Yes, Trump definitely colluded.

Love Trump or hate him, you shouldn’t concede this point.

  1. Collusion between Trump and Russia is clear from public evidence. To collude is a colloquial, non-legal term that we all understand to mean working secretly together towards a shared end goal. The public evidence of collusion is clear and obvious: Russia worked to influence the outcome of the US election in Trumps favor, even hacking into Clinton campaign emails on the day Trump publicly requested, and timing the release of Clinton’s data to override news cycles that were damaging to Trump. The Trump campaign developed campaigns based on secret knowledge that more wikileaks were coming (Mueller report page 54). Campaign leadership met repeatedly with Russian officials, including those they knew were Russian spies (Mueller report page 134) in response to explicit illegal offers to help elect Trump. The Trump campaign not only kept those meetings secret, but lied about them in sworn testimonies under oath. Trump’s lead campaign manager provided Russian agents with troves of US polling data. Roger Stone communicated with Guccifer 2.0, representing the Russian military cyber unit GRU, to receive and discuss “the turnout model for the democrats entire presidential campaign”(Mueller report page 44). These are easily documented, publicly-known facts. Mueller never says that Trump did not collude with the Russians and in fact, explicitly concludes that the Trump campaign welcomed Russia’s help and tried to exploit it. Mueller never rules out the possibility that a formal agreement took shape at any of the secret meetings held between the campaign and various Russian operatives. These organizations shared the same end-goal, met repeatedly in secret, shared secret data, aligned the timing of their most important strategic efforts, and intentionally lied about their relationship. They colluded.
  2. Mueller does not even rule out treasonous criminal conspiracy. Mueller’s investigation explicitly looked for criminal conspiracy — an explicit quid pro quo agreement to violate or obstruct the law — which is harder to find or prove. A criminal conspiracy to alter the outcome of America’s singular national election in favor of a foreign adversary is treason. Mueller defined coordination as having some form of working agreement (“We understood coordination to require an agreement- tacit or express”) between the Trump campaign and the Russian government. Mueller never finds evidence of this agreement, but given the opportunity to state definitively that it did not exist, or to exonerate the President of even this treasonous crime, he demurred: “if we had confidence that the President clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said that.” The fact that Mueller did not find explicit evidence of a coordination agreement or charge the President with criminal conspiracy in no way invalidates the abundance of evidence that Trump colluded with Russia.
  3. Partisan politicians shaped the investigation’s outcome. The fact that Mueller was not able to document sufficient evidence to charge a criminal conspiracy must be understood in the context of the balance of power and its abuse: 1) The President explicitly dangled pardons and publicly threatened witnesses. 2) Trump officials most closely linked to Russian agents (Paul Manafort, Roger Stone) successfully refused cooperation with the investigation and the President successfully avoided testifying under oath. 3) Several campaign operatives provided information that was later demonstrated to be false or incomplete, invoked the Fifth, and “deleted relevant communications” (Mueller report page 10) that would have served as evidence. 4) The President pressured and later fired career public servants who were responsible for considering the President’s crimes, including the Director and Deputy Directors of the FBI, and 5) the President appointed himself a loyalist and partisan Attorney General, a man who petitioned for the position by writing an unsolicited 20-page memo explicitly articulating his loyalty, who later went on to lie about the Mueller Report’s conclusion to the public — saying that it exonerated the President when it explicitly did not. This is like Watergate, but with successfully deleted tapes and an effective public relations campaign.
  4. Trump obstructed justice to reduce the pool of available evidence. Mueller acknowledges this: “Our investigation found multiple acts by the President that were capable of exerting undue influence over law enforcement investigations, including the Russian-interference and obstruction investigations.” Trump met all the elements of an obstruction offense under federal law and attempted to obstruct justice repeatedly, including pressuring the Attorney General, attempting to remove the Special Counsel, attempting to curtail the Special Counsel’s investigation, offering a pardon to Paul Manafort, and attempting to falsify the record by instructing the White House counsel to lie. It was for procedural reasons only that the Special counsel did not charge Trump, leaving the responsibility to prosecute to a partisan Attorney General, the responsibility to impeach to a hamstrung Congress. Trump has not been indicted for obstruction of justice only because of his power, not his innocence.

--

--

electric power, business, environmental economics, climate policy

Get the Medium app

A button that says 'Download on the App Store', and if clicked it will lead you to the iOS App store
A button that says 'Get it on, Google Play', and if clicked it will lead you to the Google Play store