In his four-page letter summarizing the “principal conclusions” of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report on his investigation into collusion between the 2016 Donald Trump campaign and Russia, Attorney General William Barr declared, as Inquisitr reported, that Mueller had failed to “establish” that Trump or his campaign engaged in a conspiracy with the Russian government to tamper with the presidential election that year.
The full Mueller report remains tightly under wraps at the Justice Department, with Barr refusing until last Friday to make even the number of pages in the report public. He now says that the report is “nearly 400 pages long” according a letter he wrote to Congress and posted online by The Washington Post . As a result, how Mueller reached his supposed conclusion, and what evidence he may have found connecting Trump and Russia but stopping short of “establishing” a conspiracy, also remains secret.
But that did not stop Trump himself from claiming, as The Guardian reported, “total exoneration” of Russia collusion as a result of the still-secret Mueller Report.
Last week, Lucian Truscott IV, an expert on the Trump-Russia scandal, who is also the bestselling author of several military-themed novels and a regular columnist for Salon.com , wrote that Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin may have simply pulled off “the crime of the century” — and they got away with it.
“Either Donald Trump is the most devious, brilliant criminal in United States history and pulled off the crime of the century by using the help of the Russian government to get elected,” Truscott wrote in his column published on Wednesday, “or the laws which protect the Constitution of the United States need some serious revisiting if we are going to maintain our democracy.”
Truscott also asked whether Mueller’s conclusions would have been the same if so many incidents that appeared to indicate Trump-Russia collaboration had happened in secret, rather than in public. For example, as Inquisitr reported, on July 27, 2016, Trump issued a public call during a nationally televised press conference for Russian hackers to attack and steal Hillary Clinton’s emails. Within hours, the Russian hackers who, as Mueller later revealed in an indictment, worked for the Russian GRU Intelligence agency attempted to do exactly what Trump had publicly asked them to do.
Two years later, Trump held a summit with Putin in Helsinki, where Putin denied that Russians hacked Democratic email servers in 2016, and Trump called Putin’s denial — which was contradicted by United States intelligence agencies as well as by Mueller’s investigative findings — “extremely strong and powerful,” as quoted by CNN .
“So, turns out you can conspire with a hostile foreign nation and get away with it if you don’t mind doing it on TV,” Truscott’s column said. “One man, Putin, lied about the Russian conspiracy, and the other man, Trump, backed him up in his lie. Putin got a goof in the White House. Trump got to be the goof in the White House. If that’s not a conspiracy, I don’t know what is.”