Paul Callan is a CNN legal analyst, former New York homicide prosecutor and current counsel at the New York law firm of Edelman & Edelman PC, focusing on wrongful conviction and civil rights cases. Follow him on Twitter @paulcallan. The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own.

(CNN) As both a prosecutor and defense attorney, I have written and reviewed many indictments. Though often brimming with legalese, they are designed by prosecutors to tell a compelling and detailed crime story. The indictment announced Friday in the Mueller investigation told just such a story -- of Russian attempts to sabotage the American presidential election.

If the allegations of the indictment prove true, it seems probable that the Russians were successful in their multimillion-dollar effort to influence the election of Donald Trump as president of the United States. Of course the answer to this complex question will never be definitively known. Polling cannot tell us whether voters might have chosen differently if the Russian influence operation hadn't happened.

What is known, however, is that the election was close and voter shifts in just a few significant states could have changed the Electoral College vote count in a presidential election in which Hillary Clinton won the popular vote.

The President, of course, has consistently been assuring the American public that the investigation led by Special Counsel Robert Mueller is all about a "hoax" and that it's a "witch hunt" largely supported by the forces of "Crooked Hillary Clinton" and the "fake news," which can roughly be defined as any news organization that offers any coverage that reflects badly on Donald Trump.

Mueller quietly and effectively disposed of those claims in his detailed explanation of how the Russian government literally sought to hack and hijack America's most important election by creating truly fake social media posts and protests designed to support the candidacy of Donald Trump (and in the primaries, Bernie Sanders) while sabotaging the candidacy of Hillary Clinton. The indictments revealed Russia's use of an assortment of dirty tricks in heavily funded efforts to deceive the American public.

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