

It is against this background that this weekend's revelations are best understood. These are that a relatively low-level and inexperienced (and tipsy) Trump campaign adviser named George Papadopoulos had told Alexander Downer one night in May 2016 that he had been told Russia had a "dirt" file on Hillary Clinton. Do the Downer revelations put Trump in the dock? Hardly. The key question at the heart of this investigation is not whether the Russians had dirt on Clinton, including damaging emails. The issue is whether the Trump campaign was working with Russian officials to acquire and disseminate information about her that could be used to tilt the 2016 election. According to The New York Times, it now seems clear that the former foreign minister's decision to tip off US intelligence about his conversation with Papadopoulos – not the aforementioned dossier full of wild, discredited and unsubstantiated claims against Trump – inspired the FBI probe.

Australian high commissioner Alexander Downer speaking at the Australian high commission in London. Credit:Alastair Grant But the Downer revelations provide no evidence of collusion. Indeed, Papadopoulos's main mission was to set up a meeting between Putin and Trump (or their key surrogates) – not to acquire information from the Russians that would damage Clinton, much less work with Moscow to steal DNC emails and publicise them. What about the fact that a Maltese professor living in London told Papadopoulos that Russian officials had informed him they had "dirt" on Clinton in the form of "thousands of emails"? For starters, the professor is not a Russian and Papadopoulos did not seek out this information.Moreover, there is no evidence of subsequent conversations about these emails with the professor or anyone else. In fact, it appears that Papadopoulos did not even report the conversation to higher ups in the Trump campaign. In this photo from President Donald Trump's Twitter account, George Papadopoulos, third from left, sits at a table with then-candidate Trump and others at what is labeled at a national security meeting in Washington in 2016. Credit:AP There are other problems with the media's collusion narrative. For one thing, if Trump is a puppet, someone other than Putin pulls the strings. And he's not Russian. In the past year, Washington has expanded NATO once again, strengthened sanctions on Moscow, supplied the Ukrainian military with lethal weapons, boosted aid to the Baltic countries and launched missiles against Syria's Assad regime. These decisions outrage the Kremlin and will only increase East-West tensions.

None of this denies the fact that the Trump White House is its own worst enemy – as its failure to disclose every detail that might be relevant to the Russian investigations demonstrates. However, there is reason to believe that those who are desperate to upend Trump are using Russiagate to wage war with him. News has emerged that Clinton campaign contributors and Trump haters, including a senior FBI official, were hired to help conduct the Independent Counsel's investigation into any collusion. As troubling, the Clinton campaign helped fund the aforementioned intelligence dossier that dug up dirt on Trump. After 18 months of investigations, there is no email or document or witness's testimony that proves Russia-Trump collusion. In short, there is still no smoking gun.

Perhaps evidence emerges this year that Trump and the Russians have been in cahoots and that the President and his associates really are engaged in the most elaborate cover-up of all time. But the Downer revelations hardly constitute the kind of evidence needed to prove Trump's guilt. Loading Tom Switzer is executive director of the Centre for Independent Studies and a presenter at the ABC's Radio National. Peter Hartcher is on leave.