Quote:A majority of President Donald Trump's voters surveyed by the left-leaning Public Policy Polling (PPP) believe he should continue to serve as president even if it's proven that he conspired with Russia to sway the 2016 election. Just 14% of Trump voters said he should resign in the event that special counsel Robert Mueller or the congressional intelligence committees find that he colluded with Russia. On the other hand, 77% of Trump voters believe he should remain in office if the collusion claims are proven true.

Quote:Special counsel Robert Mueller has obtained thousands of emails from members of President Donald Trump's transition team. An attorney representing the transition team claimed in a letter to Congress that Mueller unlawfully obtained the emails, but legal experts threw cold water on the allegation. The emails could generate many new leads for Mueller and help him piece together key events that took place during the transition period.

Quote:The Justice Department recently released 375 text messages to Congress and the press that were exchanged between two career FBI employees during last year's presidential election. But the department has failed to answer a significant lingering question stemming from that release: how it chose which texts, of the more than 10,000 the department obtained over the summer, to unveil publicly. Nor has it released additional messages that could provide context to the ones that were shared with lawmakers and reporters last week. Many of the texts, which were obtained as part of an investigation by the DOJ inspector general into how the bureau handled the investigation into Hillary Clinton's private email server, have since been weaponized by the most vehement critics of the special counsel Robert Mueller. Those more sympathetic to the agents have interpreted the texts differently, characterizing them as flirtations whose intent has been purposefully misconstrued.

Quote:Donald Trump made countless startling statements during last year’s presidential campaign, but one—in Doral, Florida—may be coming back to haunt him. At a televised news conference on July 27, 2016, Trump delivered a direct message to Moscow. Not content with the fact that Russia had hacked the Democratic National Committee, the candidate stared straight into the camera and said: “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 [Hillary Clinton] emails that are missing. I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.”

Quote:The FBI was already investigating potential links between Donald Trump’s campaign and the Russian government before they heard anything about Christopher Steele’s famous dossier on the matter. That’s the key takeaway from Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn Simpson’s extensive testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee, released Tuesday by ranking member Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) over the objections of her Republican colleagues.

Simpson’s hearing lasted for hours, and the transcript is extremely long and mostly fairly tedious. But Simpson does clearly state that when Steele spoke to the FBI about his findings, the bureau “believed Chris’s information might be credible because they had other intelligence that indicated the same thing, and one of those pieces of intelligence was a human source from inside the Trump organization.”

That sounds like Trump campaign aide George Papadopoulos, who, according to a recent report in the New York Times, accidentally kicked off the Trump-Russia investigation by telling Australian diplomat Alexander Downer that Russia had political dirt on Trump’s Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton, after a night of heavy drinking in May 2016.

Quote:The dossier is now the centerpiece of a conservative counternarrative
On January 3, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) — a key House conservative — rolled out a tweetstorm asking 18 questions about the FBI and Russia, many of them centering on the dossier. Jordan, joined by another leading House conservative, Rep. Mark Meadows (R-SC), is also calling for Trump to fire Jeff Sessions so he can put a new attorney general in place who would oversee (and presumably quash) the Russia investigation. This is part of a broader conservative effort to discredit the Mueller investigation, which in turn is part of a broader conservative counternarrative on the whole Russia scandal. And the dossier plays a key role in this conspiracy theory.
Because conservatives are “just asking questions” about the FBI and Steele, they tend not to explicitly state what they think happened. But in broad strokes, the theory is something like this:

• Trump’s political enemies paid Fusion GPS to write a dossier full of debunked claims about his connections to Russia.
  
• “Deep state” anti-Trump elements in the FBI used this false opposition research document to obtain a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court warrant targeting Michael Flynn.
  
• The Flynn surveillance, which never should have been allowed because it was based on the phony dossier, was used to catch him in a lie about a meeting with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak that was completely innocuous.
  
• This got Flynn fired and, by making meetings with Kislyak into a hot-button issue, also forced Sessions into recusing himself, which in turn gave Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein (whom Trump has decided is “a Democrat,” though it’s not clear why) the opportunity to appoint Robert Mueller as special counsel.
  
• Mueller, in turn, is buddies with former FBI Director James Comey, who is bitter about having been fired by Trump (Comey under this theory is a bad guy because he went too easy on Hillary Clinton over the email server, and we’re not supposed to pay attention to the fact that Trump’s stated reason for firing him was that he was too hard on Clinton) and is therefore leading an anti-Trump witch hunt.
  

There are, of course, other penumbras and emanations around the conservative account of the Steele dossier. Former Rep. Jason Chaffetz was on Fox recently, for example, arguing that it’s against the law to hire a foreign national to do work for a campaign (this is not true) and therefore the existence of the dossier is just another example of Crooked Hillary’s lawbreaking. The reality, however, is that while Steele is well-regarded in intelligence circles, there is no indication that his work has ever been the basis of the FBI’s Russia investigation.

Quote:The Fusion GPS cofounder, Glenn Simpson, said in the transcript that the opposition research dossier's author went to the FBI in July 2016 when he became worried that Trump, then a candidate, was being blackmailed. Simpson said Christopher Steele, a former British spy, cut ties with the FBI amid concerns it was being "manipulated" by Trump. "Chris said he was very concerned about whether this represented a national security threat and said he wanted to — he said he thought we were obligated to tell someone in government, in our government, about this information," Simpson said. "He thought from his perspective there was an issue — a security issue about whether a presidential candidate was being blackmailed." Feinstein's decision to release the transcript unilaterally came after weeks of back and forth between the committee and Fusion GPS, whose founders advocated its release in a recent op-ed article in The New York Times.

• Trump has criticized just about everybody, including many allies, but not Putin
  
• Trump hasn't released his tax returns
  
• Trump has argued he considers Mueller looking into his finances a red line
  
• Trump has done just about anything to obfuscate the Mueller investigation (and the FBI's before that)
  

Quote:President Donald Trump said Thursday that the FBI agent whom special counsel Robert Mueller ousted last July committed "treason" by exchanging politically-charged texts with an FBI colleague.  Counterintelligence veteran Peter Strzok was removed from Mueller's team after he expressed anti-Trump sentiment in texts he sent to FBI lawyer Lisa Page. Trump and his allies latched onto the revelations last year to paint Mueller's investigation and the FBI as biased against him.

• His period as White House strategist, even pertaining to conversations without the President being present.
  
• His period as adviser in the transition period, before Trump assumed the Presidency.
  

Quote:An attorney for former White House chief strategist Stephen Bannon reportedly relayed questions to the White House in real time while his client was testifying before the House Intelligence Committee on Tuesday. The Associated Press reported Wednesday that Bannon's attorney Bill Burck was communicating with the White House counsel's office via phone to check on whether it would allow Bannon to answer certain questions.

Quote:The Washington Post identified at least six politically influential Russians who attended President Donald Trump's inaugural celebrations last year. Lobbyists Natalia Veselnitskaya and Rinat Akhmetshin attended the festivities, as did gun rights activist Maria Butina, who used to serve as an assistant to Russian banker Alexander Torshin.  Veselnitskaya, Akhmetshin, and Torshin are all being scrutinized by investigators probing Russia's interference in the 2016 election.