"There are other examples too. The Mueller report lays out in detail a sustained effort to obtain a set of emails that figures associated with the campaign believed hackers might have obtained from Hillary Clinton’s private server before she deleted them. The trouble is that it appears the emails didn’t exist. It has previously been reported that now-deceased Trump supporter Peter Smith went to extreme lengths to try and track down Clinton’s 30,000 deleted emails. According to the Mueller report, after candidate Trump stated in July 2016 that he hoped Russia would “find the 30,000 emails,” future National Security Adviser Michael Flynn reached out to multiple people to try and obtain those emails. One of the individuals he reached out to was Smith. Smith later circulated a document that claimed his “Clinton Email Reconnaissance Initiative” was “‘in coordination’ with the Trump Campaign” specifically naming Flynn, Sam Clovis, Steve Bannon and Kellyanne Conway. While the investigation found that Smith communicated with both Flynn and Clovis, it found no evidence that any of the four individuals listed “initiated or directed Smith’s efforts.” So essentially, a bunch of people in Trump’s orbit tried very hard to obtain stolen emails but came up empty. Mueller decided that chasing this particular ghost did not constitute criminal conduct."
We know those 30,000 emails and almost 250,000 other emails from Hillary’s unauthorized server do indeed exist, found on Huma Abedin’s husband Anthony Wiener‘s Apple MacBook Pro, in a file folder called "INSURANCE," seized when he was arrested by the New York Police Department for sexual perversity with a minor. That laptop was handed over to the FBI and James Comey In 2016.
"In coordination with the Trump Campaign. . ." simply meant that the campaign was looking for that information and Smith had sent emails to Flynn, Clovis, and Conway saying he too was trying to find them. It doesn’t mean he was under their direction or being paid by the campaign. Even if he were being paid to search for them, it’s not illegal to do so. The article implies that attempting to find the emails was somehow "criminal conduct" even though it failed. It isn’t. Even finding and publishing them is not criminal conduct. . . Discovering and publishing evidence of criminal conduct by public officials is NOT criminal, otherwise many news reporters would have been imprisoned over the past two centuries.
For almost 3 years now we have had to listen to adults of normal intelligence pretend that Trump's joke during a public event was something other than what it was. Everybody knew that the emails had been illegally deleted by Hillary Clinton, and that the FBI had the very computer they were supposedly stored on at one point. If Trump had said space aliens instead of Russians we'd have the same people claiming Trump was crazy since he believed in space aliens.
The FBI and DOJ should have been looking for those emails if they weren't corrupted by Hillary and Obama's administration.
This conclusion is far from the full vindication that chants of “no collusion” imply, a fact driven home by the detailed factual record the Mueller report puts forward. In some cases, there was indeed a meeting of the minds between Trump campaign officials and Russia, just not in pursuit of a criminal objective. In others, members of the Trump campaign acted criminally—as evidenced by the guilty pleas and indictments that the Mueller team secured—but did so on their own. At times, these efforts even worked toward the same objective as the Russian government, but on seemingly parallel tracks as opposed to in coordination. None of this amounted to a criminal conspiracy that the Mueller team believed it could prove beyond a reasonable doubt. But the dense network of interactions, missed opportunities, and shared objectives between the Trump campaign and the Russian government remains profoundly disturbing.
What a joke!