"The report was stunningly wrong, for instance, on the law of coordination in campaign finance law. The Department of Justice’s appointment letter assigned Mueller to investigate campaign “coordination.” His report stated that “ ‘coordination’ does not have a settled definition in federal criminal law. We understood coordination to require an agreement—tacit or express.” However, Congress explicitly aimed to avoid such a permissive interpretation. In 2002, Congress passed a statute declaring that campaign finance regulations “shall not require agreement or formal collaboration to establish coordination,” and any knowing and willful violations are criminal. The Federal Election Commission implemented the statute accordingly: “Coordinated means made in cooperation, consultation or concert with, or at the request or suggestion of, a candidate,” without any requirement to prove agreement. The Supreme Court upheld these coordination rules in 2003: “[E]xpenditures made after a wink or nod often will be as useful to the candidate as cash.”
Mueller’s error in interpreting "coordination" has already had serious consequences. Mueller’s team prosecuted Paul Manafort and Rick Gates for separate crimes not directly related to the Trump campaign, but Mueller also found the evidence that these campaign officials committed felony coordination. It was a historic error to overlook such crimes, effectively inviting the same suggestions and winks-and-nods in 2020. A formal conclusion that the Trump campaign committed crimes would have made Trump’s obstruction more glaring and scandalous. Without such a conclusion, Volume II of his report, on the obstruction, fell flat.
Mueller made other legal errors that opened up loopholes for 2020 and beyond: suggesting that all “opposition research” might be protected by the First Amendment, and accepting a blanket defense of Manafort—a lawyer and a veteran campaign official or advisor in four presidential campaigns—as not “hav[ing] relevant knowledge of these legal issues.” If an operative like Manafort can't be assumed to have that knowledge, then who possibly could?
On the related facts, there are additional puzzles in the report’s omissions. Volume I, on the campaign and Russia, also surprisingly omits key facts that the Mueller team revealed elsewhere in prosecutorial documents, which when put in context make a case for criminal coordination. For example, the Mueller team's indictments of the Russian hackers showed a remarkable coincidence in dates between Trump campaign signals and Russian hacking and leaking efforts, often on the same day or even within hours. But the report itself either failed to note or failed to emphasize most of these."
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