We got a lot wrong about Trump & Russia.

I’m Isaac Saul, and this is Tangle: an independent, nonpartisan, subscriber-supported politics newsletter that summarizes the best arguments from across the political spectrum on the news of the day — then “my take.”

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If you're anything like me, your reaction to this headline might be, "Are we really talking about Donald Trump? And Russia? Again?"

Trust me, I understand.

For the last eight years, Trump has sucked up more oxygen in the political press than any other person or topic I can think of. The motivation for this piece is not a desire to keep Trump in the headlines, nor to constantly re-litigate the past when there is so much to chew on here in the present.

But the story of Trump, and specifically his interactions with Russia, is an incredibly important one. Not only because it covers the purported corruption of a former president (and potential presidential nominee in 2024), but because it also covers the current state of the media. The Trump-Russia story is just as much a story about the press as it is a story about Trump, and Putin, and obscure Kremlin oligarchs, no matter how much some people want to resist it. Our mainstream press — led by giants like The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, Fox News, and the major cable networks — covered Trump incessantly. They broke a lot of important news, and they made a lot of mistakes.

Part of my impetus for creating Tangle was watching some of those mistakes go unaddressed, and watching the clown car of partisan punditry pack in one once-trusted institution after the other. Today, tens of millions of Americans believe the mainstream media is an enemy of the people, and millions more simply don't trust it. In some ways, this has been a boon to independent journalists like me, and has helped drive the success of Tangle. But it has not been good for the body politic of this country that I care so deeply about.

Another reason I'm writing this piece is that so many of you have asked for it. Every week, another reader writes in asking me to revisit the "Trump-Russia" story, asking if I could do a round-up or a synopsis of "what really happened" or "what we really know." I hope to fulfill that wish, at least in part, today.

Finally, I'm writing this piece because it is still deeply relevant. Many of the main characters — from the mainstream media to Donald Trump to Vladimir Putin to the FBI — are still constantly in the news. More importantly, many of the same mistakes that happened in the Trump era are happening again now. Narratives are being formulated first, driven by prior feelings on the characters involved, with the facts being filled in second. A lack of skepticism is thriving within a modern context akin to a new-age Red Scare, where foreign adversaries like Russia and China are seen as the root of all evil.

As we've documented in Tangle, media outlets like The New York Post have seen their legitimate journalism throttled on account of it being "Russian disinformation" and "hacked materials." These allegations were made by U.S. intelligence officials and echoed uncritically by many in the press, only for us to find out they were invented out of thin air.

More recently, the mystery around the Nord Stream 1 pipeline explosion resulted in a largely unanimous mainstream narrative that Russia must have been behind it. Months later, we still don't have an answer. Here at Tangle, we focused on the mystery, but narrowed the pool to Russia or the United States. Just this week, the legendary investigative journalist Seymour Hersh published an extremely detailed article alleging that a team of covert U.S. Navy divers were actually behind the attack, and that it was planned with the explicit approval of President Biden.

Hersh's piece is — to put it kindly — a thinly sourced account, with just one anonymous person serving as his primary narrator. His reporting has taken some fire from critics in the last decade, so I won't die on the hill that this piece is one hundred percent accurate. But if any version of his account of events turns out to be true, he will have beaten the entire mainstream press to one of the biggest stories of the year.

I was particularly inspired to write this piece, though, after the publication of another piece: Jeff Gerth's 23,000-word tour de force titled "The press versus the president," which was recently published in the Columbia Journalism Review (CJR). CJR is, to all journalists, considered the premier watchdog of journalism.

I believe Gerth's piece is one of the most important works of journalism I've seen in recent years. I know many of you may not have time for a 23,000-word piece (hence this newsletter), but if you do — I encourage you to go read it. It is more exhaustive than what I am about to write, though some of what follows will reference Gerth's reporting, its criticism, some of his omissions and the many other notes and ideas I've been jotting down about this story for close to 18 months.

It's worth stating plainly that many of the problems Trump faced as president were problems of his own making. Not because of any particular unethical behavior — though there was plenty of that — but because of his penchant for loving anyone who complimented him, regurgitating half-baked talking points, and a long history of complicated business dealings with unsavory individuals.

The investigation that turned into the investigation into Trump's campaign, as best we know, was launched on account of thinly sourced heresy. George Papadopoulos, a Trump aide, had heard from an academic named Joseph Mifsud that the Russians had dirt on Hillary Clinton involving her emails. Papadopoulos told this to Alexander Downer, a diplomat, who reported it to U.S. officials. The FBI launched their investigation, called Crossfire Hurricane, two days later. In documentation of Crossfire Hurricane's launch, a lack of supporting evidence was apparent. According to Gerth, the FBI noted that Papadopoulos had "suggested the Trump team had received some kind of suggestion from Russia" about dirt on Clinton.

