Yes Collusion!

Many who are pro-impeachment or tend in that direction concede that Mueller’s Volume I supports Trump’s repeated claim  “No Collusion.” Trump and his friendly media go so far as to say that the Trump Campaign was “exonerated” on collusion.

Not so. There is in the Mueller Report itself evidence, summaries of evidence, and conclusions about evidence that strongly support what we would ordinarily call “collusion” between Trump and the Trump campaign on one side and agents or intermediaries of Russia or Wikileaks on the other. In Mueller’s judgment, this evidence is insufficient to support a prosecution under Justice Department guidelines for conspiracy or any other crime in the collusion neighborhood. However, that is far from a conclusion that there was in fact no collusion.

Mitchell's Memo on Ford and Kavenaugh

“A ‘he said, she said’ case is incredibly difficult to prove. But this case is even weaker than that…I do not think that a reasonable prosecutor would bring this case based on the evidence before the Committee.”

That may well be right that the evidence currently in the hands of the Committee would not be sufficient for a prosecutor to conclude that Kavenaugh is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. This, however, is irrelevant.

Were the 12 Angry Men Right?

In the 1957 classic “12 Angry Men” Henry Fonda finally persuades the other eleven jurors that, although the defendant may well have been guilty, the prosecution’s evidence did not establish beyond a reasonable doubt that he was the one who stabbed his father to death. In his systematic debunking of prosecution evidence, Fonda rebutted the inference that the knife found in the body must have been the unusual, decorated switchblade that the defendant purchased earlier that night after a fight with his father. Witnesses, friends of the defendant, identified the fatal knife as being exactly the same kind they saw in defendant’s hands on the street, and the shopkeeper testified that he had never seen another like it. In the most dramatic scene of the film, Fonda produced a second identical knife that he had bought down the street during the trial. Was that enough to demote the knife, together with the other evidence, below the reasonable doubt threshold?