Collusion. Conspiracy. Complicity. Whatever it’s called, the cooperation between Donald Trump’s campaign and foreign operatives has always been at the center of the investigation led by special counsel Robert Mueller, and according to Bloomberg, it’s still there.
No matter how many times Donald Trump has made “no collusion” his theme song, and no matter how hard he’s tried to shelter beneath the hastily generated report provided by Devin Nunes, the truth is that Trump’s campaign was engaged in multiple instances of collusion. If it wasn’t Donald Trump Jr in Trump Tower, it was George Papadopoulos in London. Or it was Roger Stone dealing with WikiLeaks. Or it was Erik Prince and a brace of Republican money men visiting with oligarchs in the Seychelles.
That there was collusion between Trump’s campaign and Russia was the most obvious, most evident item on the menu of things to be investigated from the outset. That’s exactly why Trump has been so careful to deny it so often. Whether or not Mueller will decide to bring charges of obstruction against Donald Trump remains an open question. But collusion … seems like a sure bet.
Mueller and his team of prosecutors and investigators have an eye toward producing conclusions -- and possible indictments -- related to collusion by fall, said the person, who asked not to be identified.
On a technical basis, it might be hard to find against Trump on obstruction in the case of firing James Comey, just because the constitutional writ of the executive is broad enough that proving that obstruction would first require proving a lot of intermediate steps to make it clear that Comey’s firing was outside that authority. The easier case on the obstruction side is related to the memo that Trump penned in an effort to cover up the purpose of the Trump Tower meeting, along with any participation Trump may have had in the almost limitless instances of members of his staff “forgetting” about some key meeting or exchange with Russian operatives.
But collusion is a given. At least thirteen people on Trump’s team had contact with Russian agents, oligarchs, and representatives during the course of the campaign. And those same people lied about either the nature or the extent of those meetings. That includes Papadopoulos and Carter Page and Paul Manafort and Rick Gates and Michael Flynn and Jefferson Sessions and Jared Kushner and that’s just for starters.
All of which seems to point at the idea that details of the Trump campaign’s collusion during the 2016 election, will be headline news … right before the 2018 elections.
There are at least three separate occasions on which Trump campaign staffers and advisers have admitted being offered information by Russia. That’s not including an unknown number of contacts with WikiLeaks. That’s not including evidence that Trump’s IT team at Cambridge Analytica was slipped information on DNC emails even before they published by Julian Assange. That’s not including whatever-the-hell Prince and company were doing in the Indian Ocean.
It’s not including the $30 million forwarded to Donald Trump by the NRA, of which the majority, if not all, may have been funding directly provided by Russia.
What’s most striking about the known instances in which Trump’s team had contact with the Russians is the utter joy with which they greeted the opportunity. The excitement they showed about the possibility of getting some inside dirt from a foreign power. The eagerness with which they entered into this conspiracy again and again. The only documented case of Trump’s team turning down anything came, improbably enough, from Roger Stone, who simply thought a Russian operative was asking too much — especially when they already had other pipelines operating for free.
None of it touches on the years of Trump’s association with Russian crime figures and selling real estate at far above market value in an ongoing money-laundering scheme. And none of this touches on the other instances of Trump attempting to capitalize on both his candidacy and his election, instances that have extended from building permits in Argentina, to a last-minute billion dollar plus bail-out of Jared Kushner from the blockaded country of Qatar.
But that’s not to say that all of those things might not also be the subject of reports and indictments. Somewhere right around … October 28 would be good.
