Reply to Kushner, Manafort and Don Jr. met with a Russian lawyer with Kremlin ties during the campaign

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I have a question to all you brilliant DCUM legal minds out there.  What's the legal standard/definition for collusion in this context? The more that comes out, the more certain it sounds like the Trump campaign had at least some knowledge of Russian involvement in the election during campaign season. However, this doesn't necessarily mean they acted on this knowledge. But would being complicit meet a collusion threshold test?

My pure speculation here.  I have a feeling all these meetings that took place were about the Russians telling the Trump campaign what kind of information they had and what they were going to do with the information, while team Trump so sat there and nodded their heads. [/quote]

"Collusion" is a general umbrella term for all the inappropriate coordination that TeamTrump had with Russian agents. It is not referring to a specific violation of a specific statute in this context. "Collusion" is also a legal term for a specific crime, but in a entirely different context, so it can get confusing.  Several  people (some ignorantly, some intentionally) are trying to muddy the waters between the two concepts to suggest Team Trump violated no laws here.

There are several laws that Team Trump may have violated - specific crimes with specific elements that prosecutors will determine whether they can prove. For example, some of the people on Team Trump may have conspired to violate election laws. Others may have offered or received bribes. Still others may have lied under oath. Others may have obstructed justice. Others may have willfully failed to report information accurately (a version of perjury, I suspect.) Addressing each of those potential crimes in detail is a complex undertaking because each has about 3-6 elements that must be assessed for each situation. There are a number of articles that discuss crimes generally, but you may need to dig a little deeper to find the ones that list out the specific elements for each likely crime and apply the facts we know to those elements. Doing that is interesting for practicing lawyers, but not usually of much interest for the general public, so mainstream media like CNN or Fox rarely go into that sort of detail. I have read a few of those articles that lay out the specific elements, and it seems several people on Team Trump are well on their way to checking off all the boxes that allow them to get charged. Some of those elements are a little subjective, so it's still debatable. But they're pretty close to the red line based just on public disclosures. There are certainly lots of other facts and communications that the investigators have that are not yet public.

Hth

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