The Democrats' claim of Trump Russian collusion is in tatters

Jonathon Turley:

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... the publicly known case for collusion remains strikingly incomplete, if not incoherent. What is uniformly missing from the cottage industry of collusion theories is an acknowledgment of the threshold requirements of an actual crime. There is no crime in “colluding” with Russians without some cognizable criminal act or conspiracy to commit such an act. While some have dangerously stretched the criminal code to incriminate Trump, the most obvious and viable crime remains hacking into the email systems of the Democrats.

Mueller has thoroughly identified and detailed the Russian hacking and trolling operations to influence the 2016 election. Yet, these filings notably lack any link to the Trump campaign, let alone advance knowledge or support for the Russian operation. Indeed, key links have become even more implausible as part of a conspiracy with Russian intelligence.

First, there is the question of why Russian intelligence would tell the notoriously unpredictable and impulsive Donald Trump about one of its riskiest international operations in decades. Russian spymasters are not known for putting entire operations, or the future of Russian foreign relations for that matter, just one tweet away from utter destruction.

Second, there is the curious pattern of Trump officials trying to find contacts at WikiLeaks to obtain the Hillary Clinton emails. If there was such collusion, why were Trump associates like Roger Stone or Alexander Nix, who led consulting company Cambridge Analytica that worked for the Trump campaign, seeking contacts with access to the information?

Third, even Trump associates like Michael Cohen, who actively sought contacts with Russians about business in Moscow, also seemed to get nowhere. Indeed, Cohen had to try to contact aides to Vladimir Putin through public mailboxes on the internet. Like the Trump Tower meeting, the efforts made by Cohen during the campaign had failed miserably.

The public record reveals more confusion than collusion in the Trump campaign. If this was a grand conspiracy, there is a paucity of American conspirators and a plethora of clueless associates searching for access to WikiLeaks material. Indeed, in his indictments of various Russians, Mueller expressly said that any contact with them was unwitting, which happened also to be point emphasized by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein.
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The evidence suggests that the collusion theory was a hoax concocted by the Hillary Clinton campaign and which became an excuse for losing a race they considered a shoe in.  It was an elaborate and expensive fraud that has been used to harass the President and his associates.