The Trump crowd has long claimed that there was "no collusion, " repeatedly in many venues. Somehow the MSM picked up on this screed, and so it is out there that indeed that the Mueller Report declared that there was "no collusion," a phrase that somehow Trump himself long put out there for his followers long before the Mueller Report came out.
But, in fact up front in the Mueller Report they made it clear that they were not investigating "collusion." They only briefly discussed the term, but the bottom line was that there exists no legal definition of this term. The final point in the report was that "collusion" is not even a "term of art" in the legal system Therefore, they simply ignored thereafter in the inquiry.
Bottom line is that there is massive evidence for collusion, that legally undefined form of half-baked cooperation that never got the level of coordination and conspiracy. They were massively colluding, but never ccould get it together to engage in an organized mutually benefiicial operation to influence the election. They were too incompetent to put it together, although they made great efforts to do so, The obvious example was the meeting in Trump Tower in June 2016. The Russsians wanted certain Putin-related cronies exempted from the Magnitsy law, while the Trump people wanted more dirt on HRC than the Russians were willing to give then, although soon after they delivered the goods.
Barkley Rosser
I don't think we can ever know if the Trump campaign was "too stupid" to conspire or canny enough to avoid stepping over the line while reaping as much of the benefit of "collusion" as they could -- the old mobster practice of speaking in code. I suspect it was the latter, given Trump's long practice of shady cons that he wriggled out of taking responsibility for. Obstruction of justice works best if you initiate it before you do the "crime."
ReplyDeleteI should note that there is more discussion of the concept of collusion in the Mueller Report, especially on p. 180. It is noted there that theiir initial directive involved them pursuing the question of collusion, which they then did not do for reasons listed in my post. However, they note scattered anti-trust decisions that reference it and three legal dictionaries (2 from 1800s) that say collusion involves an "agreement" to break the law or defraud.
ReplyDeleteHowever, in the end at the bottom line the report says that the two terms are "largely synonymous," which implies they are not completely so. What is cleear is that any conspiracy is collusion, but the door remains open due to the vagueness of the term that there may be collusion without conspiracy.
I have checked this out further, and while there are a few scattered commentators saying the terms are fully synonymous, the vast majority seem to agree with my position that collusion is the broader term, and that while there must be collusion to have conspiracy, one may well be able to have collusion without conspiracy, which is indeed well and clearly defined in the law.