, 11 tweets, 2 min read Read on Twitter
BREAKING (CNN): Former DNI Clapper Says Trump Campaign "Aided and Abetted" Russians

This is what I've been arguing since 2017—and laid out in my 2018 book Proof of Collusion. Aiding and Abetting is a collusive crime, impeachable, and not an offense the Mueller Report considered.
1/ The CNN anchor responded to Clapper by trying to get him to say that he wasn't using "aiding in abetting" in the legal sense, though I have no idea why she had the confidence to insist on that correction. Clapper didn't withdraw the comment, and declined to get into the law.
2/ There's never been a serious conversation on whether Trump's conduct meets the definition of aiding and abetting, not in the Mueller Report and not anywhere else. David Corn, Jim Clapper, myself, and others have made the argument, and it's never been refuted on its own terms.
3/ The requirements for aiding and abetting are very different than for conspiracy, and the facts undergirding the allegation quite different as well. For instance, it has *nothing at all* to do with any allegation there was a Trump-IRA or Trump-GRU conspiracy *before the fact*.
4/ When the former Director of National Intelligence, who knows perfectly well what the phrase "aiding and abetting" means, makes that allegation on CNN, I've no idea why a journalist hearing that attempts to shut down the conversation rather than inquiring about legal standards.
5/ Sorry for the autocorrect typo in Tweet #1; it is, as you saw in all the other tweets in this thread, "aiding and abetting."

Perhaps if we'd been having this conversation all along, as we should have been, my phone's autocorrect would've known what I was typing as I typed it.
6/ What I want now is a serious national conversation, conducted on major media and using extensive citations to all the public evidence we have about what Trump and his campaign did, on the *critical* question of whether Trump committed the federal felony of aiding and abetting.
7/ After Trump and Flynn were made aware of Russian attacks against the United States in an August 17, 2016 classified briefing, both men willfully engaged in acts to induce the continuation of the very crimes they had already been conclusively informed of. And that is *illegal*.
8/ Given that no one significant in media *ever* alleged a before-the-fact conspiracy between Donald Trump and the IRA or GRU, with respect to Trump-Russia contacts alone the word "conspiracy" should've been used approximately 5% as frequently as the phrase "aiding and abetting."
9/ There *was* a "conspiracy" involving pre-election collusion, but it was a conspiracy between the *leaders of several foreign nations* to illegally aid Trump's election. (That's what the word "conspiracy" in the title of the sequel to Proof of Collusion refers to, by the way.)
10/ As to Trump, the key terms were always these:

1. Bribery
2. Money Laundering
3. Aiding and Abetting
4. "Compromised"

You can see for yourself how often those terms (all about "collusion") appear in the Mueller Report, as opposed to references to a conspiracy no one alleged.
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