I am trying to track the timeline. If I got it right it was June of 2016 when the DNC alleged Russian hacking of their servers. In July Trump began mocking HRC by sarcastically calling on Putin to release her 33,000 emails. It is also reported that Steele began publishing his “dossier” (which was released in 17 segments) starting in June of 2016 through December 2016 (after the election) but that he was hired some time in April by surrogates for the Clinton campaign.
I still have questions whether this was a grand conspiracy or just a couple of coincidental pieces that were put together later on. While Steele was hired before the DNC claimed it was hacked, it really wasn’t until after Trump started mocking HRC’s security weakness that the allegations of collusion sprang up. I think someone took the Steele info and put it together after Trump’s comments (including his comments like “Why does HRC want war with Russia? Why shouldn’t we have closer ties with Russia?”) and decided that it was enough to allege collusion. At the time they claimed, falsely, that Trump was calling on Putin to hack the HRC campaign though obviously he did no such thing.
They later needed to find real evidence to back up their claims, which is why they went to the FISA court to tap Trump campaign communications - they were fishing for anything they could use to support their false narrative. But they could not get the court to agree to a warrant until they put forth the Steele dossier as supporting evidence, which is a little ironic because they had tried to sell this dossier to numerous news outlets and none of them would publish the allegations because they were so obviously contrived and sensationalized.
You wrote: "I still have questions whether this was a grand conspiracy or just a couple of coincidental pieces that were put together later on" ---- It is a little confusing. We still don't have all the pieces.
I'm praying Mr. Horowitz is really one of "the good guys".
She does a good job of keeping this updated as reports appear in the public square.
I think it started out slow and then ramped up once it was likely Trump was going to win the nomination. Manafort showing up on team Trump was like winning the lottery. Trump probably didn't know much about Manafort's activities, but democratic operatives at FBI/DOJ/CIA did. I suspect they were going to use Manafort as an October surprise, but word of his Ukrainian financial ties came out prematurely and Trump fired him. At the time of Manafort firing we know Papadopolis ran across the Australian Ambassador Downer at a London bar in May. The Trump Tower meeting with the Russian lawyer lady was mid July. When Manafort gets fired, Harry Reid goes nuts and fires off a Russia collusion letter to Comey 10 days later after a meeting with Brennan. I doubt Reid was directly involved, but served a purpose like McCain and the dossier release.