> Cohen et. al. wanted to simply make it clear that the 'end of Russia discussions' was well before the nomination, and not near to it, purely for optics. "Pur

> Cohen et. al. wanted to simply make it clear that the 'end of Russia discussions' was well before the nomination, and not near to it, purely for optics. "Purely for optics." Why would the optics look bad? Because what they did was a way in which corruption often happens, eg a foreign government rewarding someone for losing an election but causing a political disturbance, and they lied about it because they knew it would look bad during an investigation. We can see the Chinese rewarding the Trumps with various favors, eg trademarks, for an example of how this kind of corruption actually happens, and why people would have been suspicious of the Trump dealings. You're correct: each misdeed of the Trump organization could be explained by bumbling -- a coin-flip between incompetence and malice. Unfortunately, there's a large number of such questionable practices, and the intersection of a high number of overlapping events is actually a large degree of certainty. The simplest explanation is the preferred: Trump is a career criminal, who committed multiple kinds of crimes during the presidential election, ranging from campaign finance violations to colluding with Russian intelligence operatives. He did this not because he's some kind of deep-sleeper agent from Russia, or whatever media narrative has formed, but rather because he's an out-of-touch sociopath who has been sheltered by wealth and legitimately doesn't understand why breaking national security law to enrich himself is wrong. But he did it, along with the other crimes, and knowingly orchestrated the whole series of crimes. As he's been doing for years, through the Trump Foundation, Trump University, his frequent defrauding of contractors, etc. So yes, he "colluded", but out of stupidity and incompetence, not thoughtful malice.