Conflation is now the core strategy for Donald Trump, American president, and his allies. They have sought to make The Barr Letter become The Mueller Report in the eyes of the public, because it's a 4-page summary that presents the findings—or at least some of the findings—in the most favorable light for the president. It may well be an accurate summary, but Barr also happens to be dragging his feet on sending the actual report to Congress while Trumpians crow about their crushing victory day after day.

The other part of the conflation strategy is to make The Barr Letter's best finding for Trump—that the special counsel did not find sufficient evidence to indict the president for conspiring or coordinating with the Russian government's influence campaign—synonymous with NO COLLUSION! There are acres of gray area between "enough evidence to prove an international conspiracy beyond a reasonable doubt" and "nothing happened at all and there's no evidence of anything that the public might be interested in seeing." No matter: the president and his allies are claiming the letter "completely exonerates" him, despite the fact that it quotes from the report to say explicitly that it does not exonerate him.

Attorney General William Barr has written a 4-page summary of the report, but is dragging his feet on releasing the actual report. Win McNamee Getty Images

But having correctly identified that this is a political and public relations battle, not a legal one, the Trump team has gone on offense. They are demanding his critics be blacklisted by media outlets, accusing the same outlets of peddling conspiracy theories and lies, and attempting to oust Democratic members of Congress who investigated The Russian Connection. This includes Adam Schiff, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee—whose Republican colleagues on the committee demanded Thursday, surely at the behest of the White House, that he resign.

Here was Schiff's response:

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Wow -- after all Republican members of the House Intel Committee file a letter asking @RepAdamSchiff to resign over Russiagate, Schiff ticks through the major pieces of evidence indicating collusion and says, "you might think it's OK... I don't think that's OK!" pic.twitter.com/TtyUiI0w8q — Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 28, 2019

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SCHIFF: "You might think it's OK that [Flynn] secretly conferred with a Russian ambassador about undermining US sanctions & then lied about it to the FBI. You might say that's all OK -- that's just what you have to do to win... I think it's corrupt & evidence of collusion." pic.twitter.com/CDnyNnfWO5 — Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 28, 2019

This is the meat of it. We can all accept the partially-quoted-sentence in Barr's letter, citing the Mueller report, declaring that there was insufficient evidence of direct conspiracy with the Russian government's 2016 meddling to indict. But that is a narrow consideration.

The letter makes no mention of the Trump Tower Meeting with a Kremlin-linked lawyer, the head of a Russian oligarch's real-estate firm, and a Russian-American lobbyist that was attended by the president's son, son-in-law, and campaign manager—the latter of whom, as Schiff said here, had spent decades in politics and new exactly what he was doing. An intermediary promised Donald Trump, Jr. "dirt" on Hillary Clinton, but CNN got hold of emails suggesting the lawyer, Natalya Veselnitskaya, was really focused on rolling back American sanctions against Vladimir Putin and his oligarch cronies.

Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort, who has been jailed for a litany of crimes unrelated to the campaign. Getty Images

The letter makes no mention of the Trump Tower Moscow deal, which Trump was pursuing throughout the campaign while simultaneously seeking the American presidency—a position that would allow him to, say, grant Putin and his oligarchs the sanctions relief they desperately sought. Trump lied constantly about this during the campaign, insisting he had no business in Russia.

The letter makes no mention of that same Trump campaign manager, Paul Manafort, sending campaign polling data to an associate linked to Russian intelligence services. It would be cool to know what that was about.

The letter does not disclose in any detail the scope and specifics of the Russian influence campaign, an attack on American democracy and sovereignty that it is in the public interest to know more about. That's particularly true going into 2020, when the Russians—who we know interfered in 2016 explicitly to back Donald Trump—will likely try to get involved again.

These are all things the public has a right to know. And none of them are erased from history, or have become evidence of false media reporting, because they weren't mentioned in Barr's four-page letter cranked out in under 48 hours that summarizes a report that is at least 300 pages of material compiled over two years of investigation. Andrew Napolitano of Fox News got at this Wednesday, albeit through the lens of Democrats will never shut up about this:

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"If there were no evidence of conspiracy, and no evidence of obstruction, the attorney general would have told us so," Napolitano said. "He didn't." But this is the intent of the Conflation Campaign: to erase everything based on one thing.

Barr's letter might be accurate, but the circumstances that got him installed in the job just over a month ago make it impossible to take his word alone. He got the attorney general job after he wrote a 19-page memo attacking the Mueller probe. He specifically took issue with the prospect of an obstruction-of-justice charge—the same charge Mueller declined to decide on either way, but which Barr, in his letter, took it upon himself to dismiss. His acting predecessor, Matthew Whitaker, also got the job after attacking the probe publicly. Trump subsequently admitted Whitaker got the gig over the Russia probe. Last night, in an interview with BFF Sean Hannity, Trump suggested this whole investigation would never have happened if Barr was in charge. That's not to mention Barr's role in the Iran-Contra scandal when he was last the sitting Attorney General of the United States. There is also, in general, the fact that the president said 15 false things in public every day last year.

We must see the full report, a notion that the House of Representatives backed unanimously, 420-0, across partisan lines. And we must see it as soon as possible. Redactions for national security or grand jury confidentiality reasons are one thing, but the report should not be sent to the White House so that the person under investigation can edit a report on the investigation under the guise of "Executive Privilege."

It's not complicated: the full report must be released. If, as he's loudly telling us, it fully exonerates Donald Trump, then we can all sleep easier the following night.

Jack Holmes Politics Editor Jack Holmes is the Politics Editor at Esquire, where he writes daily and edits the Politics Blog with Charles P Pierce.

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