Trump claimed during the 2016 campaign that he had no business dealings with Russia. But in late November, in connection with the guilty plea of former Trump fixer Michael Cohen to a false-statements charge, we learned Mueller’s investigators can prove that Trump’s organization continued throughout 2016 to negotiate the construction of a Trump Tower in Moscow — negotiations that involved communications with Russian-government officials and discussions about potential meetings with Putin and Russian prime minister Dimitry Medvedev. To be sure, it is not a federal crime to explore real-estate development in Russia. Nevertheless, the revelations raise suspicion in reasonable minds that Trump’s extraordinary public ingratiation of the Kremlin’s murderous dictator is financially motivated — or, worse, the result of being compromised because Putin was in a position to reveal that Trump was deceiving the public about his business dealings with Russia.

. . . and now Trump, as president of the United States, has offered a revisionist history of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan — pure fiction that not only contradicts American policy and actions taken to counter Moscow’s aggression, but is indistinguishable from the propaganda that Putin himself would peddle.

It is an article of faith among Trump’s most ardent followers that the “collusion” aspect of the Mueller probe is a complete fabrication. You may notice, however, that not a single detail in the above summary is drawn from the Steele dossier. I am going strictly on publicly available information that is either certainly true or highly likely to be true.