Russia: the spectre that loomed over Trump’s presidency | US news

When historians look back at Donald Trump’s presidency they are likely to pick out two defining themes. One is the coronavirus pandemic. It dominated his last year in office, and saw the president become the virus’s most celebrated victim cum White House super-spreader.

The other is Russia, a subject that consumed American public life for four long years. The question first came up when Trump was a long-shot candidate for president. In a Republican party that had once regarded Vladimir Putin as a cold-eyed KGB killer, why was Trump’s behaviour towards Russia’s leader so ingratiating?

There were Trump’s flattering public statements about Putin on the campaign trail. And his blatant appeal in July 2016 for Moscow to locate emails that he claimed Hillary Clinton had deleted. “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing,” he told a press conference in Florida.

As it turned out Russia was indeed listening. That evening a group of hackers working for GRU military intelligence returned after-hours to their office in central Moscow. They tried to break into the accounts of senior Clinton aides, unsuccessfully. A rival spy agency once headed by Putin, the FSB, launched its own electronic attacks.

Across 2016 the Russians ran an aggressive and multifaceted operation to help Donald Trump win. In spring the GRU stole tens of thousands of Democratic party emails, including from Clinton’s campaign chief John Podesta. These were fed to WikiLeaks and given to reporters via a GRU persona, Guccifer 2.0.

Meanwhile trolls working out of St Petersburg launched an unprecedented anti-Clinton social media operation. The Russians – employed by Putin’s ally Yevgeny Prigozhin – impersonated Americans, organised pro-Trump rallies, and even hired an actor to dress up as Clinton and sit in a cage.

Moscow rumours

During the 2016 campaign there were swirling rumours concerning Trump and Moscow. No media outlet could quite stand them up, but the topic burst into the public domain in January 2017 when BuzzFeed published a dossier by the former MI6 officer Christopher Steele, commissioned by the Democratic party. It would torment Trump for the rest of his presidency.

The dossier alleged the Kremlin had been cultivating Trump for five years at least. It claimed Putin’s spies had collected kompromat, secretly filming Trump and two sex workers inside the Ritz-Carlton hotel during his 2013 visit to Moscow for the Miss Universe beauty pageant.

Trump vehemently denied the seedy allegations. He and his Republican supporters on Capitol Hill and within the Justice Department sought to discredit its British author and to out his sources. Steele was a “failed spy” and “lowlife”, and collusion allegations a “witch-hunt”…