YES, COLLUSION Mueller Missed the Crime: Trump's Campaign Coordinated With Russia
YES, COLLUSION
Mueller Missed the Crime: Trump’s Campaign Coordinated With Russia
The special counsel will testify before Congress next week. He needs to answer for historic legal and factual errors.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/robert-mueller-missed-the-crime-trumps-campaign-coordinated-with-russia
Ever since the release of the Mueller Report, countless commentators have implored everyone to just #ReadtheReport. The problem is not who is reading it—the problem is the report itself, and its many errors.
Robert Mueller made a significant legal error and erroneously cleared President Donald Trump and his campaign of wrongdoing on campaign coordination with Russia. Mueller’s errors meant that, first, he failed to conclude that the Trump campaign criminally coordinated with Russia; second, he failed to indict campaign chairman Paul Manafort and his deputy Rick Gates for felony campaign coordination (see in a concise timeline below); third, the 10 acts of felony obstruction in Volume II fell flat among the general public because it lacked compelling context of these underlying crimes between the campaign and Russia. On top of these errors, the former special counsel said he deliberately wrote the report to be unclear because it would be unfair to make clear criminal accusations against a president.
The bottom line is that the Mueller Report is a failure not because of Congress or because of public apathy, but because it failed to get the law, the facts, or even the basics of writing right. When Mueller testifies before Congress on July 17, he should be pressed on all of this.
The DOJ’s initial appointment explicitly tasked Mueller with investigating campaign “coordination,” and it is not too much to ask that he get the law of “coordination” right. The report stated that “‘coordination’ does not have a settled definition in federal criminal law. We understood coordination to require an agreement—tacit or express.”
However, Congress purposely sought to prevent such narrow interpretations: in 2002, it passed a statute directing that campaign finance regulations “shall not require agreement or formal collaboration to establish coordination.” The Federal Election Commission established the regulations for the implementation of the statute: “Coordinated means made in cooperation, consultation or concert with, or at the request or suggestion of, a candidate,” with no need to show any kind of agreement.
Outside spending for coordinated communications is an in-kind contribution, and foreign contributions are completely prohibited. And Congress made the criminal penalties unmistakably clear: “Any person who knowingly and willfully commits a violation of any provision of this Act” commits a crime. The Supreme Court upheld these limits in McConnell v. FEC with crucial observations about the functional role of suggestions, rather than agreements: “[E]xpenditures made after a wink or nod often will be as useful to the candidate as cash.” This timeline is full of suggestions far more explicit than winks and nods.
As the Supreme Court acknowledged, this is not about bribery and quid pro quo; it’s about outsourcing a consistent campaign messaging and expenses to known allies. It seems Mueller did not hire any legal experts with experience in campaign finance regulation. Given that this investigation was about campaign crimes, this appears to a revealing oversight with serious consequences.
In addition to ignoring these rules, Mueller also made a major organizational error: Volume I separates the events of Russian hacking from the actions of the Trump campaign. The entire point of a “conspiracy and coordination” investigation was the relationship between the two. The ongoing pattern of signal or invitation with response, of cause-and-effect, gets utterly lost in the hundreds of pages of details, the siloing of each character, and especially in the omissions and the errors.
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= new reply since forum marked as read
Including the fact that the Trump Campaign Chairman gave detailed polling data to a Russian intelligence agent, whom he also discussed strategies for winning swing states.
The Trump Administration sought to undo U.S. sanctions on Russia on DAY ONE of their administration!
There's your
QUID PRO QUO
... at least until we learn more from Mueller directly - a la congressional investigation.
I know that Daily Beast has been dogging this story for at least 3 years, and they've done a great job. However they can't jump the gun and run "news stories" when they are actually "opinions."
Thank you Daily Beast, I will watch the Mueller testimony next week and then I'll re-read this with great interest.
