One clue as to the credibility of the sources in these reports is that Steele shared them with the FBI. The fact that the FBI reportedly sought to work with him and to pay him to develop additional information on the sources suggest that at least some of them were worth taking seriously. At the very least, the FBI will be able to validate the credibility of the sources, and therefore better judge the information. As one recently retired senior intelligence officer with deep experience in espionage investigations quipped, "I assign more credence to the Steele report knowing that the FBI paid him for his research. From my experience, there is nobody more miserly than the FBI. If they were willing to pay Mr. Steele, they must have seen something of real value."

As outsiders without the investigative tools available to the FBI, we can only look at the information and determine if it makes sense given subsequent events. Steele did not have the benefit of knowing Trump would win the election or how events might play out. In this regard, does any of the information we have learned since June 2016 assign greater or less credibility to the information? Were the people mentioned in the report real? Were their affiliations correct? Did any of the activities reported happen as predicted?

The most obvious occurrence that could not have been known to Orbis in June 2016, but shines bright in retrospect is the fact that Russia undertook a coordinated and massive effort to disrupt the 2016 election to help Donald Trump, as the U.S. intelligence community itself later concluded. Well before any public knowledge of these events, the Orbis report identified multiple elements of the Russian operation including a cyber campaign, leaked documents related to Hillary Clinton, and meetings with Paul Manafort and other Trump affiliates to reportedly discuss the receipt of stolen documents. Steele could not have known that the Russians stole information on Hillary Clinton, or that they were considering means to weaponize them in the U.S. election, all of which turned out to be stunningly accurate.

The U.S. government only published its conclusions in January 2017, with an assessment of some elements in October 2016. It was also apparently news to investigators when the New York Times in July published Donald Trump Jr.'s emails arranging for the receipt of information held by the Russians about Hillary Clinton in a meeting that included Manafort. How could Steele and Orbis know in June 2016 that the Russians were working actively to elect Donald Trump and damage Hillary Clinton unless at least some of its information was correct? How could Steele and Orbis have known about the Russian overtures to the Trump Team involving derogatory information on Clinton?

We have also subsequently learned of Trump's long-standing interest in, and experience with Russia and Russians. A February New York Times article reported that phone records and intercepted calls show that members of Trump's campaign and other Trump associates had repeated contacts with senior Russian officials in the year before the election. The Times article was also corroborated by CNN and Reuters independent reports. And even Russian officials have acknowledged some of these and other repeated contacts. Although Trump has denied the connections, numerous credible reports suggest that both he and Manafort have long-standing relationships with Russians, and pro-Putin groups. Last month, CNN reported on "intercepted communications that US intelligence agencies collected among suspected Russian operatives discussing their efforts to work with Manafort ... to coordinate information that could damage Hillary Clinton's election prospects" including "conversations with Manafort, encouraging help from the Russians."

We learned that when Carter Page traveled to Moscow in July 2016, he met with close Putin ally and chairman of the Russian state oil company, Igor Sechin. A later Steele report also claimed that he met with parliamentary secretary Igor Divyekin while in Moscow. Investigative journalist Michael Isikoff reported in September 2016 that U.S. intelligence sources confirmed that Page met with both Sechin and Divyekin during his July trip to Russia. What's more, the Justice Department obtained a wiretap in summer 2016 on Page after satisfying for a court that there was sufficient evidence to show Page was operating as a Russian agent.

While the Orbis team had no way to know it, subsequent reports citing U.S. officials claimed that Washington-based diplomat Mikhail Kalugin was an undercover intelligence officer and was pulled out of the Embassy and sent home in summer 2016.

The Orbis documents refer repeatedly to Manafort's "off-the-books" payments from ousted Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych's pro-Russian party, and Russian concerns that it may be a vulnerability that could jeopardize the effort. According to the Orbis report, the Russians were concerned about "further scandals involving Manafort's commercial and political role in Russia/Ukraine." And, indeed, there have been further scandals since the Orbis reports were written. Those include Manafort being compelled in June to register retroactively as a foreign agent of a pro-Russian political parties in Ukraine, and special counsel Robert Mueller's and the New York attorney general's office reported investigation of Manafort for possible money laundering and tax evasion linked to Ukrainian ventures.

We do not have any reporting that implicates Michael Cohen in meetings with Russians as outlined in the dossier. However, recent revelations indicate his long-standing relationships with key Russian and Ukrainian interlocutors, and highlight his apparent role in a previously hidden effort to build a Trump tower in Moscow. During the campaign, those efforts included email exchanges with Trump associate Felix Sater explicitly referring to getting Putin's circle involved and helping Trump get elected.

