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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsCollusion is not a crime? Not so fast.
Like some legal zombie that cant be killed, the argument that collusion is not a crime is back and walks among us. And its still nonsense.
There were reports last week that former Trump attorney Michael Cohen would testify, contrary to repeated White House denials, that President Trump knew of and approved the infamous Trump Tower meeting in June 2016, when Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner and other campaign officials met with Russians offering damaging information about Hillary Clinton.
Faced with this new evidence of what looks remarkably like colluding with the Russians, the presidents defense has returned to the claim that any such collusion, even if it happened, would not be a crime.
Its true there is no crime called collusion. Its also irrelevant. What matters in criminal law is the facts, not the precise terms used to describe what happened.
Saying the president is off the hook because there is no crime called collusion is akin to claiming the president could shoot someone on 5th Avenue and escape prosecution because the criminal statutes prohibit homicide not shooting.
Collusion is generally defined as a secret agreement to work together towards some illicit end. As I pointed out more than a year ago when this argument first surfaced, in criminal law this describes a potential conspiracy.
A criminal conspiracy exists when two or more people form an agreement to pursue an unlawful goal and at least one of them takes some action in furtherance of that agreement. The federal conspiracy statute, 18 U.S.C. 371, prohibits conspiracies to defraud the United States and conspiracies to commit an offense against the United States.
Both charges are potentially relevant here and Mueller has already deployed both.
At: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/collusion-is-not-a-crime-not-so-fast/2018/07/31/fc8d20ba-94f3-11e8-a679-b09212fb69c2_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.e814cac44707
Surprise, Rudy: "Collusion" may not be a crime in so many words - but conspiracy is.
Mr. Ected
(9,675 posts)Mueller was not tasked with investigating and prosecuting collusion. That word doesn't appear in the DOJ order that created the special counsel. That word is the invention of the media, never intended to be interpreted as a legal term. It's like the word "treason", that has a colloquial meaning and a legal one. The crime of treason is so narrowly applied that even Trump may avoid its deadly reach. But regardless, Trump is guilty of de facto treason, in that he conspired with a hostile foreign nation to manifestly compromise the 2016 election. Damn the man to hell. May the prosecutor reveal every minute crime the man has ever committed and levy the most punitive sentence in our history. The fascists in Congress should have their time in the barrel soon thereafter.