A few years ago, Atlanta schoolteachers Shani Robinson and Angela Williamson were charged, tried, and convicted on several charges, including conspiracy and racketeering, for supposedly cheating on her students’ standardized tests. There was very little direct evidence against Robinson or Williamson, though several other teachers around the city had allegedly engaged in “cheating parties” to raise test scores. Teachers who were caught red-handed copped pleas. Robinson and Williamson did not confess to a crime they didn't commit, and were given long sentences, which the George Supreme Court upheld. The conspiracy was quite a strange one, as these were not real high-stakes tests — at least in Robinson’s case, they didn’t count in her grade. And their teaching evaluations were good. There was no reason to cheat and there was no evidence that they received any renumeration for doing so. The charges against the lot of teachers was that they wanted bonuses and promotions for turning in better test scores.
It’s easy to be convicted of conspiracy if you’re African-American and your crime is helping your community by being a good teacher when they expect you to fail.
In evaluating whether evidence about collective action of multiple individuals constituted a crime, we applied the framework of conspiracy law, not the concept of “collusion.” In so doing, the Office recognized that the word “collud[e]” was used in communications with the Acting Attorney General confirming certain aspects of the investigation’s scope and that the term has frequently been invoked in public reporting about the investigation. But collusion is not a specific offense or theory of liability found in the United States Code, nor is it a term of art in federal criminal law. For those reasons, the Office’s focus in analyzing questions ofjoint criminal liability was on conspiracy as defined in federal law. In connection with that analysis, we addressed the factual question whether members of the Trump Campaign “coordinat[ed]”——-a term that appears in the appointment order—with Russian election interference activities. Like collusion, “coordination” does not have a settled definition in federal criminal law. We understood coordination to require an agreement—tacit or express—between the Trump Campaign and the Russian government on election interference. That requires more than the two parties taking actions that were informed by or responsive to the other’s actions or interests. We applied the term coordination in that sense when stating in the report that the investigation did not establish that the Trump Campaign coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.
That, of course, is from the Introduction to the Mueller Report. They set a high bar for the crime of conspiracy, which is the closest crime to “collusion”, and make a questionable call that it was not quite crossed, even though an obvious examination of the facts shows that “collusion” happened. They won’t even ask for an indictment (which usually requires a mere “preponderance” — more than 50% — “of evidence”) without a strong showing of actions such as the passing of money.
I guess it’s OK if you’re a Republican trying to steal an election.