Collusion is not a crime? Not so fast.

Like some legal zombie that can’t be killed, the argument that “collusion is not a crime” is back and walks among us. And it’s still nonsense.

There were reports last week that former Trump attorney Michael Cohen would testify, contrary to repeated White House denials, that President Trump knew of and approved the infamous Trump Tower meeting in June 2016, when Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner and other campaign officials met with Russians offering damaging information about Hillary Clinton.

Faced with this new evidence of what looks remarkably like colluding with the Russians, the president’s defense has returned to the claim that any such collusion, even if it happened, would not be a crime.

It’s true there is no crime called “collusion.” It’s also irrelevant. What matters in criminal law is the facts, not the precise terms used to describe what happened.

Saying the president is off the hook because there is no crime called “collusion” is akin to claiming the president could shoot someone on 5th Avenue and escape prosecution because the criminal statutes prohibit “homicide” not “shooting.”

Collusion is generally defined as a secret agreement to work together towards some illicit end. As I pointed out more than a year ago when this argument first surfaced, in criminal law this describes a potential conspiracy.

A criminal conspiracy exists when two or more people form an agreement to pursue an unlawful goal and at least one of them takes some action in furtherance of that agreement. The federal conspiracy statute, 18 U.S.C. 371, prohibits conspiracies to defraud the United States and conspiracies to commit an offense against the United States.

Both charges are potentially relevant here — and Mueller has already deployed both.

At: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/collusion-is-not-a-crime-not-so-fast/2018/07/31/fc8d20ba-94f3-11e8-a679-b09212fb69c2_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.e814cac44707

Surprise, Rudy: "Collusion" may not be a crime in so many words - but conspiracy is.