John Oliver did a brilliant job of making this point:

Mueller arranged his report into Volumes 1 & 2 which address the issue of the conspiracy and obstruction separately, but they in fact are part and parcel of the exact same thing. One happened (obstruction) as a direct result of Trump’s attempt to take advantage of Russia’s conspiracy to help his campaign. One prime example was when he told Hope Hicks to cover-up Don Jr’s emails about his meeting with Veselnitskaya which he was told about before he departed to Europe for the G20.

Mueller Report Vol II Page 100.

On June 28, 2017, Hicks viewed the emails at Kushner's attorney's office.680 She recalled being shocked by the emails because they looked "really bad."681 The next day, Hicks spoke privately with the President to mention her concern about the emai ls, which she understood were soon going to be shared with Congress.682 The President seemed upset because too many people knew about the emails and he told Hicks that just one lawyer should deal with the matter.683 The President indicated that he did not think the emails would leak, but said they would leak if everyone had access to them. Later that day, Hicks, Kushner, and Ivanka Trump went together to talk to the President.685 Hicks recalled that Kushner told the President the June 9 meeting was not a big deal and was about Russian adoption, but that emails existed setting up the meeting.686 Hicks said she wanted to get in front of the story and have Trump Jr. release the emails as part of an interview with "softball questions."687 The President said he did not want to know about it and they should not go to the press.688 Hicks warned the President that the emails were "really bad" and the story would be"massive" when it broke, but the President was insistent that he did not want to talk about it and said he did not want details.689 Hicks recalled that the President asked Kushner when his document production was due. 690 “Kushner responded that it would be a couple of weeks and the President said, "then leave it alone."691 Hicks also recalled that the President said Kushner's attorney should give the emails to whomever he needed to give them to, but the President did not think they would be leaked to the press.692 Raffel later heard from Hicks that the President had directed the group not to be proactive in disclosing the emails because the President believed they would not leak.

However, on Election night Hicks had stated that there were no such contacts between the Trump campaign and Russia during the election. Mueller report Page #21.

On November 8, 2016, Trump was elected President. Two days later, Russian officials told the press that the Russian government had maintained contacts with Trump's "immediate entourage" during the campaign.54 In response, Hope Hicks, who had been the Trump Campaign spokesperson, said, "We are not aware of any campaign representatives that were in touch with any foreign entities before yesterday, when Mr. Trump spoke with many world leaders." 55 Hicks gave an additional statement denying any contacts between the Campaign and Russia: "It never happened. There was no communication between the campaign and any foreign entity during the campaign.”

This was clearly a lie as Hicks had been forwarded an email from Don Jr. by Kushner about his being contacted by WikiLeaks — who are not exactly Americans — and also George Papadopoulos and Carter Page had been specifically authorized to talk with Russians by Trump and Corey Lowendowski, Sessions and Manafort. Michael Cohen and Felix Sater were in contact with Russians (Peskov), Paul Manafort and Rick Gates were in contacts with Russians (KIlimnick), Don Jr. and Kushner were in contact with Russians (Veselnitskaya, Gorkov, Torshin) and Michael Flynn was in contact with Russians (RT, Kislyak).

Most of these people ultimately lied about those contacts in order to keep Hicks false statement, and many similar lies by Trump appear to be true. His lies — were the impetus for their lies.

As Alternet writes these lies, the firing of Comey, the attempting firings of Mueller using Don McGahn and also Corey Lewandowski were all part of conspiracy by the campaign and Trump to hide their many attempts to take advantages of Russia’s crimes. Those attempts may have mostly failed, but the point is the attempt not whether they succeeded or not.

