What's the conspiracy? Trump agrees to make concessions on Ukrainian policy, then Russia hacks the DNC, hands the emails to WikiLeaks, and then tells the Trump campaign they can send Roger Stone to pick up "Hillary's Emails" (which they weren't) from Julian Assange? That Wikileaks released publicly anyway? Or was it just that Trump would make the concessions, and Wikileaks would release it... but then why send this turdball?
It seems like the Trump campaign tried multiple times to be in cahoots with a Russian intelligence operation that was operating successfully on its own and then failed to make any connection at all until all the crimes had been committed. Including killing Seth Rich.
That’s the thing with conspiracy cases. They don’t actually have to be coordinating like via email or phone or whatever. The fact that they are coordinating, even if independently, to the same illegal goals, even if they didn’t actually accomplish said goal, is enough to establish a criminal conspiracy.
So like, theoretically, a situation where Russia is hacking Hillary’s emails to harm her in the election, and then providing them to Wikileaks independently, and then Trump is obfuscating on the source of those emails, while otherwise acknowledging that they were obtained criminally, is actually a criminal conspiracy, even if Trumo has never talked to a Russian. Never mind that he was doing this while also trying to obtain said emails.
Now I have no illusions that this will be enough for Republican step convict in impeachment. But theoretically there really would not be that much needed to indict,
Conspiracy to commit what crime?
The hack had already happened, the emails are after it was already public knowledge that more were coming.
I think that you could make a pretty good case even today for any of the following:
Conspiracy to:
- defraud the United States:
https://www.justice.gov/jm/criminal-resource-manual-923-18-usc-371-conspiracy-defraud-us- violate campaign finance laws (both from accepting foreign aid in a campaign and from the Stormy Daniels illegal campaign donation). This one seems to be basically open and shut. Michael Cohen pled guilty to it already more or less and directly implicated Donald Trump under oath.
- misprision of a felony from the Trump tower meeting, possibly. I don’t think we have enough information about the meeting to know for sure.
- violating Foreign Corrupt Practices Act for offering Putin $50 million to approve Trump Tower Moscow... or planning to do so
- violating us sanctions by planning to accept finances from a sanctioned bank in that process of finding financing for Trump Tower Moscow.
All of these are basically one or two public data points from being obviously proven. IMP some of them might look pretty obvious just from repackaging news stories and reading them chronologically.
This email people kind of forgot about (it’s real despite the dumb screen name, you can find it in the attached NY times story)
https://twitter.com/th3j35t3r/status/1032124237304086528At the time Cohen said “Felix is a blowhard and didn’t know his head from his ass and we weren’t seriously working on Trump Tower Moscow”. I think the odds are that Cohen is not singing the same tune today to Mueller and this reads somewhat differently knowing that they were actually trying to get the deal done for Trumo Tower Moscow through at least mid 2016.
The overall conspiracy, I think might look something like this, though some of it is definitely conjecture.
- Trump wants to get Trump Tower Moscow done and be President
- Putin wants to get rid of sanctions
- Trump starts buttering up Putin in the Primary both publically through speeches that say good things about Russia with a conciliatory tone and actions in the convention and privately by offering up a $50 million condo to help get the deal approved
- Russia in the middle of these negotiations starts setting things up in a way that positions Trump to benefit personally from removing sanctions by taking a few actions:
- they begin to privately support him through illegal donations to the NRA, illegally buying ads on Facebook/twitter/etc, hacking Hillary/DNC emails and laundering them through fake identities and Wikileaks.
- they Veselnitskaya to trump tower to talk about gathering dirt on Hillary Clinton. During this meeting they suggest it would be positive to remove sanctions on Russian entities
- they arrange funding for Trump Tower Moscow through a sanctioned, state owned bank (VTB), giving him a clear personal financial incentive to lift sanctions
- Trump puts the word out to his inner circle that they will lift sanctions. Flynn begins working on and communicating this, leading into Logan act violations and the communications where he eventually said Russian sanctions would be “ripped up” as one of the first acts of the Trump administration, freeing him up for one of his own corrupt side deals.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/06/us/politics/michael-flynn-russia-sanctions-ripped-up-whistleblower.html- As the Logan Act violations happened, Trump began to lie about them and initiate a cover up
- Comey is fired as a heavy handed attempt at the cover up
- Trump engages in a pattern of lying to obfuscate the truth as part of the cover up
- Trump and other White House staff now enter a new conspiracy to cover up both the original scheme AND the cover up by 1) coordinating their testimony so that the lies don’t contradict 2) coordinating a strategy with Devin Nunes and the House Intelligence committee to impede the Congressional investigation.
- he does some minor witness tampering and further obstruction of justice on the way until firing sessions in some sort of last ditch effort to shut it all down.
Again there is some conjecture in there, but not all that much. And the important thing to understand about conspiracy laws is that the people don’t actually have to explicitly tell each other what each of them is doing or going to do to further the conspiracy.
