Still, a prosecution along these lines would hardly be straightforward or routine. In the past, criminal cases about solicitation have focussed on cash, so Mueller’s case would rest on a novel interpretation of the law. The status of WikiLeaks also creates a potential obstacle. Federal law contains an exemption for the press; news operations cannot be charged with making illegal campaign contributions by covering a campaign. The Trump campaign—and surely WikiLeaks itself—would likely argue that the organization is a journalistic outlet. It’s worth noting that President Trump’s own Central Intelligence Agency has a different view of WikiLeaks. Mike Pompeo, the director of the C.I.A., said in a speech in April, “It’s time to call out WikiLeaks for what it really is: a non-state hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors like Russia.”

There’s another way in which collusion could be a crime—and it’s based on the original hack of the e-mails. The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which was enacted in 1986, prohibits unauthorized persons from obtaining the private electronic information of others, including access to e-mail accounts. “If there is an agreement to commit hacking, it doesn’t matter if the people in the Trump campaign didn’t do the actual hacking—it just matters that they knew someone else would do it. There just needs to be an agreement that one or more will do it,” Orin Kerr, a professor at George Washington University Law School and an expert on computer law, told me. “They just need to have encouraged the hacking.”

Is the distribution of e-mails stolen by others a crime? What if (as appears to be the case here) the theft of the e-mails took place well before the Trump campaign encouraged their distribution? In this case, the law of criminal aiding and abetting, not conspiracy, might be useful for Mueller. In most aiding-and-abetting cases, the defendant assists the main perpetrator while the crime is taking place—by, for example, driving the getaway car in a bank robbery. A recent Supreme Court precedent appears to expand the definition of aiding and abetting to include assistance after the crime has been committed. In Rosemond v. United States, the Court upheld the conviction of a defendant for aiding and abetting the use of a gun in a drug crime, even though he had no advance knowledge that there would be a gun present at the transaction. What mattered, according to Justice Elena Kagan’s opinion, was that “the defendant has chosen, with full knowledge, to participate in the illegal scheme.” There is currently no proof that anyone in the Trump campaign encouraged the Russians, or anyone else, to hack into their adversaries’ e-mail accounts for the e-mails that were eventually released. But Trump, Sr.,’s speech and Trump, Jr.,’s e-mails show that they knew that the e-mails had been hacked, and still encouraged their distribution. The C.E.O. of Cambridge Analytica, the data-analytics firm that worked for the Trump campaign, reportedly even reached out to WikiLeaks in the summer of 2016, asking it for State Department e-mails from Hillary Clinton so that the firm could organize and release them.

According to Susan Hennessey, a former lawyer at the National Security Agency and now a fellow at the Brookings Institution, where she studies cybersecurity, “Rosemond suggests that you can be held liable for the full crime even if you don’t know about every single element in advance. In this context, it may mean that the Trump-campaign officials can be prosecuted for aiding and abetting the hacking even though they did not know about it when it was done. By joining in the distribution of the hacked e-mails, they aided and abetted the commission of the crime.” (Journalists and others who publish newsworthy leaked and hacked documents without fear of criminal consequences can do so thanks to First Amendment protections.)

Nonetheless, based on the available evidence, both of these theories of criminal liability—conspiracy to receive unlawful in-kind contributions from foreigners, and aiding and abetting the hacking of e-mails—look like long shots for Mueller. Prosecutors tend to be cautious about pursuing criminal cases based on novel legal theories. “Prosecutors are expected to win every case they bring, and they are risk-averse because they don’t want to lose,” Samuel Buell, a former federal prosecutor who is now a professor at Duke’s law school, told me. “They know that in virtually every white-collar case the defense lawyer is going to say to the jury, ‘My client didn’t know what he was doing was against the law.’ So the key evidence in these cases is the proof that the defendants knew what they were doing was wrong—like when they destroy documents or lie about what they’re doing. That’s what establishes consciousness of guilt.” This may be why Mueller’s team has closely investigated the events of July 8, 2017, aboard Air Force One, after the news first broke of Trump, Jr.,’s e-mails with Goldstone and the subsequent meeting with the Russian lawyer. On the plane, the President apparently dictated a statement about the meeting that may have been false. The first comments from the White House about the meeting were drafted in part by Trump, and asserted that the conversation had focussed on adoption issues, which was misleading at best. If either Trump, Sr. or Jr., lied about the meeting in Trump Tower, that could suggest they knew that what had occurred in the meeting was a criminal act.