Further, the Trump administration's effort lift sanctions on Russia immediately following the inauguration seems to mirror Orbis reporting related to Cohen's alleged promises to Russia, as reported in the Orbis documents. A June Yahoo News article by Isikoff described the administration's efforts to engage the State Department about lifting sanctions "almost as soon as they took office." Their efforts were halted by State Department officials and members of Congress. Following the inauguration, Cohen was allegedly involved, again with Felix Sater, in back-channel negotiations seeking a means to lift sanctions via a semi-developed Russian-Ukrainian plan--which also included the hand delivery of derogatory information on Ukrainian leaders. This also would fit with Orbis reporting related to Cohen.

The quid pro quo as alleged in the dossier was for the Trump team to "sideline" the Ukrainian issue in the campaign. We learned subsequently that the Trump platform committee changed only a single plank in the 60-page Republican platform prior to the Republican convention. Of the hundreds of Republican positions and proposals, they altered only the single sentence that called for maintaining or increasing sanctions against Russia, increasing aid for Ukraine and "providing lethal defensive weapons" to the Ukrainian military. The Trump team reportedly changed the wording to the more benign, "appropriate assistance."

Consider, in addition, the Orbis report saying that Russia was utilizing hackers to influence voters and referring to payments to "hackers who had worked in Europe under Kremlin direction against the Clinton campaign." A January Stanford study found that "fabricated stories favoring Donald Trump were shared a total of 30 million times, nearly quadruple the number of pro-Hillary Clinton shares leading up to the election." Also, in November, researchers at Oxford University published a report based on analysis of 19.4 million Twitter posts from early November prior to the election. The report found that an "automated army of pro-Trump chatbots overwhelmed Clinton bots five to one in the days leading up to the presidential election." In March 2017, former FBI agent Clint Watts told Congress about websites involved in the Russian disinformation campaign "some of which mysteriously operate from Eastern Europe and are curiously led by pro-Russian editors of unknown financing."

The Orbis report also refers specifically to the aim of the Russian influence campaign "to swing supporters of Bernie Sanders away from Hillary Clinton and across to Trump," based on information given to Steele in early August 2016. It was not until March 2017, however, that former director of the National Security Agency, retired Gen. Keith Alexander, in Senate testimony said of the Russian influence campaign, "what they were trying to do is to drive a wedge within the Democratic Party between the Clinton group and the Sanders group." A March news report also detailed that Sanders supporter's social media sites were infiltrated by fake news, originating from "dubious websites and posters linked back to Eastern Europe," that tried to shift them against Clinton during the general election.

John Mattes, a former Senate investigator who helped run the online campaign for Sanders, said he was struck by Steele's report. Mattes said, Steele "was writing in real time about things I was seeing happening in August, but I couldn't articulate until September." It is important to emphasize here that Steele's source for the change in plan was "an ethnic Russian associate of Republican US presidential candidate Donald Trump [who] discussed the reaction inside his camp."

A slew of other revelations has directly tied many of the key players in the Trump campaign--most notably Manafort, Page, Cohen, and Michael Flynn--who are specifically mentioned in the Orbis reports to Russian officials also mentioned in the reports. To take one example, the first report says that Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov was responsible for Russia's compromising materials on Hillary Clinton, and now we have reports that Michael Cohen had contacted Peskov directly in January 2016 seeking help with a Trump business deal in Moscow. This was after Cohen received the email from Trump business associate Felix Sater saying "Our boy can become president of the USA and we can engineer it. I will get all of Putin's team to buy in on this."

To take another example, the third Orbis report says that Manafort was managing the connection with the Kremlin, and we now know that he was present at the June 9, 2016 meeting with Trump, Jr., Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya, and Rinat Akhmetshin, who has reportedly boasted of his ties to and experience in Soviet intelligence and counterintelligence. According to an Aug. 21 New York Times story, "Akhmetshin told journalists that he was a longtime acquaintance of Paul J. Manafort."

The Orbis reports chronicle, and subsequent events demonstrate, that the Russian effort evolved over time, adapting to changing circumstances. When their attack seemed to be having an effect, they doubled down, and when it looked like negative media attention was benefiting Clinton, they changed tactics. The Orbis reports detail internal Kremlin frictions between the participants as the summer wore on. If the dossier is to be believed, the Russian effort may well have started as an anti-Clinton operation, and only became combined with the separate effort to cultivate the Trump team when it appeared Trump might win the nomination. The Russian effort was aggressive over the summer months, but seemed to back off and go into cover-up mode following the Access Hollywood revelations and the Obama administration's acknowledgement of Russian interference in the fall. Perhaps they realized they might have gone too far and were possibly benefitting Clinton.

However, when Trump won, they changed again and engaged with Ambassador Kislyak in Washington to get in touch with others in the Trump transition team. As this process unfolded, control of operation on the Russian side passed from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, to the FSB, and later to the presidential administration.