Roger Stone indictment shows there was no conspiracy between Trump campaign and Russia

Andrew McCarthy:

Special counsel Robert Mueller’s indictment of Roger Stone elucidates what has been apparent to the public for a year, and therefore must have been known to prosecutors and the FBI for much longer: There was no criminal conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russian government. That is, the Kremlin’s cyber-espionage efforts to undermine the 2016 election by hacking Democratic email accounts were not coordinated with the Trump campaign.

In the Stone indictment, Mueller offers up 20 pages of heavy-breathing narrative about the Russian theft of tens of thousands of emails from the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta, the transmission of the purloined materials to WikiLeaks (portrayed as a witting arm of the Putin regime), and their subsequent media publication in the final weeks of the campaign. But the big wind produces no rain. At the end, we get a couple of pages of process crimes.

Stone is charged with such comparative trifles as concealing from Congress that his communications with an associate were in writing. The seven counts are offenses generated not by an espionage conspiracy but by the investigation of an espionage conspiracy that did not exist.

Not one that “may not have existed.” The Trump-Russia conspiracy did not exist.
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Indications of the Trump campaign’s lack of knowledge about, much less involvement in, Russia’s operations are not new. They are completely consistent with the two indictments Mueller has filed against Russian enterprises: the “troll farm” case, charged in February 2018, and the hacking case, charged five months later. While the Russians never have been particularly effective at meddling in U.S. elections, their intelligence apparatus has been at it for the better part of a century. Peddling propaganda and, in modern times, hacking are not activities they need help with — not from Trump’s campaign or anyone else’s.

Democrats speculate that Putin wanted Trump to win. Most of us on the other side counter that he wanted to sow discord into American society regardless of who won. In either event, Putin’s desires do not make Trump complicit in Putin’s violations of American law — even if most of us can agree that Trump’s courting of Putin’s favor was nauseating (as were the Obama/Clinton “Russian Reset,” the Uranium One deal, Bill Clinton’s collection of a tidy $500,000 for a quickie Moscow speech, Barack Obama’s hot-mic promise of “flexibility” on Russian demands once the 2012 election was over, and so on).
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The Russian collusion hoax was the product of the Clinton campaign's attempt to get the FBI and DOJ to make Trump a target so they could use it for political purposes.  It was a disgraceful sham that the FBI bought .  They got conned by the Clinton campaign, Fusion GPS and Steele.  Perhaps the FBI was working with the Democrats to distract Trump from governing.  The Mueller probe likewise is a Democrat-sponsored operation to distract Trump from governing.  It is certainly not a good faith effort at this point to prosecute anyone for conspiring with the Russians.