Attempting to obstruct justice, such as giving orders to quash the special counsel probe as Trump did, is just as much a crime as actually obstructing justice. Your aids refusing to carry out your corrupt orders doesn’t make you less corrupt. Perhaps even more importantly, though, we have no idea how successful Trump was at obstructing justice. Consider an extremely important caveat in the summary of the first volume of the report, which focuses on the Russian election interference, the Trump campaign’s links to Russia, and potential conspiracy. Mueller could not establish that a conspiracy occurred; however, he noted that Even when individuals testified or agreed to be interviewed, they sometimes provided information that was false or incomplete, leading to some of the false-statements charges described above.…some of the individuals we interviewed or whose conduct we investigated—including some associated with the Trump Campaign—deleted relevant communications or communicated during the relevant period using applications that feature encryption or that do not provide for long-term retention of data or communications records. And he explained that while this report embodies factual and legal determinations that the Office believes to be accurate and complete to the greatest extent possible, given these identified gaps, the Office cannot rule out the possibility that the unavailable information would shed additional light on (or cast in a new light) the events described in the report. In other words, while Mueller didn’t demonstrate that a conspiracy occurred, he leaves open the possibility that it did. And [the] cover-up may be the reason he didn’t find it.

So Mueller specifically suggests that the obstruction not just by Trump but by many of his aides who lied and had destroyed information and evidence — may. have. worked.

For example, they didn’t find any emails between Papadopoulos and the campaign in which he shared with them that he had been told about the “Dirt” on Hillary which the Russians held nearly two months before the DNC hack and the WikiLeaks copies of the emails were released. Papadopoulos certainly had this prior knowledge, but it doesn’t really make any sense that he never told this to anyone in the campaign. And it makes no sense since he was willing to tell it to a Australian ambassador he’d never met before [and he also told the Greek Foreign Minister], then that Ambassador immediately went to the FBI, which is how the investigation started.

Despite this there was a claim by one member of the Trump campaign John Mashburn that he did recall seeing an email from Papadopoulos about the Hillary “dirt” — but no copy of that email has been found to verify that claim.

WASHINGTON — The White House official had a startling assertion: He thought he had received an email in the first half of 2016 alerting the Trump campaign that Russia had damaging information about Hillary Clinton. Testifying behind closed doors on Capitol Hill in late March, the official, John K. Mashburn, said he remembered the email coming from George Papadopoulos, a foreign policy adviser to the campaign who was approached by a Russian agent, sometime before the party conventions — and well before WikiLeaks began publishing messages stolen in hackings from Democrats. Such an email could have proved explosive, providing evidence that at least one high-ranking Trump campaign official was alerted to Russia’s meddling, raising questions about which advisers knew and undercutting President Trump’s denials of collusion.

Could that email have been deleted using an encrypted program or app? There’s frankly no way to know, but to date Mashburn has not recanted this statement. Could everyone else have been lying about it all this time? Frankly, yes.

The point of fact is that most of the Trumpsters may have failed to collude directly with Russia — Don Jr. didn’t get any dirt from Veselnitska, Michael Cohen didn’t complete the Moscow Tower deal, Papadopoulos didn’t find out more about the emails after Sessions asked him too — but as I’ve written before Roger Stone DIDN’T FAIL. He successfully communicated with DCLeaks and Guccifer 2.0 — both of whom were part of Russian Intelligence — he directly received some of the hack documents from the DCCC and gave Guccifer his review and opinion on them, and also through intermediaries established a two way link with WikiLeaks where he received early information about the Podesta emails and also also told them precisely when they should start releasing that information, which was ultimately just an hour after the Access Hollywood story was published, about which he had been apparently warned by someone inside Trump’s campaign.

The fact that Stone at the point wasn’t technically a member of his campaign is the only thing supports the argument that Trump “campaign” didn’t collude — the rest tried and failed, but Roger Stone definitely succeeded.

Also there has been the claim that the Russia “didn’t impact the votes” but frankly the releases from Wikileaks absolutely did have an impact on the election.

