Anyway, though, supposedly a redacted report will be released, and this gets me thinking. As you read a few days ago, I remain unconvinced that Trump and his people are innocent of "collusion," but "collusion" isn't a crime. "Conspiracy" is a crime, and my assessment at the moment, with the limited information we have, is that Mueller looked at what he had from a prosecutor's perspective and decided that the bar for conviction under criminal conspiracy charges wouldn't be met with the evidence he had, so he couldn't bring charges. That is a very different question from whether or not the evidence shows what any layperson would call "collusion" because "collusion" and criminal conspiracy aren't the same things. One is a colloquial term with no legal definition. The other is a specific crime. My analogy was to the closely related matter of coordination of independent expenditures in campaign finance, since coordination was part of what Mueller assessed anyway. Coordination in campaign finance is almost impossible to show in court, even when any layperson would say, "yeah, that's coordination," because of how it is defined legally, and what the evidentiary standards are for its legal definition. So, given what I've seen from publicly available evidence, I still think Trump and his people "colluded," but I defer to Mueller on the matter of "criminal conspiracy" and whether or not charges could be brought. I still want to see the report, though.
However, this brings up an important question. What would it take to change my mind? The drumbeat of news coverage in response to Trump critics is that everyone is supposed to declare Trump innocent, and if they don't, then blah, blah, blah. Of course, as I also wrote a few days ago, no one held Republicans to this standard when it came to Hillary Clinton, but I'm a scholar and an intellectual snob who needs to pull the holier-than-thou crap on everyone I ever meet, and I can't do that if I don't ask myself these questions. So, why haven't I changed my mind about Trump? Well, as I said the other day, there was no new information from Barr's statement that I didn't figure out from the fact that Mueller wouldn't issue any new indictments, but that leads to the follow-up question of what it would take for me to declare Trump actually innocent. Not just, "not guilty," but innocent. Of "collusion," anyway. He has admitted to too many other things for me to declare him innocent of everything. If there is nothing Mueller's report could say, then I'd be as bad as Trey Gowdy and the Benghazi conspiracy wackos, and the lefties who have their favorite conspiracies, and Ilhan Omar, and... oh, I'll just stop here. When a misanthrope gets started listing people he doesn't like, it never ends.
So here it is. If Mueller's report says what I inferred the other day-- that there's a lot of suggestive evidence, but not enough to convict on criminal conspiracy charges-- then I'm not changing my mind on "collusion" because "collusion" is legally different from "criminal conspiracy." That's my whole point. When Paul Manafort meets with a Russian agent to talk about Russia policy and hand over polling data relevant to their interference efforts, as we know happened, and as he perjured himself about, I'm going to call that collusion, and since there's no legal definition of collusion, I'm 100% comfortable with that. If Mueller just decided he couldn't prosecute that as "criminal conspiracy," for various reasons, then my inference is validated, and I don't have any Bayesian updating to do.
In order to change my mind, I would need to see a more compelling explanation for the empirical observations that we already have than the non-legal term, "collusion." Billy Ockham. He's my main man. If Robert Mueller looked at Roger Stone and Jerome Corsi's dealings between Trump and WikiLeaks, when everyone knew that Russia provided the hacked emails to WikiLeaks (even that craven liar, Donald Trump, whose lies are themselves suggestive of culpability as far as I'm concerned), Manafort's many dealings with Russia, Flynn's many dealings with Russia, Papadapoulos… the whole shebang. If Mueller looked at all of that and also found a bunch of other exculpatory stuff that put what we know in a different light such that the observations we have are less bad than they look because of stuff he knows and we don't, then that would cause me to change my mind.
Remember ACORN? Remember James O'Keefe? This con-artist is a right-wing pseudo-journalistic activist who had a schtick. He would put on costumes, and secretly record meetings in which he tried to get liberals to say self-incriminating things on camera, then selectively edit the videos and release them to Breitbart (home of Steve Bannon!), Fox News and other right-wing pseudo-news organizations. Back in 2008, for some reason, conservatives decided that a group called "ACORN" was a demonic hellspawn organization that sacrificed children to pray to, like, turn everyone gay, or something. I don't know. I can't follow their crazy shit. They're too deep down the rabbit hole for me. Anyway, one of O'Keefe's most famous lies-- never corrected by Fox because, c'mon, it's Fox-- was when O'Keefe recorded an ACORN employee saying that he'd help transport underage girls across the US border for sexual slavery. This was one of the video clips that helped turn ACORN into the right-wing's Emmanuel Goldstein for a time. What the video didn't show was the employee, right after the meeting, calling the cops on O'Keefe. The employee was just playing along, to get information, thinking that he was conducting a sting operation. That ACORN employee that O'Keefe and right-wing media spent so much time demonizing? He called the fucking cops on O'Keefe, thinking he was busting a child sex trafficker. He was the good guy, and O'Keefe and the right-wing media were liars. However, you needed an investigation to find that out. That's what I mean by finding exculpatory evidence in an investigation that would make you change your mind about the publicly available information.
We know about some really sleazy-looking things that happened. Mueller, according to Barr, says no-criminal-conspiracy, which isn't the same thing as "NO COLLUSION!!!" What would it take to convince me of "NO COLLUSION!!!!"? Something like finding out that the ACORN guy actually called the cops.
Anyone want to take bets on that? When everyone perjured themselves, Trump wouldn't sit for an interview, and Mueller couldn't reach a conclusion on obstruction, even though obstruction requires "corrupt intent," leading to a real puzzle since that requires an underlying crime, and that leads us to ask what crime Mueller found plausible if he truly did exonerate Trump?
So, yes, I really want to see the full Mueller report. I don't trust Barr's redaction process. In order to change my mind about collusion, which is legally different from what Mueller actually investigated, which is "criminal conspiracy," I'd need to see exculpatory evidence because otherwise, this just looks to me like the natural conclusion from the fact that the bar for prosecution under criminal conspiracy is very, very high, and the term is different from what any layperson would call "collusion."
And if Mueller's report says what I infer, then anyone claiming that it exonerates Trump on "collusion" has it wrong. Anyone who actually wants to exonerate Trump on "collusion," which is not a legal term, has the burden of argumentation on them to explain how Roger Stone and Jerome Corsi's actions don't constitute "collusion," how Paul Manafort's actions don't constitute "collusion," how the Trump Tower meeting isn't "attempted collusion" at least, and so forth. Collusion is not a legal term. There are knowable facts about close associations between the Trump campaign and the Russian government. If the terms of debate are "collusion" rather than "criminal conspiracy," then the burden right now is on those denying collusion, and I think that the burden became insurmountable once we learned of Manafort's meeting with the Russian agent in which he handed over polling data. That may not constitute "criminal conspiracy," but that demonstrates how high the bar is for "criminal conspiracy," not the innocence of the Trump campaign on "collusion."
Well, what a bunch of c-words...
I've said over and over again over the last couple of years that Trump would never face any legal consequences for anything. Anyone hoping for Mueller to do anything was completely missing the point of what was happening. Trump was always going to get away with everything, and never going to face prosecution. "Collusion," though? That's not the same thing as "criminal conspiracy." On the latter, we need to defer to Robert Mueller. On the former, we need to defer to William of Ockham, not William Barr.