The Russian collusion hoax looks dead after Mueller shows his hand

Phillip Ewing:
Political and legal danger for President Trump may be sharpening by the day, but the case that his campaign might have conspired with the Russian attack on the 2016 election is still unproven despite two years of investigations, court filings and even numerous convictions and guilty pleas.

Trump has been implicated in ordering a scheme to silence two women ahead of Election Day in 2016 about the alleged sexual relationships they had with him years before.

That is a serious matter, or it might have been in other times, but this scheme is decidedly not a global conspiracy with a foreign power to steal the election.

More broadly, the president and his supporters say, the payments to the women in 2016 are penny ante stuff: Breaking campaign finance law, if that did take place, isn't like committing murder, said one lawyer for the president.

The "biased" Justice Department is just grasping at straws to use something against Trump because it hasn't been able to locate a "smocking gun," as Trump wrote this week, that would tie his campaign in with Russia's active measures in 2016.
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There's an important kernel of truth in that argument — not only is there no smoking gun, but the Russia case also appears to have been weakening, not strengthening, while America's eyes have been on the payments.

Item: Cohen ostensibly played a key role in the version of events told by the infamous, partly unverified Russia dossier. He denied that strongly to Congress. He also has admitted lying to Congress and submitted an important new version of other events.

But that new story didn't include a trip to Prague, as described in the dossier. Nor did Cohen discuss that in his interview on Friday on ABC News. Could the trip, or a trip, still be substantiated? Yes, maybe — but if it happened, would a man go to prison for three years without anyone having mentioned it?
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... the crimes for which the feds want Manafort to be locked up aren't a Russian conspiracy to throw the election.

Moreover, Manafort took part in at least one event that has attracted endless discussion: the June 2016 meeting at which he and other top campaign leaders hosted the delegation of Russians following an offer of dirt on Hillary Clinton.

But Manafort's role in that meeting hasn't figured into either of his federal cases nor been the subject of court documents. Maybe the feds are holding all that back for some kind of big reveal — or maybe there's no conspiracy here.

If Manafort isn't in any legal jeopardy over his role in the Trump Tower meeting, does that suggest no one else is, either? There were a lot of outside theories that the meeting might have broken federal laws barring U.S. political campaigns from getting opposition research from foreigners.

Does the absence of anything about that in Manafort's case mean the feds actually don't think there's anything to prosecute?
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There is more.

If laws were broken getting opposition research from foreigners that would implicate Hillary Clinton, Fusion GPS, Perkins Coie and others who participated in pushing the Russian collusion hoax via the Steel dossier which was compiled by a foreigner for the Clinton campaign from alleged reports of other foreigners.   It is either not a crime, or Mueller and his team of Hillary Clinton supporters did not want to put her in jeopardy for committing it.

It is not clear why Ewing does not mention this in his discussion of the Trump Tower meeting which turned out to be a none event for the campaign.  It is clear that those who were present from the Trump campaign saw nothing of value in the information that was offered.  The person who set up the meeting apparently made up the story about dirt on Clinton in order to get them to take the meeting.

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