Philip Bump of the Washington Post, the Mueller report actually reveals the opposite. “It may be — and appears to be — true that Russia didn’t manipulate actual voting results,” says Bump, “but Russia’s efforts absolutely affected the vote, as they were intended to — and as Trump and his campaign hoped they would.” “Mueller’s indictments against a number of alleged Russian intelligence agents details how they accessed the Democratic National Committee network and Podesta’s email account (among other targets) and transferred the data to WikiLeaks,” said Bump. “There, the stolen material became a central component of the election coverage for much of the last month,” and even though the hacked Democratic emails didn’t really show anything damning or incriminating about Clinton or her associates, they were treated as a huge story, drowning out coverage of Trump’s “Access Hollywood” tape bragging about assaulting women. Based on the Mueller report, writes Bump, “The campaign knew that WikiLeaks was releasing material damaging to Clinton, prompting Trump to praise the organization frequently that October,” they believed it would help their campaign.” And public polling at the time showed 37 percent of voters would be less likely to vote for Clinton due to WikiLeaks. The claim that Russian involvement didn’t affect the race “is particularly indefensible coming from Trump, who celebrated WikiLeaks publicly precisely because he knew it would help his candidacy. He knew it and Mueller knew it,” Bump concludes. “It was, after all, one of the key reasons that Russia was interfering in the election in the first place.”

NBC news notes just how heavily the Trump campaign leaned on help from WikiLeaks in the final days of the campaign.

Less attention, however, has been paid to how Trump and his team seized on that Russian meddling, which the U.S. intelligence community says included the hacking of Clinton campaign chair John Podesta’s emails — and their release via WikiLeaks. How did Hillary Clinton blow a 7-percentage-point lead over Donald Trump in the final month of the campaign? Much of the post-election analysis has revolved around FBI Director James Comey’s letter to Congress on Oct. 28. Less attention was spent on the role that WikiLeaks played. Until, that is, news broke that the CIA thought Russia actively tried to help Trump win; figures connected to the Russian government allegedly hacked Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta’s emails, which then found their way to WikiLeaks. So what effect did WikiLeaks have on the election? The revelations from Podesta's emails — including excerpts of Clinton’s paid speech to Goldman Sachs, advisers’ candid criticisms of their candidate and a memo on "Bill Clinton Inc." — all fueled negative headlines. And Trump pounced: Oct. 31 in Warren, Mich.: "Did you see where, on WikiLeaks, it was announced that they were paying protesters to be violent, $1,500?... Did you see another one, another one came in today? This WikiLeaks is like a treasure trove"

Nov. 2 in Orlando, Fla.: "WikiLeaks just came out with a new one, just a little a while ago, it's just been shown that a rigged system with more collusion, possibly illegal, between the Department of Justice, the Clinton campaign and the State Department"

Nov. 4 in Wilmington, Ohio: "Boy, I love reading those WikiLeaks" NBC News counted 145 mentions of WikiLeaks by Trump in the last month of the race. Beyond the headlines and attacks from the stump that they produced, the WikiLeaks revelations hurt Clinton because voters couldn’t tell the difference between them and the longstanding controversy surrounding Clinton’s own emails, according to top campaign officials.

Be that as it may, Mueller’s investigation has been far from a “Nothing Burger.”

All told the Mueller and parallel investigations resulted in a total indictment count of: 9 Guilty Pleas (Cohen, Flynn, Gates, Papadopoulos, Van Der Zwaan, Pinedo Jr, Fieldman and Russian hackers Baratov and Dokuchaev) out of 50 indictments between the U.S. (47) and Russia (3) which include a total of 7 Americans, 1 British Citizen (Van Der Zwaan who’s father in Law is Russian Oligarch German Khan), 1 Canadian Citizen (Baratov who was born in Russia), 38 Russians and 3 Russian companies.

They weren’t able to gather the evidence they needed to prove a conspiracy by Trump and Co. — but they definitely have evidence of obstruction [which may be why they couldn’t prove the conspiracy] that Congress now has to address via Impeachment or other means.

Here are the detailed daily events for this week:

April 17th —

April 18th —

April 19th —

April 20th —

April 21st — Easter

April 22nd —

April 23rd —