Respect everyone involved here (even when they're throwing food at each other), but the reason Russiagate became a "a non-story on the left", at least from my perspective, is that ... (see rest of thread) https://theweek.com/articles/935438/how-trumprussia-story-buried

....campaign "collusion" was never what we were talking about. That became the focus once it became clear that the actual central charge of the whole affair - that Trump was deliberately doing Putin's bidding, possibly due to blackmail, possibly due to bribery - wasn't true.

Might be hard to remember at this point because the pivot was so seamless and forceful, but *this*, not collusion, was at the heart of the Russiagate narrative, from the Steele dossier and the "pee tape" to that embarrassing Chait piece. And it all fell apart....

...whether via the Mueller report's info on the post-election period (which makes no sense if Trump was a Kremlin spy or whatever); or the FBI's own findings that large parts of the Steele dossier, incl. the "pee tape", were actually Russian intel disinfo.

Now, you could say that surely we should be concerned about Trump taking help from Russia in the campaign, which I agree is unseemly and potentially dangerous, but

a) It's not illegal (see Israel's election interference in the US i.e. the Romney '12 campaign)

and....

...b) Then you'd have to be at least as concerned about Clinton & the DNC's election collusion with the Ukrainian govt that year, which for some reason elicits no outrage, and people are now pretending didn't even happen.

So yeah, "collusion" only became the central issue once the more fantastical charge - Trump is a Putin asset etc. - became untenable. It's fair to consider this a major scandal, but making foreign election interference an exclusively Trump-Russia thing is misleading.