The truth is that Putin and his Kremlin cohorts fed Steele a load of bullshit knowing it would get back to Fusion GPS AND the FBI. The purpose of Putin's devious plot is to destroy the US from within by dividing the country.
[video:www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=6&v=4r9bpTULXsE]

The ensuing Russia scare-mongering also forced the US government to massively increase it's defense budget which will effectively prevent the country from repairing it's disintegrating infrastructure.

Putin is using his much vaunted Jujitsu skills by using America's power to his advantage and turning it upon itself. It worked even better than he expected.

s/

Putin does NOT want the sanctions lifted. Here's just one example of why:

[video:www.youtube.com/watch?v=_xFuN2p6IPM]

Meanwhile, back in the US of A:

AMERICA FAILING: 4 Amtrak train crashes in 2 months
Politicians can’t agree on infrastructure spending, and Americans are paying the price
...
America’s ‘crumbling infrastructure’, not just a campaign pillar for Donald Trump, has, over the course of the past six weeks, made itself considerably more apparent through multiple train accidents.

The Amtrak train that collided with a freight train in South Carolina Sunday, killing two people and injuring more than 100, is the latest in a string of major crashes involving the passenger railroad.

It’s important to note that Amtrak is a quasi-public corporation that receives state and federal subsidies but is managed as a for-profit organization.
...

Russia has had working high speed rail since 2010.

California’s High-Speed Rail: Slow, Expensive, and Bound for Cancellation
by Chuck DeVore January 26, 2017 4:00 AM

A confidential federal report puts another stake into the heart of California’s “bullet train” In a thousand years, archaeologists will marvel at the engineering and effort that went into a 118-mile stretch of gravel, concrete, and steel in Central California, which had no discernible purpose, no evident reason for its beginning and end — a mystery as inscrutable as Peru’s Nazca Lines. If these future archaeologists surmise that the disused bones of California’s bullet train had some religious significance, they would not be far off. California’s government-run train project is clinically dead. It presents the simulacrum of a viable public-works project only through Governor Jerry Brown’s heroic intervention. However, in less than two years, Governor Brown will be termed out and the California High-Speed Rail project will be officially dead, killed by a new governor moored more securely to cold fiscal reality than is Brown.

Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/444262/california-high-speed-rail-...

Putin watching American MSM:
[video:www.youtube.com/watch?v=dYTfzfsbiUI]