General Discussion
Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsAttempting to conspire without finishing the act is a crime.
Title 18 section 903. Gotta love google. I need Muellers report to answer so many questions on conspiracy. Don't you?
The Velveteen Ocelot
(115,829 posts)in furtherance of the conspiracy even if the underlying crime is never committed. If you and a couple of other people just talk about robbing a bank, that's not a crime. But if, after talking about it, you go out and buy a ski mask and a shotgun while your co-conspirators case the bank, that is a crime - even if after that you all get the flu and are too sick to do the actual robbery.
The problem with proving conspiracies, though, is that sometimes it's hard to establish what was actually planned and who agreed to it.
shockey80
(4,379 posts)I cannot think of any other reason why the campaign manager of Trumps campaign would hand over polling data to a Russian. Can you?
The Velveteen Ocelot
(115,829 posts)It's not espionage because the data wasn't a national defense secret belonging to the government. It does not seem to have even been obtained illegally by Manafort, and some of it was actually public, so there's no crime there; giving it to the Kilimnik therefore wouldn't be the crime of selling stolen property (it does not appear that Kilimnik actually paid for the data either). More about this here: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/08/us/politics/manafort-trump-campaign-data-kilimnik.html
It's clearly collusion, but collusion isn't the crime of conspiracy unless an underlying crime was contemplated or committed. Maybe Mueller couldn't find a federal criminal statute that fit these facts.
shockey80
(4,379 posts)A lot of questions have to be answered.
dalton99a
(81,568 posts)The answer is that it isnt the same crime, and hasnt been thought of that way in the Anglo-American legal tradition for over 500 years. Rather, conspiracy has always been a separate offense, punished independently without calibration to the underlying crime. So conspiracy to sell a joint can be punished the same way as conspiracy to sell a kilo of marijuana.
Why would the law be written that way? The answer has to do with the harm to society when individuals agree with one another to commit criminal acts. These acts are seen as possessing a higher level of moral culpability and are also more dangerous. Two people can often do more harm than one. And those criminal economies of scale are sometimes supplemented by psychological dangers. People tend to take more risks in groups than alone. For these reasons, the law has always treated conspiracy harshly. Indeed, for much of American history, conspiring to commit an immoral but not illegal act was itself punishable as conspiracy.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/23/opinion/politics/conspiracy-theory-trump-cohen.html
SWBTATTReg
(22,156 posts)Grasswire2
(13,571 posts)We've heard that from the legal beagles on teevee.
So isn't it enough to indict?