Stefan A. Halper is an American foreign policy scholar and retired senior fellow at the University of Cambridge where he is a life fellow at Magdalene College. He served as a White House official in the Nixon, Ford, and Reagan administrations, and was reportedly in charge of the spying operation by the 1980 Ronald Reagan presidential campaign that became known as "Debategate". Through his decades of work for the CIA, Halper has had extensive ties to the Bush family. Through his work with Sir Richard Billing Dearlove, he had ties to the British Secret Intelligence Service, MI6.
Spygate is a disproven conspiracy theory peddled by 45th U.S. president Donald Trump and his political base on many occasions throughout his presidential term. It primarily centered around the idea that a spy was planted by the Obama administration to conduct espionage on Trump's 2016 presidential campaign for political purposes. On May 17, 2018, Trump tweeted: "Wow, word seems to be coming out that the Obama FBI 'SPIED ON THE TRUMP CAMPAIGN WITH AN EMBEDDED INFORMANT.'" In that tweet, he quoted Andrew C. McCarthy, who had just appeared on Fox & Friends repeating assertions from his own May 12 article for National Review.
Carter William Page is an American petroleum industry consultant and a former foreign-policy adviser to Donald Trump during his 2016 presidential election campaign. Page is the founder and managing partner of Global Energy Capital, a one-man investment fund and consulting firm specializing in the Russian and Central Asian oil and gas business.
Christopher David Steele is a British former intelligence officer with the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) from 1987 until his retirement in 2009. He ran the Russia desk at MI6 headquarters in London between 2006 and 2009. In 2009, he co-founded Orbis Business Intelligence, a London-based private intelligence firm.
The Steele dossier, also known as the Trump–Russia dossier, is a controversial political opposition research report compiled by Christopher Steele that was published without permission in 2017 as an unfinished 35-page compilation of "unverified, and potentially unverifiable" raw intelligence reports—"not established facts, but a starting point for further investigation". The veracity status of many of the allegations is still unknown because efforts to corroborate the allegations were short-lived, limited, and weak, with the FBI stopping all efforts to corroborate the dossier in May 2017 when the Mueller investigation took over the Russia investigation.
On March 4, 2017, Donald Trump wrote a series of posts on his Twitter account that falsely accused former President Barack Obama's administration of wiretapping his "wires" at Trump Tower late in the 2016 presidential campaign. Trump called for a congressional investigation into the matter, and the Trump administration cited news reports to defend these accusations. His initial claims appeared to have been based on a Breitbart News article he had been given which repeated speculations made by conspiracy theorist Louise Mensch or on a Bret Baier interview, both of which occurred the day prior to his Tweets. By June 2020, no evidence had surfaced to support Trump's claim, which had been refuted by the Justice Department (DOJ).
Since Donald Trump was a 2016 candidate for the office of President of the United States, multiple suspicious links between Trump associates and Russian officials were discovered by the FBI, a special counsel investigation, and several United States congressional committees, as part of their investigations into Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections. Following intelligence reports about the Russian interference, Trump and some of his campaign members, business partners, administration nominees, and family members were subjected to intense scrutiny to determine whether they had improper dealings during their contacts with Russian officials. Several people connected to the Trump campaign made false statements about those links and obstructed investigations. These investigations resulted in many criminal charges and indictments.
The Robert Mueller special counsel investigation was an investigation into 45th U.S. president Donald Trump regarding Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections and was conducted by special prosecutor Robert Mueller from May 2017 to March 2019. It was also called the Russia investigation, Mueller probe, and Mueller investigation. The investigation focused on three points:
- Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections
- Trump associates and their connection to Russian officials and espionage
- Possible obstruction of justice by Trump and his associates
George Demetrios Papadopoulos is an author and former member of the foreign policy advisory panel to Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign. On October 5, 2017, Papadopoulos pleaded guilty to a felony charge of making false statements to FBI agents about the timing and the possible significance of his contacts in 2016 relating to U.S.–Russia relations and the Trump presidential campaign. In 2018, he served twelve days in federal prison, then was placed on a 12-month supervised release.
