What did the Democrats know and when did they know it?

For the last two and half years, the vicious Trump haters in the Democratic Party and the media have been bending the truth and outright lying to try and hang the Watergate hat on my father.

The natural takeaway from the 448 pages of Robert Mueller’s report is that the analogy fits them a lot better.

There was no collusion — none, not by anyone associated with the Trump Campaign. And, according to the report, Special Counsel Mueller appeared to know this as far back as 2017.

And yet, for another two years Democrats such as House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff continued to claim, bald-faced, that they had evidence of collusion.

So I’ll ask the question again: what did they know and when did they know it?

Every indication is that anyone who was in the know knew better. Even before the Mueller probe began, the Democrats’ own intelligence experts were telling them there was no collusion. That should have given them a pretty good indication that if their real concern was Russian election interference, then digging into my father, his family, and the Americans who helped us pull off the greatest electoral upset in modern history was just a huge waste of time.

If you still have any lingering questions about the Russiagaters’ motives, they should all be answered in full by the left’s reaction to the Mueller report. The first volume of the report — you know, the one that conclusively shows there was absolutely no collusion — was met with universal disappointment from Democrats.

If America’s vulnerability to Russian hacking were really the Democrats’ concern, wouldn’t they be thrilled to have an independent investigator confirm what my father has been saying all along, that Russian intelligence had not compromised one of America’s great political parties and co-opted the highest office in the land?

Yet there was nary a sigh of relief from the left, much less jubilation.

If understanding how Russia projects political influence in America were the Democrats’ real focus, wouldn’t they be just as concerned about how the Obama administration failed to stop Russian intelligence agencies from doing so? Ample evidence points to a complete systemic failure, both before and after Russia’s plan became clear.

Yet there was not a single call from Democrats to investigate those failures, even as Mueller’s own report draws renewed attention to them.

The mask slipped even further in the media wing of the Democratic Party, where some accused Mueller of not doing “his job.”

“The job,” as quickly becomes clear when reading these articles, was to nail my father for the crime of winning a presidential election that liberals thought they were entitled to. “The job” was to punish me and my family — regardless of what we conclusively did not do with regard to Russia.

“The job,” in short, was to make a display of raw, naked power; to use scraps of inaccurate or misunderstood information as the basis for a two year independent investigation with no obvious purpose other than to undermine my father’s presidency.

Even though Mueller’s investigation debunked the liberal conspiracy theories about “collusion” and “obstruction,” it did accomplish a large part of what the Democrats were hoping for. The attempted coup served as a constant distraction from the President’s policy agenda for nearly two years, cast a shadow over the 2018 midterm elections that helped Democrats take control of the House of Representatives and double-down on their obstructionist political strategy, and even took a few Republican scalps along the way

The overarching shame of Russiagate is that, egged on by a wildly irresponsible media, some people were actually hoping to find out that their President was a Russian agent. The second shame, nearly as important, is that Democrats were able to exploit those people’s delusions to justify a two year, taxpayer-funded opposition research team.

Just take hyper-liberal former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s word for it. As he saw it, Mueller did “his job” very well: he assembled the dirt Bloomberg thinks will help him defeat my dad next year.

That’s an awfully long way from protecting America’s elections from the Russians. It would be a terrible shame if that were the Russiagaters’ real intention the whole time, especially if they knew from the start that the collusion narrative was bogus.

So the big question remaining before us is, once again, what did the Democrats know and when did they know it?

Donald Trump Jr. is the Executive Vice President at The Trump Organization.