(a) The Russians do not understand American political campaigns well enough to appreciate that alleged misconduct by a donor does not hurt a candidate if the candidate is not complicit in the misconduct; (b) the Putin regime attempted (unsuccessfully) to lure the Trump campaign into its anti–Magnitsky Act effort by convincing Don Trump Jr. and other campaign officials that there was a useful anti-Clinton angle to be exploited; and (c) the Putin regime calculated that, simply by taking a meeting with a Kremlin emissary on the promise of damaging information about Clinton, the Trump campaign would foolishly expose itself to blackmail by Putin.
.. We can easily infer why the Trump campaign concluded Veselnitskaya’s information was useless. We do not know what it is about the Ziff family’s dealings with Browder that the Russians believed amounted to — or could be spun as — tax-law violations. But the Trump officials, who were under the impression they would be receiving information that incriminated Clinton herself, would have realized instantly that alleged misconduct by Clinton Foundation donors would be irrelevant to the campaign if it did not directly involve Clinton.
.. Fusion’s dossier about Clinton Foundation donors was never used in the campaign. Neither was Fusion’s dossier about Donald Trump — the one compiled for Fusion by former British spy Christopher Steele and later described by then–FBI director James Comey as “salacious and unverified.”
For all the talk about “Trump collusion with Russia,” it seems increasingly clear that the Kremlin, as is its wont, hoped to undermine the United States government regardless of which party won the White House in 2016. Wittingly or not, Fusion GPS helped the Putin regime play both sides.