Bruce Genesoke Ohr is a former United States Department of Justice official. A former associate deputy attorney general and former director of the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force (OCDETF), as of February 2018 Ohr was working in the Justice Department's Criminal Division. He is an expert on transnational organized crime and has spent most of his career overseeing gang and racketeering-related prosecutions, including Russian organized crime.
This is a timeline of major events in the first half of 2017 related to the investigations into links between associates of Donald Trump and Russian officials and spies that are suspected of being inappropriate, relating to Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections. Following the timeline of Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections before and after July 2016 up until election day November 8 and the post-election transition, this article begins with Donald Trump and Mike Pence being sworn into office on January 20, 2017, and is followed by the second half of 2017. The investigations continued in the first and second halves of 2018, the first and second halves of 2019, 2020, and 2021.
The Special Counsel investigation was a United States law enforcement and counterintelligence investigation of the Russian government's efforts to interfere in United States politics and any possible involvement by members of the 2016 Trump presidential campaign. It was primarily focused on the 2016 presidential election.
Crossfire Hurricane was the code name for the counterintelligence investigation undertaken by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) from July 31, 2016, to May 17, 2017, into links between Donald Trump's presidential campaign and Russia and "whether individuals associated with [Trump's] presidential campaign were coordinating, wittingly or unwittingly, with the Russian government's efforts to interfere in the 2016 U.S. presidential election". Trump was not personally under investigation until May 2017, when his firing of FBI director James Comey raised suspicions of obstruction of justice, which triggered the Mueller investigation.
This is a timeline of events related to Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections, sorted by topics. It also includes events described in investigations into the many suspicious links between Trump associates and Russian officials and spies. Those investigations continued in 2017, the first and second halves of 2018, and 2019, largely as parts of the Crossfire Hurricane FBI investigation, the Special Counsel investigation, multiple ongoing criminal investigations by several State Attorneys General, and the investigation resulting in the Inspector General report on FBI and DOJ actions in the 2016 election.
The Russia investigation origins counter-narrative, or Russia counter-narrative, is a narrative embraced by Donald Trump, Republican Party leaders, and right-wing conservatives attacking the legitimacy and conclusions of investigations into Russian interference in the 2016 elections, and the links between Russian intelligence and Trump associates. The counter-narrative includes conspiracy theories such as Spygate, accusations of a secretive, elite "deep state" network, and other false and debunked claims. Trump in particular has attacked not only the origins but the conclusions of the investigation, and ordered a review of the Mueller report, which was conducted by attorney general William Barr – alleging there was a "deep state plot" to undermine him. He has claimed the investigations were an "illegal hoax", and that the "real collusion" was between Hillary Clinton, Democrats, and Russia – and later, Ukraine.
This is a timeline of events related to Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections.
Review of Four FISA Applications and Other Aspects of the FBI's Crossfire Hurricane Investigation is a report by the United States Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General which was released on December 9, 2019 by Inspector General Michael E. Horowitz. The report reviewed the Crossfire Hurricane investigation by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), which looked into whether people associated with the Donald Trump 2016 presidential campaign coordinated with Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections.
As part of a large and baseless conspiracy theory, Donald Trump posited that Barack Obama had spied on him, which Trump described as "the biggest political crime in American history, by far." The series of accusations have been nicknamed Obamagate. Obama had served as President of the United States from 2009 until 2017, when Trump succeeded him; Trump served as president until 2021.
Michael A. Sussmann is an American former federal prosecutor and a former partner at the law firm Perkins Coie, who focused on privacy and cybersecurity law. Sussmann represented the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and retained CrowdStrike to examine its servers after two Russian hacker groups penetrated DNC networks and stole information during the 2016 U.S. elections.
The Durham special counsel investigation began in 2019 when the U.S. Justice Department designated federal prosecutor John Durham to review the origins of an FBI investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections. Durham was given authority to examine the government's collection of intelligence about interactions between the 2016 presidential campaign of Donald Trump and Russians, and to review government documents and request voluntary witness statements. In December 2020, Attorney General William Barr announced that he had elevated Durham's status and authority by appointing him as a special counsel, allowing him to continue the investigation after the end of the Trump presidency.
