Politico is doing what some of us continue to toil over, the minutiae (Thanks Pete) of the redacted Mueller report. A Trump Crimea resort might be worth something. And yet there certainly a lot of deleted emails. “Inadvertently” Individual-1 may not exhibit corrupt intent (even on Twitter).
Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort all escaped prosecution for their role in the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting with a Russian lawyer promising dirt about Hillary Clinton. Mueller’s report said the office looked into whether the senior campaign leaders should face charges for violating laws banning foreign campaign contributions. But ultimately they opted against pushing for indictments out of concern a conviction wasn’t a sure thing. The special counsel acknowledged lacking evidence to prove any of the three men acted with general knowledge of the crime they’d be committing and said that the promised opposition research wouldn’t necessarily qualify as an illegal donation since it was unclear the information was “a thing of value.”
On the hacking front, Mueller’s team also considered filing charges against an unnamed defendant with trafficking in stolen property, a reveal buried in a footnote. Prosecutors were contemplating bringing the additional charges — they redacted any information about who was being scrutinized — under the Depression-era National Stolen Property Act. Ultimately, however, the special counsel’s office found that hacked emails in electronic form wouldn’t qualify under the law’s almost century-old definition of “goods, wares or merchandise.”
[...]
The special counsel didn’t mince words in noting his work was stymied in part by missing messages and other communications.
Former Trump campaign manager Steve Bannon and his associate Erik Prince, for example, gave conflicting accounts of their discussions about Prince’s post-election trip to the Seychelles, where Prince met with a high-level associate of the Kremlin. Both claimed they inadvertently lost all records of their communication.
www.politico.com/...
Darn those Third-Rate Burglaries like Watergate.