There's a few things you're slamming together that are better understood when teased apart.
There were actions that Russia took during the 2016 election season to support the election of Trump. This is a well documented fact.
There was a meeting between a Russian intelligence connected lawyer and Trump campaign personnel including Trump Jr, Jared Kushner, and Paul Manafort. In this meeting, the Trump campaign was offered information to use against the Clinton campaign. This is a well documented fact.
After thorough investigation, it was concluded that there was not substantial explicit collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. But that same evidence showed they were extremely aligned in their goals. Trump was clearly Russia's preferred candidate and Russia was spending time, money, and effort to support his candidacy in a number of ways.
That investigation was impeded by Trump, as Mueller found in his report and testified to Congress.
Trump and his acolytes like to take "Trump did not explicitly collude with Russia" to mean "There is nothing whatsoever to the idea that Russia wanted Trump to win and took actions to support that outcome." And that's just not the case. That's putting some extreme interpretations on the actual facts of the matter.
"Extremely aligned in their goals" - absolute horse shit.
And believe it or not, Trump can't control who Russia chooses as their candidate. The UK Labour Govt had Kamala as their chosen candidate and campaigned for her to win.
Foreign governments always have a view on preferred winners in elections. But just because Russia independently wanted Trump to win and tried to influence the election without his co-ordinating with him says nothing at all about Trump as a candidate. It more speaks to Russia's intelligence assessments.
The difference is in 2024, Kamala wasn't brokering a hotel deal in London with a penthouse for the King of England, and lying about it to the American people.
MI-6 wasn't hacking Republicans and laundering the material through Wikileaks so that Kamala could crow about it.
Kamala's campaign wasn't meeting James Bond in her home and making secret deals with him and lying about it when caught.
> It more speaks to Russia's intelligence assessments.
Yes, it speaks to their assessment that Trump is the candidate that supports Putin's interests.
Russia is a dictatorship that is often working in opposition to US interests. The UK is a close ally with an elected government. I know which one I'd rather be endorsed and supported by, should I be a political candidate. If Russia was supporting me I would want to understand why, because I don't feel my interests and positions would align with Russia's. I'd want to understand why they think my election would be good for them. Maybe I like those reasons, maybe I don't, but it's an opportunity for reflection and evaluation.
Don Jr could have said "No, that seems like it would be potentially seen as inappropriate" when that Russian contact reached out. Instead, he replied, "if it's what you say I love it".
I concur with 99% of this but there's a crucial point I need to make. According to the Mueller report, they specifically investigated "conspiracy", and never even touched the idea of "collusion":
"In evaluating whether evidence about collective action of multiple individuals constituted a crime, we applied the framework of conspiracy law, not the concept of 'collusion.' In so doing, the Office recognized that the word 'collusion' was used in public reporting about the investigation, but collusion is not a specific offense or theory of liability found in the United States Code, nor is it a term of art in federal criminal law. For those reasons, the Office’s focus in analyzing questions of joint criminal liability was on conspiracy as defined in federal law." (Mueller Report, Volume I, p. 2)
This is important for two reasons. First, because during the election, the prime claim made by people who were pointing this out was that collusion was happening. An actual conspiracy between Trump and Russia was thought to be too outlandish even by the people like Seth Abramson, who was one of the most ardent proponents of the collusion idea.
So it's a sleight of hand:
- raise the bar from collusion to conspiracy
- say the bar for conspiracy is not met
- therefore Trump is exonerated of collusion
But the charge of collusion still stands. And as I laid out in my other post, the facts support the plain meaning of collusion - "secret or illegal cooperation or conspiracy, especially in order to cheat or deceive others".
> After thorough investigation, it was concluded that there was not substantial explicit collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.
The second reason this is important is that because the bar was raised to conspiracy, we cannot claim that the investigation that was performed was sufficient. It wasn't a thorough investigation of conspiracy, so we can't even say they didn't find enough evidence when they didn't look under the biggest rocks.
For starters, the investigators were essentially barred from investigating any financial links. In 2008 Trump's own son is quoted saying "In terms of high-end product influx into the US, Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets", so any serious investigation of links between Trump and Russia should necessarily include financial links.
And of course now we have hindsight to know why financial links were verboten -- after the investigation concluded, it was revealed by none other than Michael Cohen, that Trump was actually brokering a "Trump Tower: Moscow" deal during the 2016 campaign. He had already signed a non-binding letter of intent with a Russian company, and the deal included a penthouse dedicated to Vladimir Putin. But Trump when asked about his dealings in Russia in 2016 had said this:
"I have nothing to do with Russia. I have nothing to do with Russia – for anything. I don’t have any deals there. I have no deals that could happen there because we’ve stayed away."
The most frustrating part about this is we didn't learn it through the Mueller Investigation, although we should have. The investigation was kneecapped, cut short, and then the results were spun and lied about (a federal judge admonished AG Barr for a "lack of candor" in the way he selectively quoted ad redacted the "executive summary" of the Mueller report he released before the full report, which allowed Trump to take a "exoneration" victory lap, that was anything but).
No, we know about this because Michael Cohen was arrested for campaign finance violations, for crimes he committed in 2016 on the behest of Trump, to buy the silence of a porn star Trump had an affair with.
And this doesn't even get into the second volume, which details the myriad ways Trump obstructed the investigation, which included firing investigators (Comey), witnesses tampering (dangling pardons in front of Manafort), lying to investigators (according to Mueller's testimony), etc. etc.
So it's safe to say the investigation was not thorough or complete.
This is just an infinite fractal mosaic of malfeasance, degeneracy, ineptitude, buffoonery, and all around disappointing behavior, from all parties.
