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This is incorrect, or as you would hyperbolically put it, "extremely" incorrect. Trump wasn't a total puppet, but Russia was definitely helping him. The activities of the Internet Research Agency are now public knowledge after Prigozhin died in a fireball after missing his shot at the king. Campaign staffers such as Papadopoulos met with RU intelligence agents to arrange for embarrassing email leaks from people like Podesta, lied about it several times, and was sentenced to prison. Many other individuals such as his campaign manager(!) had suspicious links to Russia, and there has been plenty of additional evidence that Russia was trying to influence the election. Some of it was just to delegitimize democracy, while much of it was to prop up Trump. Is this really hard to believe? Russia has been interfering in US elections since the Cold War, and history has shown how much friendlier Trump has been to Putin compared to Biden or Hillary.
Manafort lobbied foreign governments without being registered, which was a technical requirement widely unfollowed in the industry until the FBI prosecuted Manafort over it. Again, there was no actual Trump-Russia collusion, so the argument has to rely on vagueries like "suspicious ties".
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Papadopoulos was ambushed by FBI agents who pretended he wasn't under investigation, asked him questions until he got a detail wrong, and then charged him with lying to the FBI. They had to invent this process crime because they had no other crimes to charge him with. But they did leak stories to the press that made it seem as though Papadopoulos had been up to sinister Russian collusion schemes, because this is how they made what they were doing seem defensible to a gullible part of the public.
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I'd already mentioned this - I don't think their posting a bunch of BLM memes was enough to have any kind of measurable impact on the results of the election. I'll take concerns about Russian influence on American elections seriously when they get to the point of having a 10th of the impact that the Israelis have.
This ties in to the corrupt origination of crossfire hurricane - like the Carter Page warrant and Alexander Downer's involvement etc. If you want to talk about this incredibly complicated and opaque topic it will take an entire thread to hash out all the details and points of agreement.
Wikipedia is worse than useless for this and the page you've linked even debunks some of the claims made in the article. The DNC and Podesta leaks were almost definitely not the result of Russian action, for instance. The US intelligence community can't actually be trusted on this topic - we know they were actively lying to deceive both when they made the Carter Page warrant application, and when they released the letter condemning the Hunter Biden laptop.
No? Hillary was literally buying fake kompromat from the Russians in order to attack Trump, and I can't see any indication that he was acting in Russian interests except coincidentally - there's some undeniable overlap in the policies that both Trump's base and the Russians support (like ending the forever wars and not purposefully starting a proxy war against Russia) but that isn't really a meaningful argument.
If memory serves it was in the small 7 or 8 figure spend. It was dwarfed by orders of magnitude what Clinton spent. If the Russians are that effective….then maybe they deserve it!
No the simple explanation was yes there were some Russian troll farms but they had a negligible impact on the election and there is zero connection with Trump.
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I don’t think it’s the slam dunk people have been treating it as. For Trump to be colluding, he’d have to know about and approve of the things Russia was doing. Other than one televised statement that could arguably be a joke, nothing he did seemed to point to him knowing about any of it. Maybe he didn’t say anything, but given that he couldn’t help himself in the middle of a presidential debate, I don’t see it. If he can’t tell the proud boys to leave his campaign, how does he do so easily in the case of Russia?
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