Is it the coverup — or the crime? With Trump and Russia, we still can't be sure - Salon

It seems as if many observers believe that special counsel Robert Mueller is homing in on Trump over issues of obstruction of justice. It is the one case that offers the most public evidence, mainly stemming from the testimony of former FBI Director James Comey and various leaks about Trump's clumsy demanding that just about everyone who walks into the White House do whatever it takes to get him off the hook. It's not much of a stretch to think there might be a case there.

There is more to the Russian investigation than obstructing it, however. We don't have a clear idea what that might be yet, which is as it should be, but there is enough evidence in the public domain to see the basic outlines. Jonathan Alter and Nick Akerman stitched it together nicely in this piece for the Daily Beast.

They make the common-sense observation that during the Watergate scandal President Richard Nixon was never shown to have known about the original crime and was done in by the coverup, but the current political environment is quite different, and will likely require the underlying crime be proven as well. After all, this case is about a conspiracy with a foreign government and if there is evidence that actually happened, it's something that should be properly adjudicated. It's not your run-of-the-mill corruption investigation.

Alter and Akerman point out that Nixon's prosecutors had almost all the information they needed more than nine months before he resigned and they assume Mueller too has amassed most of the evidence for his case, which they believe consists of "conspiracy, wire fraud, illegal foreign campaign contributions, or all three." For the conspiracy they point to Michael Flynn's statement to the court admitting that he'd lied to the FBI about something that “had a material impact” on the FBI’s probe “into the existence of any links or coordination between individuals associated with the [Trump] Campaign and Russia’s efforts to intervene in the 2016 election.” They write:

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