Why read so much into the lack of indictments when Mueller's team have agreed to the standard that they cannot indict a sitting president? [1] Let's just wait and see -- I'm fed of speculation at this point.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/muellers-team-told-t...
So even though the President can't be indicted, the indication that no other indictments means that collusion is not a part of the report.
There may be other offenses that Trump have committed, but that is even MORE speculation.
What is a crime is, for example, conspiracy to hack DNC computers - for which several people, mostly Russians, were already indicted. Another example would be conspiracy to "impair, obstruct, or defeat the lawful function of any department of government", which is what the Internet Research Agency was indicted for.
Let it play out and see what happens. Regardless, I suspect Congress will inevitably get the truth out and eventually it will come out to the public. Like most things in a democracy, they're often slow and sometimes messy. This is a feature, not a bug!
1. https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/dozens-sealed-criminal-indic...
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/22/special-counsel-mueller-has-...
A sitting president cannot be arrested by his administration, by law.
The Pappadopolous indictment and conviction-by-guilty-plea was for (lying about) Trump-campaign initiated attempted collusion, in which Pappadopolous acted with the knowledge and approval of higher officials in the Trump campaign.
The Stone indictment is for (lying about) collusion with WikiLeaks on the release of information that, per other indictments, was being released as part of a Russian propaganda operation.
So, no, it's entirely false to say “no existing indictment has been due to collusion”.
> There may be other offenses that Trump have committed, but that is even MORE speculation.
That's not really speculation, either; it's not as if the identity of the unindicted coconspirator Individual 1 in the Cohen indictment out of SDNY is a mystery.
The two week prison sentence Pappadopolous received gave little weight to his complicity, and seemed to me to be more a slap on the wrist for his not cooperating with the FBI.
This is incorrect.
"Collusion" isn't a specific crime, but rather, a euphemism for a family of crimes.
We've seen Trump associates charged with and convicted of those crimes, relating to improper communications, obstructing an investigation into foreign influence, lying to the government during an investigation, etc.
We've seen the Russians charged with the related crimes, such as hacking the DNC. We've seen Mueller trace out the connection between GRU and the campaign convicts, via Wikileaks. We've seen multiple Trump associates who lied under oath about their or Trump's financial dealings with Russia. Or in the case of Stone, about many many things.
We've seen additional evidence that Trump is the center of a vast criminal syndicate with ties to Russia, given the multiple branching investigations across jurisdictions, the related campaign finance crimes, and the testimony of his decade-long "fixer".
This is what is looks like when a criminal organization is prosecuted -- and the reason that Trump has not been charged with conspiracy relating to the criminal acts he ordered, acts for which others face jail terms, is policy against indicting a sitting president.
There's no speculation involved, and considerable evidence of their criminality.
What's fanciful is you ignoring all of the facts to say things like:
"Well, it doesn't matter if associates of his are going down for related crimes, and that he's the connecting feature between their criminal acts -- that he hasn't been charged with something made up means that nothing happened!"
(All of that aside, the media is a travesty and their coverage of this has been click-bait driven fantasy.)
If you can point out who exactly you think coordinated with Trump that'd be great.
Pappadopolous was convicted for lying about his attempts, approved by higher ups in the campaign, to coordinate with Russia.
Stone was indicted for lying about his role in coordinating between the Trump campaign and WikiLeaks about the DNC document release in which, from other indictments, WikiLeaks was acting as either an agent or dupe of Russian intelligence.
Irrelevant, the actual facts charged in the indictment involve collusion. “Collusion” isn't a legal charge, it's a fact pattern, and it's part of the fact pattern in both the Stone and Pappadopolous indictments. The claim that there are no indictments involving collusion is false.
> And Stone denies the accusation.
Which is irrelevant to any claims about the content of indictments of findings of the Mueller probe. It would be relevant if the claim was “no convictions involving collusion” or “no confessions involving collusion”, though Pappadopolous would still disprove both of those claims.
As there is no actual crime of collusion for which a person can be indicted, this is a subjective viewpoint.
On any other level, “collusion” is a word with a clear meaning, and the Stone and Pappadopolous indictments (the latter of which is subject of a conviction with guilty plea and detailed statement of the offense confirming this) involve what is unambiguously actual collusion between the Trump campaign and WikiLeaks (on a matter which the facts alleged in other indictments identify WikiLeaks as advancing a Russian propaganda operation) and attempted (from the Trump campaign side) collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia directly.
Everything that denied this is lies and sophistry to support lies.
It seems to me that the lack of further Mueller indictments denies it. But, we could argue it either way, and that is what makes it subjective.
Surely you'd agree that Trump's campaign chair giving US polling data to a Russian cut-out counts as colluding.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/paul-manafort-trump-polling-da...
And sadly, the fact that the media is like this is largely a reflection of the population in general. And, as others point out, the media is probably like this because they are just chasing profit.
Biases are rooted in the computational limitations of the human mind. We have limited memory and communication bandwidth. Our brains use compression algorithms to record, store, and retrieve data.
Absolutely not. As someone else notes to your comment, everyone is biased. I'm "biased" that people not dying is a good thing -- some would argue the universe would be better off without humanity. Bias is inevitable, and not the problem; the problem, as you state, is "letting that bias color their views." Or, rather, not so much "color" your views, but letting your personal bias override any other interpretation.
I personally believe Trump has done some very illegal things and it's just a question of finding a smoking gun. That doesn't mean he has done anything illegal regarding situation X (I don't know, let's say promoting Mar-A-Lago after he started running for office), and that's something I need to keep in mind when I read articles about him.
The article is trying to persuade us the press discredits itself when it correctly reports 37 indictments, several convictions, Russian meetings with Don jr. and a mind-boggling array of lies. It criticizes an accurately researched nyt list of Trump associates connected with Russians implying it has been refuted by the Mueller report which the author has not even seen.
Consider what the author is suggesting: these things should not be reported.
It intentionally blurs opinion pieces with factual reporting, and even then heavily paraphrases. It attributes words of others to papers that did not publish them. It implies someone's votive candles somehow reflects on the press.
All hinged on the the fact that there are no recommended indictments (beyond the dozens already being pursued). Additional indictments that would have to be for the theoretically unindictable offense of collusion.
It's not attempting to examine press malfeasance, it's attempting to discredit establish facts by vaguely lumping these unrelated things together. Mixed along with what is not explicitly stated in the unread Mueller report. And to do so preemptively to fix opinion about a report before it's even available publicly.
This article is neither reporting nor analysis, although it pretends to be. It is indistinguishable from countless others that appear in Turkey, Venezuela, Hungary and other nations in a similar state. The names are different and the language is English and that's all.
It is another attempt to de-legitimize the press using exactly the same techniques in every other nascent autocracy: blur one persons words with another, blur opinion pieces with reporting and wildly paraphrase them. Blend irrelevant errors over unconnected annoying fact. Do all this preemptively.