https://www.salon.com/2019/06/18/trumps-no-collusion-lie-is-finally-falling-apart-but-will-americans-actually-notice/?fbclid=IwAR3YfJa6G1oOcHny_rZXG8E0oH8RIefVnYCM88vli4kdNVsX6ZtQpcouPZU
"Mueller added that Trump campaign officials lied to investigators, which “impaired the investigation of Russian election interference.” The lies and the cover-up, drawn from mob tactics, flummoxed Mueller’s work. On page 9, Mueller also writes that “the investigation identified numerous links between individuals with ties to the Russian government and individuals associated with the Trump Campaign.” These “links” are roughly more than 100 clandestine meetings between Trump officials and Russians listed and described in Mueller’s report — meetings nearly all of these officials repeatedly lied about. Despite these findings in the report, when asked whether the meetings took place, Vice President Mike Pence told Fox News Sunday, “Of course not. Why would there be any contacts between the campaign?” Whoops. Throughout 2017 and 2018, as we devoured bombshell after bombshell about these meetings, most of us defined what we observed as the non-legal term “collusion.” In fact, it’s a fairly reasonable semantic jump from “links” to “collusion,” especially when we factor in Mueller’s reporting on Paul Manafort’s meetings with reputed former Russian GRU agent Konstantin Kilimnik, during which the men discussed everything from influencing the president to backstop Putin on Ukraine, to delivering proprietary internal polling data on “battleground states” Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin to Kilimnik — the latter being one of the most shocking items in the report, given that those three states tipped the Electoral College in Trump's favor. Again, there are more than 100 documented episodes of campaign officials (mob-style “buffers”) and Russian operatives participating in secret discussions, during which the Trumpers and Russians remained vague and opaque enough for plausible deniability. Many of the most recognizable Trump-affiliated participants serially lied about the meetings, in some cases to the FBI and other cases on federal disclosure forms."