Sekulow dismisses the possibility of criminal charges based on either unlawful campaign contributions or the aiding and abetting of hacking. “I’m not concerned about these bizarre theories,” he told me. “There is no basis for saying, under the law or the facts, that any of this behavior during the campaign was criminal.” Cobb also professes optimism about the resolution of the case, and suggested to me that he thought the Mueller investigation, at least as it relates to the White House, would wrap up soon, probably in January of next year. (Cobb has made this kind of prediction before, guessing wrongly that the investigation would end by Thanksgiving or shortly after. Recent news reports suggest that Trump, perhaps influenced by Cobb, has been telling friends that he thinks Mueller will finish his work in the next few weeks.) Cobb said that even Flynn’s guilty plea “demonstrates again that the special counsel is moving with all deliberate speed, and clears the way for a prompt and reasonable conclusion.” The trial of Manafort and Gates isn’t scheduled to begin until next May, so Cobb’s sense of Mueller’s schedule is likely wishful thinking. On October 30th, the day of the Manafort and Gates indictment, Mueller also revealed that George Papadopoulos, a foreign-policy adviser to the Trump campaign, had pleaded guilty earlier in the month to lying to F.B.I. agents about his contacts with Russia during 2016. Aaron Zelinsky, one of Mueller’s prosecutors, said in court at Papadopoulos’s guilty-plea proceeding that “there’s a large-scale ongoing investigation of which this case is a small part.” Flynn’s plea and his coöperation suggest that when it comes to the final area of the prosecutor’s inquiry, obstruction of justice, the investigation may be ramping up rather than winding down.

Unlike “collusion,” the crime of obstruction of justice is well established and easy to understand. “The law prohibits people from taking actions that would impede the government’s search for the truth and doing so with the intent to keep the truth from coming out,” Fishman, the former U.S. Attorney, told me. The issue is at the heart of Mueller’s mandate because a possible obstruction of justice—the President’s decision to fire James Comey—gave rise to the creation of the special-counsel position in the first place. The crucial issue in the Comey firing is whether the President had a corrupt motive for the dismissal.

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Two competing narratives about Comey’s departure lead to dramatically different conclusions about Trump’s behavior. The first comes principally from Comey’s testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee. Comey laid out a damning account of his dealings with Trump, starting on January 6th, before the Inauguration. By this point, it had been widely reported that the F.B.I. was investigating Russian interference in the 2016 campaign, and on that day Comey went to Trump Tower to brief the President-elect about the situation, including the claim, later revealed in the so-called Steele dossier, that Trump had cavorted with prostitutes in Moscow, in 2013. Three weeks later, on January 27th, Trump invited Comey to dinner alone at the White House and asked him if he wanted to keep his job as director. Trump then raised the subject of the Russia investigation and said, “I need loyalty, I expect loyalty.” Comey said he finessed the request by agreeing to provide “honesty,” and “honest loyalty.” Three weeks later, Trump had the talk with Comey in which he pressured him to let Flynn off easy, a conversation that now seems especially sinister. On March 30th, Trump called Comey at the F.B.I. and described the Russia investigation as “a cloud” that was impairing his ability to act on behalf of the country. He said he had nothing to do with Russia, and had not been involved with hookers in Moscow. He asked Comey what the two of them could do to “lift the cloud.” On April 11th, the President called Comey again to ask what the director had done to “get out” the word that he, Trump, was not personally under investigation regarding Russia. To all of the President’s requests in these conversations, Comey later testified, he replied in as noncommittal a way as possible. The next significant contact with the President was the letter of dismissal Comey received on May 9th. Comey’s account lays out the case that he was fired because he refused to abort the investigation of Trump—in other words, that the President had obstructed justice.