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Sunday, April 21, 2019

Conspiracy as Defined in Federal Law

Page 10 of the Mueller report largely consists of a few points of semantics.
  1. Collusion is not a specific offense or theory of liability found in the United States Code.
  2. For that reason, Robert Mueller focused on questions of criminal liability as defined under federal law governing conspiracy.
  3. In that vein, the focus was further narrowed to set aside whether or not members of the Trump campaign coordinated with Russian election interference efforts, since, like the much bandied-about term collusion, coordination has no settle definition in federal criminal law.
A couple of pages later we come to one of the Report's more redacted sections, the Executive Summary to Volume 1.  In layperson-ese, Volume 1 is the summation of the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 Presidential election.  It provides copious evidence that such interference, which began as early as 2014, was planned and voluminous.

So, while the Mueller investigation does not deal with, indeed shows no interest in, collusion, it certainly does not exonerate Mr. Trump or the Trump Administration.  For instance, on page 13, it's noted that the Trump Campaign showed an interest in WikiLeaks' releases of documents, and welcomed their potential to damage candidate Clinton.

Doesn't sound like any synonym for exoneration to me ...

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