A few weeks before that meeting between Papadopoulos and Mifsud, a DNC staffer working for the Clinton campaign unwittingly gave purported Russian hackers access to his email account, lending credence to Mifsud's claim. Papadopoulos didn't appear to know this at the time, and for weeks before hearing of the dirt on Clinton, he had been trying to arrange a meeting between Putin and then-candidate Trump in an apparent attempt to join Trump’s team for a long-term, formal role. Around this same time, Trump began suggesting on the campaign trail that the United States should have a more friendly relationship with Putin.

A few months later, in June of that year, Donald Trump Jr., campaign manager Paul Manafort and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner met with a Russian lawyer who promised dirt on Hillary Clinton. Emails and investigations into this meeting suggest the entire affair was a dud, with the Trump camp coming to the conclusion the lawyer had no valuable information and the meeting was a waste of time.

About five days later, the DNC publicly revealed it had been hacked, and it accused Russia of being behind the hack. A hacker going by the name Gufficer 2.0 started leaking the Clinton campaign’s emails to the public, with damaging information — as well as the campaign’s strategy for attacking Trump — being sprayed across the internet. Not long after, Wikileaks would upload about 20,000 of Clinton's emails, which included evidence of the DNC working to elevate Clinton and stymie Sen. Bernie Sanders, despite its supposedly neutral role in the primary.

We'd learn later, through the multiple investigations into this time period, that Roger Stone — then a Trump adviser — had repeatedly tried to coordinate with Wikileaks during the release of that information. Mueller could not make a determination about whether Stone ever directly connected with WikiLeaks' founder Julian Assange, although Stone — known for being a shrewd embellisher and media manipulator — publicly alleged such communications happened before the election. Trump would later pardon Stone after he was convicted on seven counts of obstruction, witness tampering and lying to Congress.

Shortly after the Wikileaks dump, Trump held his now infamous press conference, from which the media largely zeroed in on one particular moment: “I will tell you this, Russia: If you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing,” Trump said. “I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.”

From that press conference until the election, there was a flood of Russia-related news. The New York Times reported on a ledger belonging to Manafort, Trump's campaign manager, alleging he was due nearly $13 million "in cash" from a Russia-aligned party. Manafort has maintained that he never dealt in cash, and that the money covered his entire team, but he eventually resigned because of the piece — and would later become one of the strongest purported links between Trump's team and Russian agents.

That was in August of 2016. In the few months leading up to the election, the news kept coming like a firehose. In early September, The Washington Post reported that intelligence agencies were investigating a "broad" covert operation by Russia to sow chaos in the U.S. election. Trump got briefed on the investigation. President Barack Obama said publicly that Russia was behind the hack of the DNC. Russia denied orchestrating it, and Trump cast doubt on the intelligence agencies, saying we may never really know who was behind the hack. In early October, Stone again said on Twitter that he was confident Wikileaks would "educate" Americans about Clinton.

A few days later, Wikileaks dumped another trove of emails, this time from Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta. They continued to release those emails through election day, competing with media attention surrounding the so-called “Access Hollywood tapes,” in which Trump is caught on a live mic bragging about groping women. In debates with Clinton and on social media, Trump repeatedly praised Wikileaks, referencing the contents of the emails that show the Clinton campaign and DNC worked together to stymie Sanders. At the same time, Clinton, Obama and the intelligence officials continued to tell the public that Russia was behind the hack and leak campaigns, and Clinton used Trump’s posture to criticize him as a “Russian asset.”

At the end of October, just days before the election and after months of Clinton, Democrats and former intelligence officers accusing Trump of being in bed with Putin, The New York Times ran a story headlined, “Investigating Donald Trump, FBI Sees No Clear Link to Russia.” The piece noted the FBI’s belief that Russia was trying to sow chaos, not necessarily to help Trump, and knocked down other reporting about a purported link between Trump and Alfa Bank in Russia.

Nine days later, Trump was elected president.

During these months, there was another, concurrent story unfolding around Trump and Russia. This one started with Fusion GPS, a research firm created by a group of Wall Street Journal reporters who were initially hired to look into Trump for the Washington Free Beacon, a conservative publication backed by a hedge fund billionaire and Trump critic. Fusion picked up their work for the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and the Clinton campaign in the spring of 2016, around the same time Papadopoulos was first meeting with Misfud, the professor who would eventually allege that Russia had dirt on Clinton.