Mueller hasn’t found the low-level staffer.
Trump-Russia special counsel Robert Mueller is authorized to investigate “any links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump.” The popular word for that is collusion, and it remains at the heart of both the Mueller and the Senate Intelligence Committee investigations. (Majority Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee recently announced they were unable to find evidence proving collusion.)
While much about the Mueller investigation remains unknown, we do know the indictments he has filed and the pleas he has reached with various figures in the case. There are some, including charges against Russia’s Internet Research Agency, several individual Russians, and two minor figures, that target either people on the Russian side of the equation or those for whom there are no suspicions of collusion.
But Mueller has charged three people who were in the Trump campaign inner circle — former national security adviser Michael Flynn, former campaign chairman Paul Manafort, and former deputy campaign chairman Richard Gates, all with ties to Russia and all of whom might be expected to be part of a collusion scheme, had one existed. Mueller has also charged one peripheral hanger-on, George Papadopoulos, who might conceivably have been part of a collusion scenario.
But all have faced charges and none of those charges, at least so far, has involved allegations that Flynn, Manafort, Gates, or Papadapoulos played a role in a scheme of collusion, or coordination, or conspiracy, or whatever it is called. And that could tell the public something about the state of the collusion allegation inside the Mueller investigation.
To put it briefly: What kind of collusion scheme between Russia and the Trump campaign could have existed without Michael Flynn being part of it? What kind of collusion scheme could have existed without Manafort? And Gates? And yet none of them — nor Papadapoulos, either — has been charged with taking part in a collusion scheme.