It’s now an article of faith on the right that the Trump-Russia investigation was a dirty trick based on a completely bogus dossier produced by former MI6 intelligence officer Christopher Steele. The most serious allegations in Steele’s dossier suggested that the Kremlin assisted Donald Trump’s election because they believed they could control him due to compromising video in their possession of Trump in a Moscow hotel room with prostitutes.

There were certainly some problems with Steele’s intelligence report, but it was never the sole reason for suspicion about collusion between the Kremlin and Trump’s campaign. It was later revealed that in the fall of 2015 and spring of 2016, Trump was aggressively negotiating a real estate deal with the Russian government to build a Trump-branded tower in Moscow–the kind of arrangement he adamantly denied pursuing at the time. This, by itself, gave Russian President Vladimir Putin leverage over Trump, as he could have provided documentary evidence of Trump’s dishonesty at any time during the primaries, general election or his presidency.

The Guardian is now in possession of what appears to be a classified report (No 32-04 \ vd) used during a January 22, 2016 meeting between Putin and his senior national security team. There are many intriguing elements in the report, which is judged as plausibly authentic by independent experts.

It confirms that the Kremlin adopted a firm strategy of assisting Trump’s election (“It is acutely necessary to use all possible force to facilitate his [Trump’s] election to the post of US president.”). For this purpose, each branch of Russian national security was assigned a specific area of responsibility.

According to the document, each spy agency was given a role. The defence minister was instructed to coordinate the work of subdivisions and services. Shoigu was also responsible for collecting and systematising necessary information and for “preparing measures to act on the information environment of the object” – a command, it seems, to hack sensitive American cyber-targets identified by the SVR.

The SVR was told to gather additional information to support the commission’s activities. The FSB was assigned counter-intelligence. Putin approved the apparent document, dated 22 January 2016, which his chancellery stamped.

The measures were effective immediately on Putin’s signature, the decree says. The spy chiefs were given just over a week to come back with concrete ideas, to be submitted by 1 February.

It also confirms that the Kremlin had compromising material (kompromat) collected from Trump’s earlier “non-official visits to Russian Federation territory.” The exact nature of this information is contained in an appendix (“appendix five, at paragraph five”) which was not included in the leaked documents. At another point, the kompromat provides an explicit rationale for supporting Trump. He would be under Putin’s “clandestine” control.

There were international benefits from a Trump win, it stresses. Putin would be able in clandestine fashion to dominate any US-Russia bilateral talks, to deconstruct the White House’s negotiating position, and to pursue bold foreign policy initiatives on Russia’s behalf, it says.

This is the most explosive revelation in the leaked documents and it helps explain bizarre behavior from President Trump, including his famous performance in Helsinki where he took Putin’s word on election interference over the opinion of the American intelligence community.

But there’s more consequential information that has more urgency. It pertains to how Russia seeks to weaken and divide America. One goal is to weaken American political leaders through “viral” disinformation.

The paper does not name Hillary Clinton, Trump’s 2016 rival. It does suggest employing media resources to undermine leading US political figures.

There are paragraphs on how Russia might insert “media viruses” into American public life, which could become self-sustaining and self-replicating. These would alter mass consciousness, especially in certain groups, it says…

…A matter of weeks after the security council meeting, GRU hackers raided the servers of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and subsequently released thousands of private emails in an attempt to hurt Clinton’s election campaign.

The immediate intent of the of DNC hack, which was released as the Democrats convened in Philadelphia for their national convention, was to make drive a wedge between Clinton and supporters of Bernie Sanders. That effort involved genuine documents, but other efforts to “alter mass consciousness” were based on outright lies, including about Clinton’s health.

The Russians also seek to drive wedges between the left and right, with the aim of causing “destabilisation” of our sociopolitical system, in part through bringing “hidden discontent” to the fore.

They agreed a Trump White House would help secure Moscow’s strategic objectives, among them “social turmoil” in the US and a weakening of the American president’s negotiating position…

…A Trump win “will definitely lead to the destabilisation of the US’s sociopolitical system” and see hidden discontent burst into the open, it predicts…

…Moscow would gain most from a Republican victory, the paper states. This could lead to a “social explosion” that would in turn weaken the US president, it says.

It’s fair to say that the January 6, 2021 insurrection was exactly the kind of “social explosion” the Kremlin sought when they decided to help Trump get elected.

Lastly, the documents include a brief psychological profile of Trump which describes him as an “impulsive, mentally unstable and unbalanced individual who suffers from an inferiority complex.”

What’s most frustrating is how well this Russian plan worked. They didn’t meet all their own goals, for example they were unable to get international acquiescence to their seizure of Crimea. But their worst intentions for America were fully realized.  Half the country is in the spell of viral disinformation and bipartisan support for anything from foreign policy to paying our debts to supporting our democracy has gone out the window. America is severely weakened on the international stage and Russia has a freer hand.

Most of all, even if these documents are verified and widely reported, the right will never consider them legitimate because they’ve become invested in the idea of Trump-Russia collusion is fake news.