Thread by @SethAbramson

Public challenge: Find a news article or a thread by someone with a verified Twitter account that accuses Trump of striking a secret agreement with the IRA or GRU prior to the disinformation campaign run by the former or the hacking campaign run by the latter.

You won't find it.

1/ My point: the "collusion" being discussed on television and radio and social media and on every possible means of communication today is *not* the "collusion" that anyone in media or on social media or anywhere was discussing before today. This is a surreal moment for America.

2/ Just finished with NPR; next, BBC; then a longer conversation for an ongoing documentary. I am doing all I can today to spread the word that the Obstruction issue now just goes to Congress (Rosenstein/Barr will be rightly ignored) and the collusion issue is (oddly) unresolved.

3/ My recommendation—and this will only shock folks who haven't read this feed for two years—is that Democrats *not* express any alarm or upset about conclusions suggesting there's insufficient proof of a conspiracy with the IRA and GRU. Why? Because we *never thought there was*.

4/ As I said in my pinned thread—which I hope those with a moment will read and retweet—the only surprising thing about Mueller's conclusions re: a Trump-IRA/Trump-GRU conspiracy is that he apparently *did* find some evidence (if not enough) when frankly I thought there was none.

5/ If Mueller had said that there's no evidence Trump's Russia policy is the result of bribery—and constitutes aiding and abetting Russia's interference efforts *after the fact*—I'd be outraged, and would say that Democrats should be outraged. But that's *not* what happened here.

6/ The thing I'd say to Democrats is, they're on their heels when, frankly, they needn't be. At all.

On Obstruction, Congress remains the only body that can or will speak finally to the issue. On collusion, the investigation of what Democrats have called "collusion" *continues*.

7/ Tomorrow, Democrats will wake up—after a feverish day of listening to confused analysis by @ShimonPro and strange proclamations by @wolfblitzer—and say, "Wait a minute, what just happened?" And the correct answer will be... actually? *Not much*. In fact, almost nothing at all.

8/ Note: notice how there are virtually no attacks on Mueller—relative to the entire stock of analysis out there—from the left. Now think about what the *right* would have said about Mueller if he'd issued a harrowingly bad report for Trump. One side is showing it has principles.

9/ Many months ago I started tweeting that Team Trump—led by Rudy Giuliani—was redefining collusion in a *narrow* way to focus *only* on collusion allegations that, well... *no one had ever made*. Today, William Barr showed that he's just as capable of framing collusion that way.

10/ One thing NPR just asked was, "Well, are you critiquing Mueller for so narrowly construing his investigative scope on collusion?" And the answer is... *no*! Defiantly, *no*. I can easily give 100 reasons for why Mueller would've left the rest of the collusion probe to others.