Yes, the lawyers provided some details about how Russian operatives had reached scores of millions of Americans with divisive and misleading messages. But that was only after Facebook’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg, insisted in November that it was a “pretty crazy idea” that Russian operatives had used Facebook to influence the election. (Facebook’s latest tally of Americans who were exposed to Russia’s divisive content: 126 million.)

The opacity of the tech companies was matched by the efforts of some conservative media outlets to confuse and distract.

In the days leading up to the indictment of Mr. Manafort and his lobbying partner Rick Gates, they saw fit to question Mr. Mueller’s legitimacy. They did so while arguing that the real focus should be on Mrs. Clinton, the Democrats and a political research firm that commissioned the gathering of information on Mr. Trump’s ties to Russia, Fusion GPS.

The counternarrative was particularly pronounced in the outlets controlled by Mr. Murdoch — who has close ties to the president’s family — and his news and entertainment companies, 21st Century Fox and News Corp.

On Saturday, the Fox News host Jeanine Pirro called for the jailing of Mrs. Clinton, saying, “It’s time to shut it down, turn the tables and lock her up.”

She alleged that “the Obamas and the Clintons” had “built the Trump-Russia connection,” pointing to a report in The Washington Post that the Clinton campaign and Democratic National Committee had helped finance research by Fusion GPS, which produced a dossier describing ties between the Trump campaign and the Russian government. She did not mention a report in The New York Times that a conservative media organization, The Free Beacon, hired Fusion GPS to research Mr. Trump and other Republicans.

The most salacious findings in the dossier, based on information collected from sources inside and outside the Kremlin by a Fusion GPS contractor, the former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele, remain uncorroborated.