Andrew McCarthy: How long has Mueller known there was no Trump-Russia collusion?
By Andrew McCarthy
https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/andr...ssia-collusion
Almost from the start, Democrats and their media echo chamber have moved the goal posts on collusion. The
original allegation – the political narrative that the Clinton campaign, through Obama administration alchemy, honed into a counterintelligence investigation – was that that the Trump campaign was complicit in Russia's "
cyberespionage" attacks on the 2016 election.
But there was no evidence that candidate Trump and his surrogates had anything to do with the Kremlin's hacking and propaganda schemes. And no supporting logic. The Russians are very good at espionage. They neither needed nor wanted American help, their operations predated Trump's entry into the campaign, and some of those operations were anti-Trump.
Nevertheless, in short order, that
endlessly elastic word, collusion, was being stretched to the breaking point – covering
every conceivable type of association between Trump associates and Russia.
Some of these were unseemly, such as the Trump Tower meeting, an apparently unsuccessful effort to obtain campaign dirt on Hillary Clinton.
More of them were routine, such as incoming national-security adviser Michael Flynn's communications with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak during the post-election transition. But
none of these collusion episodes were criminal. The only "collusion" prosecutors care about is conspiracy; a criminal agreement to violate a federal penal statute – such as the laws against hacking.
There was never any such evidence. There was
just unverified, sensational, hearsay nonsense – the Steele dossier generated by the Clinton campaign.
Now that Special Counsel Robert Mueller has concluded that there was no criminal collusion, the question arises: When during their exhaustive 22-month investigation did prosecutors realize they had no case?
I put it at no later than the end of 2017. I suspect it was in the early autumn....
...When Special Counsel Mueller closed his investigation last week, he almost certainly knew for about a year and a half that there was
no collusion case. Indeed, the indictments that he did bring appeared to
preclude the possibility that the Trump campaign conspired with the Kremlin.
Yet the investigation continued. The Justice Department and the special counsel made no announcement, no interim finding of no collusion, as Trump detractors continued to claim that a sitting American president might be a tool of the Putin regime.
For month after month, the president was forced to govern under a cloud of suspicion.
Why?