RussiaGate is a sophisticated Shell Game

The 1950s were the golden era for USA Imperial hegemony over the entire Planet. The Cold War was conducted both as a military/economic strategy to isolate and roll back the perceived expansionism of then Soviet Union(and the so-called Socialist Camp), and an ideological indoctrination of the Public masses on the supposed evils of Soviet-styled Communism. That US strategic initiative succeeded--despite various localized setbacks--brilliantly. The Soviet Union unwittingly got suckered into a fiscally-unsustainable arms race that ultimately sapped its economic vitality, significantly contributing to massive Public disillusionment and eventual
implosion. Meanwhile, an ideological consensus was achieved among both Conservative and Liberal circles in the USA--and indeed among sizable majority of Public Opinion around the "Free World"--that Soviet Communism represented an authoritarian regime bent on undermining the "democracy" in the "Free World."
The reality was of course quite different. Despite whatever shortcomings(including its domestic economic inefficiencies) of the Soviet system, the canard of Soviet expansionism and foreign meddling was truly a "corporate-bin-Laden" media Fake News of McCarthyite hyperbole. Especially compared to the grotesque history of criminal USA Imperial military aggressions and massive "soft-power" destabilizations across 3 continents. (See William Blum's references, for starters.)
Now fast forward to the 21st century, when the declining economic and diplomatic influence of the USA Evil empire is accelerating precipitously. Alarmed by this rapid descent, coupled with domestic contradictions of racism, vast inequality, supersized prison population amidst a dysfunctional criminal justice system, and dozens more identity politics divides, the ruling elite(aka the Wall Street-Pentagon cabal, or Military-Industrial Complex)wracked its brains to come up with a deeply-matrixed scheme, to try to return to its heyday of Cold /War foreign policy consensus. With the USA's leading edge cyber warfare(notably the Stuxnet disruption of the Iranian nuclear program) and social media(best example was the use of one-sided anti-Assad/Syrian reporting from Western-backed and financed social media platforms to spread Fake Narratives on actual USA regime change policy in Syria)technologies, the Deep State operatives from the NSA/CIA/FBI concocted fantastic--but ultimately untraceable--stories of "Russian hacking" of both major political parties, election venues and machines, even popular net-based social movements. Once these dubious planted stories are floated, various unsuspecting reporters and media outlets re-gurgitate the uncorroborated stories(and often exaggerate them several degrees more sinister!), and before you can sing, "My Country Thee...," they become Headline News on all the major corporate-bin-Laden networks and they become unquestioned True Stories!
If Herr Goebbels were alive today, he'd be marveling at such seamless transformation of the concocted Fake Narrative into the mainstream RussiaGate stories.