On Friday, Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee released a heavily-redacted report summarizing the findings of their investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. With respect to Donald Trump, their party's leader who unexpectedly triumphed in the aforementioned election, their findings can be summarized as follows: His associates made spectacularly poor decisions that included, on occasion, trying to collude with various Russians, and were prevented from doing so by some combination of incompetence, impotence, and blind luck.

From the report:

Trump officials didn't steal Hillary Clinton's emails—but they couldn't stop talking privately with those who did. Carter Page wasn't a shadow emissary to the Kremlin—but he still won't say exactly what he did there. Noted plea-copper George Papadopoulos tried to link the campaign to his contacts in Russia—but he didn't have enough pull, it turns out, to be taken seriously. Jeff Sessions and Donald Jr. relished their opportunities to chat with Russian officials with whom they happened to cross paths—but, the authors conclude, the president's son and his future attorney general were just being polite. "We found no evidence of collusion, and so we found perhaps some bad judgment, inappropriate meetings," explained GOP congressman Mike Conaway, who headed the House's probe.

The most ambitious bit of spin accompanies the account of the infamous "If it's what you say I love it" meeting at Trump Tower, to which an enthusiastic Donald Jr. summoned Paul Manafort and Jared Kushner after being offered dirt on Hillary Clinton—which, according to the meeting's broker, was part of the Russian government's attempts to boost Donald Trump's presidential bid. This exchange, the authors concede in a brief moment of honesty, "indicates that Trump Jr. was open to discussing derogatory information from Russian government sources that could be useful to candidate Trump."

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