Is 'Collusion with Russia' over?

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Special Counsel Robert Mueller has been a busy fellow for the past week. Rapid fire, his indictment of several Russian nationals for meddling in the 2016 election has been followed by a guilty plea, for lying to investigators, from a lawyer tied to Trump-campaign figures Paul Manafort and Richard Gates; a new indictment against Manafort and Gates that, as anticipated, added tax- and bank-fraud charges (in Virginia) to already existing money-laundering charges (in Washington); and finally, just breaking as this is written, a guilty plea from Gates on charges of defrauding the United States and lying to the FBI.

As President Trump’s champions emphasize, what is most notable about this array of allegations is an omission: Nowhere has the special counsel charged any kind of criminal collusion between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin

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To be sure, not only is there no “collusion” allegation in the new indictments; the Trump campaign is barely mentioned. It has no ostensible relevance to the charges against Manafort, Gates, and the lawyer, Alex van der Zwaan. To the limited extent that the campaign is mentioned in the indictment against the Russian nationals, any contacts that campaign officials had with Russians are said to have been unwitting. That fact would seem to cut sharply against the notion of collusion, for had there been a collusive Trump–Russia relationship, there would have been no need for Russian operatives to dupe Trump-campaign officials.

Add to the mix the other charges Mueller has filed against Michael Flynn and George Papadopoulos, who have pled guilty. In neither instance did Mueller allege any kind of criminal conspiracy between the Trump campaign and the Putin regime. Both defendants served the campaign, and both had contacts with apparent Putin-regime operatives (the Russian ambassador in Flynn’s case, more-shadowy figures claiming regime ties in Papadopoulos’s). Yet Mueller permitted each defendant to resolve the case by pleading guilty to a single count of making false statements to the FBI — a mere process crime, and one that, by branding them as liars, would undermine their effectiveness as cooperating witnesses if there were any eventual “collusion” case against other campaign figures. Again, this cuts against the idea that Mueller is contemplating a collusion case.

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