Russiagate

Mueller indicted 12 Russian military-intelligence officers for hacking and 13 Russians for the troll operation, and laid out how both worked. He also found “numerous links” between the campaign and Russian-connected people, including the Trump Tower meeting and Manafort’s sharing of polling data. But he said the evidence was not enough to charge anyone in the campaign with conspiring with the Russian government. [1][2]

On obstruction he took no position: “if we had had confidence that the president clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said so.” Barr and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein then decided the evidence did not support charging obstruction. [1][2]

The Senate Intelligence Committee, led by Republicans, went further on counterintelligence. It found Manafort’s contact, Konstantin Kilimnik, was a Russian intelligence officer and called the relationship “a grave counterintelligence threat.” It did not find proof of an election conspiracy either. [3]

The Steele dossier, paid for through the Clinton campaign’s law firm, was a set of raw, mostly unverified claims. The FBI used parts of it to get surveillance warrants on former Trump adviser Carter Page. The Justice Department inspector general found 17 significant errors or omissions in those applications and said the FBI kept relying on Steele after reasons to doubt him piled up. [1]

The same report found the investigation was properly opened, on a tip about another adviser, George Papadopoulos, and not on the dossier, and it found no documentary evidence that political bias drove the opening. [1]

FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith pleaded guilty in 2020 to altering an email to say Page was “not a source” for the CIA when he had been one. Special Counsel John Durham was harsher than the inspector general about the FBI’s reasons for opening a full investigation, but the two people he took to trial, Michael Sussmann and Igor Danchenko, were acquitted. [2][3]

In July 2025 the CIA published a review criticizing how the 2017 intelligence assessment was rushed and how the dossier was handled; it still called the core finding that Russia interfered defensible. Days later Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard released documents she said showed a “treasonous conspiracy” by Obama officials. Senator Grassley released a Durham annex about intelligence on an alleged Clinton campaign plan whose reliability Durham himself could not establish. [1][2][3]

A federal grand jury in Fort Pierce, Florida, then began investigating the officials behind the original investigation. More than 130 subpoenas were reported, including to James Comey and John Brennan. In September 2026 the prosecutor leading the effort resigned without bringing any charges. Brennan denies wrongdoing. [4][5][6][7]

This guide uses the same rule for this probe that it uses for investigations of Trump: subpoenas and declassified memos are allegations and leads, not findings.