Attempting to conspire without finishing the act is a crime.

[shockey80]

Title 18 section 903. Gotta love google. I need Muellers report to answer so many questions on conspiracy. Don't you?

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

1. True. You can be charged with conspiracy if you took any affirmative steps

in furtherance of the conspiracy even if the underlying crime is never committed. If you and a couple of other people just talk about robbing a bank, that's not a crime. But if, after talking about it, you go out and buy a ski mask and a shotgun while your co-conspirators case the bank, that is a crime - even if after that you all get the flu and are too sick to do the actual robbery.

The problem with proving conspiracies, though, is that sometimes it's hard to establish what was actually planned and who agreed to it.

[shockey80]

5. Handing over polling data to a Russian would seem to fit the description of this law.

I cannot think of any other reason why the campaign manager of Trumps campaign would hand over polling data to a Russian. Can you?

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

7. The question is whether handing over the polling data was itself a crime.

It's not espionage because the data wasn't a national defense secret belonging to the government. It does not seem to have even been obtained illegally by Manafort, and some of it was actually public, so there's no crime there; giving it to the Kilimnik therefore wouldn't be the crime of selling stolen property (it does not appear that Kilimnik actually paid for the data either). More about this here: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/08/us/politics/manafort-trump-campaign-data-kilimnik.html

It's clearly collusion, but collusion isn't the crime of conspiracy unless an underlying crime was contemplated or committed. Maybe Mueller couldn't find a federal criminal statute that fit these facts.

[shockey80]

8. Maybe is the key word.

A lot of questions have to be answered.

[dalton99a]

2. It is a serious crime

Prosecutors use the conspiracy doctrine to punish two or more people who merely agree to commit a criminal act. They don’t even have to actually perform the act; they just need to have agreed to do so. The idea behind conspiracy liability is that when two people agree to commit a crime, it’s much worse for society than when a lone actor does. A Yale Law Journal article I wrote on this subject was inspired by a riddle: Why is it that if you sell a joint, you get a six-month sentence, and if your friend sells a joint, he gets a six-month sentence, but if you both agree to sell a single joint, you get a five-year minimum sentence? The outcomes seem really odd because it looks as if the same crime is getting different punishments.

The answer is that it isn’t the same crime, and hasn’t been thought of that way in the Anglo-American legal tradition for over 500 years. Rather, conspiracy has always been a separate offense, punished independently without calibration to the underlying crime. So conspiracy to sell a joint can be punished the same way as conspiracy to sell a kilo of marijuana.

Why would the law be written that way? The answer has to do with the harm to society when individuals agree with one another to commit criminal acts. These acts are seen as possessing a higher level of moral culpability and are also more dangerous. Two people can often do more harm than one. And those criminal economies of scale are sometimes supplemented by psychological dangers. People tend to take more risks in groups than alone. For these reasons, the law has always treated conspiracy harshly. Indeed, for much of American history, conspiring to commit an immoral but not illegal act was itself punishable as conspiracy.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/23/opinion/politics/conspiracy-theory-trump-cohen.html

[SWBTATTReg]

4. Thanks for posting. Very informative. NT

[Grasswire2]

3. that is true

We've heard that from the legal beagles on teevee.

So isn't it enough to indict?

[uponit7771]

6. K&R, I'm seeing MAGA Cultist bring up stuff like this. People are waiting on Muellers reports