While Donald Trump and his acolytes do their victory dance over William Barr’s tilted assessment of the Mueller Report, one outstanding question that remains: if Trump and his team did no wrong, why did they lie ?

Why did Trump insist that he had no business dealings in Russia when, in fact, he was negotiating a deal for a Trump Tower in Moscow?

Then, of course, there’s the issue of the clandestine meeting in New York’s Trump Tower.

According to Barr, the Trump campaign rebuffed attempts by the Russians to collude in the election, yet Trump Junior and Eric Kushner and others met with Russian officials in Trump Tower.

That hardly sounds like rebuffing collusion!

We discovered that the initial stated reason for that meeting, supposedly to discuss adoption policies, was bogus, but we also learned that Trump himself crafted a letter offering a phony explanation of a meeting that he initially insisted that he knew nothing about.

As the English poet Walter Scott wrote: “O, what a tangled web we weave when first we practise to deceive!”

The Trump team’s web of deception seemed to grow as not only the Mueller probe continued, but as Congressional hearings explored alleged campaign irregularities.

The testimony of key Trump campaign personnel seemed to raise more questions than answers.

Why did campaign chair Paul Manafort lie about meetings with Russian officials? Why did Michael Flynn lie about his meetings with Putin allies?

Why did Trump’s good friend, Roger Stone, lie about his conversation with Julian Assange of Wikileaks fame, about the release of hacked emails from the Democrats and Hillary Clinton?

If there was no collusion, as William Barr would have us believe, I suppose we are to assume that it was just coincidence that days after that Stone-Assange conversation is alleged to have occurred, Trump made his now famous plea to the Russians to hack into Clinton’s emails and miraculously, those emails were exposed!

There may be a legitimate explanation for these questions, but all we have at this point is a four-page summary crafted by Barr that’s woefully lacking any detail.

My high school Math teacher used to tell us that you can’t just write down the answer to an algebra problem, you have to show your work to get full marks.

That’s what’s lacking here; in the absence of the details of Mueller’s investigation, Americans are left to simply take Barr at his word and that raises more concerns.

In his first go-round in the Justice Department, Barr was instrumental in granting pardons to members of the Reagan administration who were about to stand trial for their role in the sleazy Iran-Contra controversy.

Add to that, the letter that Barr crafted a while ago, in which he essentially opposed the fact that Mueller’s team would actually consider indicting Trump, and there are legitimate concerns about whether Barr puts partisan politics ahead of the pursuit of justice.

The best way for Barr to alleviate those concerns is to release the Mueller Report in its entirety.

Anything short of that will only fan the flames of a political cover-up.

Bill Kelly is the host of the Bill Kelly Show on Global News Radio 900 CHML.

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