EVERYTHING BUT THE TAPE:

Russian meddling in the 2016 election

While Trump and his supporters have seized on the most salacious, uncorroborated claims to discredit the dossier as a "pile of garbage," much of Steele's memos focused on Russia's role interfering in the 2016 election. Steele's intelligence memos detail a pattern and preference for Trump that have since been confirmed by the US intelligence community and indictments against Russians brought by Mueller's investigation.

Steele, a former MI6 intelligence operative, has a history of working with US agencies, including the FBI, and helped with the corruption investigation into FIFA, the world soccer governing body. Steele's dossier eventually made its way to the FBI, which cross-referenced Steele's work with its own burgeoning investigation into Russian meddling.

Written in the midst of the campaign, Steele's memos contained allegations that Russia was waging a broad effort to interfere, and Russian President Vladimir Putin was personally involved in the effort, motivated by his "fear and hatred" of Clinton. That assertion is now accepted as fact by the US intelligence community and Trump's handpicked intelligence leaders, though Trump himself has refused to unequivocally accept the conclusion that Putin was trying to help him.

Even Putin has seemingly endorsed the conclusion that he favored Trump's candidacy. Asked during his summit with Trump last year in Helsinki, Finland, if he wanted Trump to win the election, Putin responded: "Yes, I did. Yes, I did. Because he talked about bringing the US-Russia relationship back to normal."

The dossier said that the hacks against Democrats, which were publicly released by WikiLeaks during the 2016 campaign, were part of a wider Russian hacking effort. That has since been confirmed in Mueller's court filings, and last year, the special counsel indicted a dozen Russian intelligence agents in connection with the hacks.

The dossier also noted efforts from the Russian government to exploit political divisions within the US and the Democratic Party after the bruising primary fight between Clinton and Sen. Bernie Sanders. A separate Mueller indictment dealt with disinformation efforts by a Kremlin-linked troll farm that played on those divisions. Since the 2016 election, social media companies have pulled thousands of accounts tied to Russia.

Trump's real estate dealings in Russia

The dossier claimed that the Russians tried to influence Trump by offering him "sweetener" real estate deals, in hopes of drawing him closer to Moscow. The specific details about these purported deals haven't been corroborated, but the dossier said Trump declined these offers.

Throughout the campaign, Trump said he had "nothing to do with Russia." When the dossier was first published, there wasn't any indication that Trump's company was involved in Russia beyond the Miss Universe pageant that he hosted in Moscow in 2013.

But it recently became public knowledge that Trump pursued a lucrative project in Moscow deep into the 2016 campaign, and that his then-attorney Michael Cohen sought help from the Kremlin to move the project along. Cohen admitted these shocking details when he pleaded guilty to lying to Congress about the Trump Tower Moscow proposal, which never came to fruition.

Steele's sources were right that Trump had recently explored business dealings in Russia. And his suggestion that it could be linked to the election has also been made by Mueller's team. In court fillings, the special counsel said that the proposal "likely required" help from the Kremlin and highlighted how it overlapped with "sustained efforts" by the Russians to influence the election.

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