You need not believe the Steele dossier at all. But you have (probably?) seen the video of Trump in Helsinki, right?

Either you think the video was manufactured, or you must have a reasonable explanation for why Trump would diss his own intelligence organizations in favor of the word of a foreign President.

Even if he had genuine doubts about the honesty and veracity of his intelligence service, airing that doubt in front of Putin, heck, airing it as a defense of Putin, is so bizarre.

This was not strategy. Trump didn't extract concessions from Putin for his absolving him of all the allegations.

Nor was this domestically strategic. In fact, this caused him a great deal of domestic headaches, with even some of his own party memebers doing some barely-acceptable mumbling about supporting the intelligence services and giving up to Putin in response.

So the natural question is... why do it? There's no benefit, and quite a bit of harm, at home. There's no benefit abroad. There's harm abroad too, but Trump doesn't care about Europe, so that we can ignore.

So tell me, what actions of Ted Kennedy showed he was beholden to the Russians? The legitimacy of which part of the government did he challenge in support of the Russian President? Which policy priority of the US did he compromise, that precisely plays into the hands of Russia, giving it greater strategic leverage?

Referring to the Steele dossier is a nice little head fake, but it has nothing to do with what happened at Helsinki. I don't care if it is the pee pee tape, or Russian bank loans, or if Putin is Trump's long lost brother. The exact reason needs to be investigated, but the result of it is clear: Trump has surrendered US foreign policy and electoral independence for no possible explanation except one: he is under pressure from Putin to do so.