained in the Steele dossier. Then candidate Trump has now ascended to the American presidency, which is one of the most powerful positions in the world (but also vulnerable, if Russian or other foreign entities have compromised it). His first year in office has been tumultuous, to say the least, rife with infighting among the various wings of the Republican party and against Democrats not keen on helping him further his legislative agenda (which has then been mirrored by similar divisions between most of the American public, allowing openings from various (national and international) groups seeking to sow more hate and division). The Charlottesville episode immediately comes to mind, exposing the dark undercurrent of present-day American society. At further risk of distancing too much from the central story of Collusion, an investigation was opened in the midst of this tumultuous year, first by former FBI director James Comey (fired by Trump) and taken up by special counsel Robert Mueller. And so, the book comes full circle from its opening chapter to its concluding one.
While some of the links between Russian and the Western players in this narrative are tentative (i.e. indirect contacts like business relationships that are not necessarily illegal) and some actors have questioned the credibility of the Steele dossier (Fusion GPS after all does espionage work for many paying clients), Harding forces readers to at least stop and think about the whole Trump-Russia business. At the very least, Trump was unwise to get caught up in the seedy underworld of Russian espionage. At the very worst, Trump was making a deal with the devil in order to aid his election bid. (As I said before, the Mueller investigation should be allowed to run its course before any definitive conclusions are made). In any case, the potential for the president (and indirectly the public) to be compromised in any way by any foreign actors should give all Americans pause, no matter their political orientation or background.
Works Cited:
Harding, Luke. (2017). Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win. New York: Vintage Books.
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