By Joe diGenova

Even after Special Counsel Robert Mueller definitively debunked the conspiracy theory that the Trump Campaign colluded with Russia to steal the 2016 election, the Democrats are still managing to deceive people into believing their lies.

According to a new Fox News poll, roughly 50 percent of voters now believe in the collusion hoax, an increase of 6 percent compared to surveys conducted right before the Mueller Report was released.

How is that possible?

There’s just one explanation for this counterintuitive result: for all their whining about “fake news” and a “post-truth” society, Democrats and the media are still targeting low-information voters with the most widespread misinformation campaign in modern American political history.

Liberal politicians and journalists quickly became personally vested in the collusion story once Hillary Clinton’s team settled on the fantasy as their preferred excuse for losing an election that Democrats almost universally assumed she would win in a landslide.

At this point, they have extraordinary incentives to keep the deception going, even though an exhaustive investigation by their own champion, Robert Mueller, found no way to substantiate it.

Democrat politicians need to keep the shadow of scandal hanging over the Trump administration. Rachel Maddow and other liberal commentators spent years lying to their viewers about secret evidence of collusion. They can’t very well change their tune now. They’re in too deep.

As they’ve learned, the replacement “obstruction of justice” narrative simply doesn’t cut it. The Mueller Report’s bizarre, laundry list approach of detailing every instance in which the President might have obstructed while declining to state that he actually did so was a clear effort to give congressional Democrats ammunition.

But even with that ammo, they still need the collusion lie, because without it the Mueller Report’s entire digression on “obstruction” reveals nothing more than a president who was justifiably angry about a lawless investigation into a crime that never happened.

So, they stumbled onto the perfect solution: just conflate the two narratives in their messaging until low- and no-information voters think they’re two sides of the same coin.

Collusion? Obstruction? What’s the difference?

To that end, the Russisgaters spin half-truths and outright falsehoods to imply they’re still talking about collusion — even months after the Mueller Report concluded that the special counsel’s two-year investigation “did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government” and that, in fact, Trump campaign staffers rejected offers of such assistance on multiple occasions.

The Russiagaters responded to Mueller’s findings by going into full denial mode. Democrats quickly took to the airwaves to insist that Mueller’s report said anything but what it actually concluded: that there was no collusion.

Russiagate’s most fervent advocate, Democratic Representative Adam Schiff, simply lied, saying, “Undoubtedly there is collusion.”

Perhaps unaware of Schiff’s declaration, one of Russiagate’s greatest cable news cheerleaders, Obama-era Solicitor General Neal Katyal, tried to confuse viewers by changing the terminology. He claimed, incredibly, that “only Trump” uses the term “collusion.”

The same shameless deception is still going on.

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler, who was famously overheard on a train promising his donors that he would go “all-in” on Russiagate after the 2018 midterm elections, held a sham hearing on the topic earlier this month featuring convicted Watergate-fixer, liberal activist, and Russiagater John Dean.

Most of the media attention went to Dean’s rambling, irrelevant nonsense about how President Trump is acting like his old boss Richard Nixon, an attack Dean also made against George W. Bush.

The more outrageous testimony, though, actually came from former U.S. Attorney Barbara McQuade, who is one of MSNBC’s favorite Russiagate commentators.

Before Mueller’s report, McQuade told her followers that Rachel Maddow’s conspiracy mongering was itself proof of collusion. At the hearing, she refused to back down, pointing to “contacts” between Russians and the Trump Campaign — the ones Mueller included in his report as examples of how the Trump campaign refused to collude — as evidence that there was, in fact, collusion.

The implications of this misinformation campaign extend far beyond the 2020 elections. Thanks to the blatant dishonesty of Democrats and their allies in the mainstream media, the American people are materially less informed about the world around them, and that makes them even more vulnerable to further manipulation from the Democrats with the help of their scribes and megaphones in the mainstream media.

Yet, it’s the discerning masses to whom Donald Trump counter-messages daily, and he will continue to do so to overcome the lies of the left and achieve success on Election Day 2020.

We were told that Robert Mueller would have the final word on whether collusion took place, but now Democrats are ignoring his verdict because it wasn’t the one they wanted and expected. The American people shouldn’t tolerate such blatant and deliberate deception.

Joseph diGenova was US Attorney for the District of Columbia and an Independent Counsel. His is founding partner of diGenova & Toensing, LLP.