Eli Lake, Columnist

The Shady Dirt Diggers at the Heart of the Trump-Russia Scandal

The Kremlin's drive to repeal sanctions against oligarchs is bigger than helping one U.S. presidential candidate.

July 14, 2017 at 5:22 PM UTC

Eli Lake is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering national security and foreign policy. He was the senior national security correspondent for the Daily Beast and covered national security and intelligence for the Washington Times, the New York Sun and UPI.

Russia's playing chess, not checkers.
Photographer: Altan Gocher/NurPhoto via Getty Images

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As the Trump-Russia scandal reaches a tipping point, it's worth going back to the first big break in the story: the dossier. Back in January, when Buzzfeed first published an opposition research document on President Donald Trump's ties to Russia, it wasn't clear what to make of it.

Compiled by a former British spy, Christopher Steele, the research was unverified. But it was significant enough that the intelligence community included it in briefings held with both President Barack Obama and then-candidate Trump himself. Some of it seemed crazy, like the detail that Russians had video of Trump in a lewd sex party. Some of it seemed all-too-believable, such as the account of how the Kremlin assessed its election-influence operation over time.