to the people who are saying "But there's no COLLUSION!" It's very telling to me how the Trump team has focused its protestations on that word, collusion. That, along with the media coverage, has helped to frame the investigation as something that will eventually provide a binary answer to the question, "Was there a top-down working agreement between the Trump campaign and the Russian government to attempt to install him as president?"

It's reasonable to think that Mueller's team has reached a point where the answer to that question is a definitive "No." But it's also reasonable to think that the question itself long ago ceased being the central focus of the investigation, and I'd argue that it was never likely to last as the central focus. Kushner had a point when he said that the campaign was too disorganized to collude with Russia in the manner that the popular anti-Trump narrative suggests.

I think that that narrative plays into his hands, because doing so will allow Trump to claim victory in any circumstance other than Mueller issuing a report that says Trump was Stringer Bell sitting in a conference room with a bunch of KGB agents. I think that defense relies on an awfully narrow definition of the phrases "any links" and "any matters that may arise" regarding Trump and Russia. There are a hell of a lot of scenarios in which Trump was aware of or authorized some awfully shady shit that wasn't the result of organizational-level cooperation between his campaign and the Russian government.

For instance, which scenario is a bigger threat to our democracy?

- A Russian agent dresses up like a Cold War spy and hands Kushner or Manafort an envelope with a thumb drive of DNC emails that make Hillary look bad.
- A Russian oligarch pays Kushner or Manafort double the usual "fee" on a legally questionable transaction and says, "Oh, by the way, if you guys happen to win the election, I have some issues I'd like to discuss with the president. I trust you can make that happen."

I understand why people are still convinced No. 1 occurred. My personal intuition says that if it did, it would be an open-and-shut case, given the wiretapping evidence that would almost certainly exist on the Russian end. And, honestly, if all of those hundreds/thousands of hours of audiotapes and all the emails/texts Mueller has subpoenaed fail to produce a smoking gun that shows an indisputable pattern of organization or organizational quid pro quo, it's reasonable to assume that all of the anecdotal evidence we've heard just far is just tangential exceptions that can be explained away as bad decisions (meeting with Russian lawyer in Trump Tower, Flynn's interactions with his Russian contacts, etc.). Maybe cover-ups are the one thing Trump and his people don't fuck up, but I don't think that's the most likely explanation.

Either way, I think there's a reasonable chance that, whatever Mueller is focusing on, it's not the "major scheme" Trump's backers envision. Nothing in Mueller's marching orders eliminates the possibility that this is now a money laundering investigation, or a title fraud investigation, or an investigation into the violation of economic sanctions against a foreign power, or any number of other crimes that could have arisen in dealings between individuals in the Trump campaign and individuals in Russia.

There are a vast and unpredictable number of ways this investigation could be going that would make Trump's defenders correct in their conclusion that this is no longer a collusion investigation, but incorrect in the implication that Trump's chief worry is limited to impeachment on an obstruction of justice charge.