Cartoon by Jeff Stahler

Trump spent the weekend tweeting about Russia. He lied, a lot.

Vox: Even by his standards, President Trump has been on a Twitter rampage since special counsel Robert Mueller started indicting Russians for election interference last Friday. Trump has sent 16 tweets on the topic in the three days following the indictment, amounting to roughly two-thirds of all of the tweets he sent in that time period.

The Russia tweets had one big thing in common: They were full of lies.

Friday’s indictments focused on Russian social media activity — creating pro-Trump Facebook groups and anti-Hillary Twitter bots — rather than hacks targeting the Clinton campaign or US election infrastructure. Trump’s tweets describe this as vindication; as proof that “there is no collusion” between his campaign and Russia and that the whole scandal was ginned up by Democrats and “the fake news media.”

This is not true — the absence of indictments related to collusion on Friday does not mean that such indictments won’t be coming in the future. But in order to make it sound true, Trump’s tweets ended up twisting the facts in ways that range from factually dubious (the notion that allegations of Trump-Russia collusion are a “hoax”) to the downright offensive (claiming the FBI would have caught the Parkland, Florida, shooter if it hadn’t been so busy investigating his ties to Russia).

Sometimes, though, he strayed into the territory of outright, easily debunkable lies. What follows are the three clearest examples.

The main thrust of Trump’s tweets was, for whatever reason, the idea that election hacking didn’t affect the outcome of the 2016 election. Trump attributes this claim to the FBI indictments, citing a New York Post article arguing that they prove “[Clinton] lost the old-fashioned way, by being a terrible candidate. Case closed.”

It would indeed be striking if Mueller weighed in on this question; you don’t typically see polling analysis in criminal indictments. Yet it’s not there. Nowhere does the indictment say that Russian social media efforts were irrelevant to the election. If anything, it seems to imply the opposite — listing off a series of large-scale efforts by Russia’s Internet Research Agency (the name its hackers used) to shape the outcome of the election:

Defendant ORGANIZATION had a strategic goal to sow discord in the U.S. political system, including the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Defendants posted derogatory information about a number of candidates, and by early to mid-2016, Defendants’ operations included supporting the presidential campaign of then-candidate Donald J. Trump (“Trump Campaign”) and disparaging Hillary Clinton.

Defendants made various expenditures to carry out those activities, including buying political advertisements on social media in the names of U.S. persons and entities. Defendants also staged political rallies inside the United States, and while posing as U.S. grassroots entities and U.S. persons, and without revealing their Russian identities and ORGANIZATION affiliation, solicited and compensated real U.S. persons to promote or disparage candidates. Some Defendants, posing as U.S. persons and without revealing their Russian association, communicated with unwitting individuals associated with the Trump Campaign and with other political activists to seek to coordinate political activities.

Now, the report doesn’t outright say that these activities were decisive in helping Trump win. But it also doesn’t say that they had no impact on the election. It’s agnostic on the question, as is appropriate in a federal indictment.

Trump’s assertion that Russian social media campaigns didn’t sway the election may be true; the data on that question is really hard to parse. But it’s an outright lie to say, as Trump did, that Friday’s indictments have settled the question. Trump is misstating the Mueller team’s conclusions to make him seem like a more legitimate president >>>