“Dear President Putin,” wrote Donald Trump to Russian President Vladimir Putin on Dec. 19, 2007, to congratulate the former KGB officer on being named Time magazine’s man of the year. “You definitely deserve it. As you probably have heard, I am a big fan of yours.” And as the Republican-led United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence confirmed last week after a bipartisan investigation, the feeling is assuredly mutual. Putin wanted Trump elected president, not Hillary Clinton, because Putin believed Trump would serve his interests and Clinton wouldn’t. Putin, therefore, interfered with America’s election to help Trump win and ensure Clinton did not. Not only did Trump welcome that help but he solicited it, and he and his closest aides actively colluded with the Russians and their intermediaries to secure it and capitalize on it. And then, as the Senate committee found, Trump made false statements under oath about that collusion to special counsel Robert Mueller in order to hide it.

Other than that, the Senate committee, chaired first by Republican Sen. Richard Burr and currently chaired by Republican Sen. Marco Rubio, “exonerated” the president of collusion. Generally, once you hear this president deny that X is true, you can rest easy knowing that X is absolutely true. The Senate report demonstrates that all the while Trump proclaimed “no collusion,” the truth was “yes, collusion.”

For starters, the committee established that the notorious June 2016 meeting hosted at Trump Tower by Trump’s campaign manager, Paul Manafort, Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner and Donald Trump Jr. for the purpose of receiving Russian dirt on Clinton wasn’t just with any old Russians. It included Russians who had “significant connections to the Russian government, including the Russian intelligence services.” The links between one of them and the Kremlin were, the committee stated, “far more extensive and concerning than what had been publicly known.” This, of course, was the meeting set up by Trump Jr., who responded to a Russian intermediary’s promise to yield information damaging to Clinton with this inspirational, high-minded message: “If it’s what you say it is, I love it.”

Then there are the detailed findings about the close, longtime relationship between Manafort and Russian intelligence officer Konstantin Kilimnik; and between Manafort and Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, a Putin intimate who, according to the Senate, has acted as “a proxy for the Russian state and intelligence services” dating back to 2004, when Manafort met him. Manafort, convicted by a federal jury of tax and bank fraud, shared confidential Trump campaign information, including polling data and campaign strategies, with Kilimnik. Perhaps Kilimnik simply has a fascination with American political campaigns and put this information on his nightstand next to Theodore White’s classic “The Making of the President 1960,” but one may be forgiven for inferring that there are alternative explanations. The committee found evidence that Kilimnik was personally tied to Russia’s operation carried out by Russian intelligence to interfere in our presidential election. And it concluded that Manafort’s relationship with Kilimnik “represented a grave counterintelligence threat” to the United States.

Trump told the special counsel he did not recall anyone from the Trump campaign having had contact with his adviser Roger Stone, who liaised with Russian intelligence operatives about the Democratic emails the Russians had hacked and released through Wikileaks. The committee established that -- surprise! -- the denial was false. “(T)he Committee assesses that Trump did, in fact, speak with Stone about Wikileaks and with members of his Campaign about Stone’s access to Wikileaks on multiple occasions,” the committee found.

But Trump is ever ready with a most persuasive response, certain to keep his loyalists loyal for its sheer gravitas. Like everything else -- the Mueller report, Trump’s attempt to extort the Ukrainian president to obtain fabricated dirt on Joe Biden, the COVID-19 pandemic and much, much more -- the Senate committee findings were -- you guessed it! - “a hoax.” Hooked on the Kool-Aid, incapable of seeing what is in front of their noses, the president’s adherents continue to believe him.

Jeff Robbins, a former assistant United States attorney and United States delegate to the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva, was chief counsel for the minority of the United States Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. An attorney specializing in the First Amendment, he is a longtime columnist for the Boston Herald, writing on politics, national security, human rights and the Mideast.