Also, you can tie most government officials to Russia in some capacity. Everybody in politics is well connected.
It was a widely spread conspiracy theory with 0 evidence given a veil of credibility because many talking heads brought it up as if there were something tangible backing it.
Just because many people talked about and bought into it doesn't invalidate that it was a conspiracy theory
Nobody is claiming Trump is a genius. The Russian ties are all out there in the open. The only open question was whether they rise to a criminal level. Trump apparently thought they did when he panicked and fired James Comey to halt an investigation. I don’t think the connections were necessarily criminal, just un-American (that of cozying up to corrupt dictators while denigrating allies).
This is simply untrue: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/18/us/politics/senate-intell...
Even a Republican-backed investigation found many links between Trump campaign advisors and Kremlin officials.
Just because Trump says he was "totally exonerated" for the soundbite doesn't mean anything.