Collusion Confusion

Yesterday, the Republican-controlled Senate Intelligence Committee released a nearly 1,000-page report that "laid out an extensive web of contacts between Trump campaign advisers and Russian government officials and other Russians, including some with ties to the country’s intelligence services," according to the New York Times coverage of the release (link here).

Donald Trump has long tried to paint the Mueller investigation as a hoax and the Russian allegations as a deliberate attempt by "the deep state" to discredit him. The fact that his own party released a massive document that refutes his claims is an extreme embarrassment. Of course, that won't stop Trump from lying about it because most of his duped supporters will never know of the report.

Paul Waldman at the Washington Post published an excellent take on this news (link here) in a piece entitled "A new bipartisan report raises the question: If this isn’t ‘collusion,’ what is?"

Republicans like Marco Rubio, he notes, have insisted there was no collusion, notwithstanding all the actual evidence of collusion. "He was using a tortuously narrow definition of 'collusion' to exonerate Trump. That definition says that only a carefully planned, coordinated and executed criminal conspiracy counts as “collusion,” and anything short of that does not."

Using this yardstick, Rubio would have to argue that a bungled attempt at a crime was not actually an attempt because it was poorly planned and slap-dash. As we all know, criminals never forget something or botch their attempt or just plain fuck up.

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