The firing of FBI boss James Comey has raised fresh questions about possible collusion in the run-up to the 2016 US election

What do we know about alleged links between Trump and Russia?

How far has the FBI got in its investigation of alleged links between the Trump campaign and Russia?

James Comey, who has been fired by Donald Trump as director of the FBI, had been presiding over a wide-ranging counter-intelligence investigation into possible links between Donald Trump’s campaign and Russia. The key question is: how much collusion, if any, was there between Trump’s associates and Moscow during the run-up to the 2016 US election?

Comey’s investigation began in secret in late July. This was soon after WikiLeaks released thousands of hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee (DNC).

A dossier by the former MI6 agent Christopher Steele alleges that Trump’s team secretly plotted the DNC hack with Russian agents. It claims that key figures in Trump’s entourage – his personal lawyer Michael Cohen and former foreign policy aide Carter Page – were involved in the conspiracy. Other names implicated include Paul Manafort, a former campaign manager, and his long-term political mentor and former campaign adviser Roger Stone.

Trump has repeatedly dismissed the allegations as “fake news”, as have other Trump operatives named in the dossier. The FBI, however, held several clandestine meetings with Steele last summer and autumn. Sources inside the intelligence community, in Washington and London, describe Steele as an experienced, credible and “solid” former spy.

The FBI investigation appears to have made slow progress at first. After Trump’s election victory in November it gained fresh momentum, with Comey said to be pursuing leads with greater energy and resources. On 20 March, the FBI director dramatically confirmed the existence of the investigation for the first time, while giving evidence to the Senate judiciary subcommittee.

Comey said he was carrying out an investigation into “any links between individuals associated with the Trump campaign and the Russian government, and whether there was any coordination between the campaign and Russia’s efforts”. The investigation was still at an early stage, Comey indicated. He shot down Trump’s claim that the then president, Barack Obama, had bugged Trump Tower during the election, saying there was “no evidence” of this.

It is unclear how much evidence the FBI now has. One source told the Guardian the agency possessed “specific concrete and corroborative evidence of collusion between senior people in the Trump campaign and [Russian] agents of influence relating to the use of hacked material”.

It is this, rather than Comey’s handling of the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails, which could be behind Trump’s extraordinary decision on Tuesday to sack the FBI director.

Was Russia behind the hack of Democratic National Committee emails?



Reports by US intelligence agencies including the FBI, CIA and NSA conclude that the Kremlin did carry out the hack. The reports identify two separate Russian hacking groups, Fancy Bear and Cozy Bear, working respectively for the GRU and FSB intelligence agencies.

The two hacking groups appear to have worked independently. They breached Democratic party systems by sending out thousands of spear-phishing emails. The method was cheap and devastatingly effective, with senior Democrats clicking on rogue links. Victims included Clinton’s campaign manager, John Podesta. The DNC emails were published by WikiLeaks in late July, followed by Podesta’s in October.

The FBI has been scrutinising whether the Trump team knew about the hacks in advance, and if it finessed their publication. Stone, Trump’s long-time friend, tweeted in August that it would soon be Podesta’s time “in the barrel”. Stone admits being in contact with Guccifer 2.0, a hacker whom intelligence agencies have called an agent working for the Kremlin, and says he was in communication with Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks.

Roger Stone (@RogerJStoneJr) Trust me, it will soon the Podesta's time in the barrel. #CrookedHillary

Stone insists he had no foreknowledge of any leaks or any contacts with Russians. The Kremlin says claims it interfered in the election are baseless.

Some IT specialists have complained that the reports released by the outgoing Obama administration are overly vague. Speaking on Monday, James Clapper, a former director of national intelligence, said there were secret and public versions of the same reports, both with the same conclusions. The highly classified version contained “a lot of the substantiation that could not be put in the [public] report”, he said.

Clapper added: “For me, the evidence was overwhelming and compelling that the Russians did this.”

What role have British and non-US spy agencies played in the investigation?



A big one. In late 2015, the UK surveillance agency GCHQ first became aware of suspicious “interactions” between figures connected to Trump and known or suspected Russian agents, according to UK sources. This intelligence was passed to the US as part of a routine exchange of information.

At this point, Trump had not clinched the Republican nomination and looked something of a presidential long-shot.

Over the next six months, until summer 2016, a number of western agencies came across further leads indicating contacts between Trump’s inner circle and Russians, sources said. Several countries passed on electronic intelligence – known as “sigint” – to Washington. They include Germany, Australia, Estonia and Poland, and possibly France and the Netherlands.

From late July 2016, the FBI began analysing this data. GCHQ insists it was not seeking to spy on Trump. Instead it was actively targeting known Russian intelligence officers already on the grid. The Trump contacts were picked up by accident.

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According to the New York Times, meetings between Trump operatives and suspected Kremlin agents took place in Britain, the Netherlands and other countries. Steele’s dossier says one of them was in or around Prague late last summer and implicates Cohen. Cohen’s alleged mission was to cover up all traces of the hacking operation. He denies this.

The matter was deemed so sensitive that GCHQ’s then boss, Robert Hannigan, flew to the US last summer to brief the then CIA chief, John Brennan. In late August and early September, Brennan gave a series of classified briefings to the Gang of Eight, the top-ranking Democratic and Republican leaders in the House of Representatives and the Senate. He told them the agency had evidence that the Kremlin might be trying to help Trump to win the presidency, the New York Times reported.

In April, the Guardian published a story revealing GCHQ’s role, under the headline “British spies were first to spot Trump team’s links with Russia”. On Monday, Clapper confirmed the report – an unusual move. Asked by Senator Dianne Feinstein whether the article were true, he said: “Yes, it is and it’s also quite sensitive … The specifics are quite sensitive.”

How much of the Steele dossier stands up?

Last year, a political intelligence firm in Washington, Fusion GPS, hired Steele to investigate Trump’s dealings with Russia. The DNC paid for the work after its initial funder, a wealthy Jeb Bush supporter, dropped out.

Between July and December, Steele sent regular enciphered memos back to Washington – 35 in all. These were sensitive and confidential.

The dossier says that the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, had been “cultivating, supporting and assisting Trump” for at least five years. Putin’s goal was to “encourage splits and divisions in the western alliance”. Allegedly, the Trump team had been giving information to Moscow on Russian oligarchs in the US. In return, the Kremlin fed Trump information on his political opponents, including Clinton. The two sides had a mutual goal: to defeat Clinton, whom Putin “hated”.

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The dossier claims that the Russians have an extensive file of compromising information, or kompromat, on Trump, drawn up in order to blackmail him. It says that Trump was videoed in a room in Moscow’s Ritz-Carlton hotel in a compromising sexual situation. This was during a 2013 visit for the Miss Universe beauty pageant. Trump vehemently denies this.

So far, the sex allegations in the dossier have not been corroborated. It is unclear what material the FBI has from Trump’s various trips to Moscow, which date back to 1987. The FSB – and its Soviet-era predecessor, the KGB – have a long history of videoing targets in private situations. Only Putin, and his spy chiefs, will know for sure.

Parts of the dossier have been stood up and in places it looks prophetic. One Steele memo says the Kremlin was behind the hacking of DNC emails, claiming these were released via WikiLeaks for reasons of “plausible deniability”. In return, Trump agreed to “sideline Russian intervention in Ukraine” as a campaign issue and to raise “US/Nato defence commitments in the Baltics and eastern Europe” to deflect attention.

This is precisely what happened at the Republican National Convention last July, when language on the US’s commitment to Ukraine was mysteriously softened. Meanwhile, in a series of tweets, Trump questioned whether US allies were paying enough into Nato coffers.