The joke he made at a political rally about Russia releasing Clinton's emails if they had them? That simply is not not evidence that Trump colluded with Putin to hack the election. Calling that evidence is like a climate denier calling an unseasonal snowfall evidence that global warming is false. And that's not what the misinformation peddlers at the time were claiming to be the evidence, either. Remember Adam Schiff's repeated false claims of "ample evidence" that he could not share but alleged were shown to the House Intelligence Committee that he chaired? That was the kind of inflammatory misinformation that drove the whole conspiracy theory.
This is how conspiracy theories hook people, they tell people what they desperately want to be true, and they falsely claim there is this vast amount of solid, air-tight evidence, and it will all soon come out. That gets people invested, hooked, convinced that it is true. When things eventually get disproven much later and it turns out there is no such evidence forthcoming, the believers are so invested in it that they are incapable of accepting the reality, so they cling to whatever flotsam they possibly can -- "Trump did collude with Putin to hack the election, therefore this joke at a campaign rally must be a message to Putin, therefore it is irrefutable evidence that Trump colluded with Putin to hack the election". It works on probably a subconscious level, it is a very difficult to step back and see this when you are in the hole, let alone dig yourself out of it.
No report into this including the vaunted Mueller Report has ever produced any evidence that Trump colluded or conspired with Putin to hack the election. I have read them. Mueller Report On The Investigation Into Russian Interference In The 2016 Presidential Election, Volume I, p. 181, second paragraph:
For that reason, this Office’s focus in resolving the question of joint criminal liability was on conspiracy as defined in federal law, not the commonly discussed term “collusion.” The Office considered in particular whether contacts between Trump Campaign officials and Russia-linked individuals could trigger liability for the crime of conspiracy—either under statutes that have their own conspiracy language (e.g., 18 U.S.C. §§ 1349, 1951(a)), or under the general conspiracy statute (18 U.S.C. § 371). The investigation did not establish that the contacts described in Volume I, Section IV, supra, amounted to an agreement to commit any substantive violation of federal criminal law—including foreign-influence and campaign-finance laws, both of which are discussed further below. The Office therefore did not charge any individual associated with the Trump Campaign with conspiracy to commit a federal offense arising from Russia contacts, either under a specific statute or under Section 371’s offenses clause.
Citizens United case means that, by design, there will be no evidence of money transfers from foreign powers to US elections.
so the idea we can 'find no evidence' is because people rigged the system so there would be no evidence.
Democrats could start taking money directly from Xi Jingping or from some communist in Venezuela and we would never know about it. Republicans can take money from the Saudis and we would never know about it. This is the reality of modern politics in the US.
infinite invisible money and zero evidence that anything happened, by design
Right, if you're already deep in the hole and all-in on a conspiracy theory, there are endless ways you can explain away holes in the theory and turn conjecture or coincidence into hard evidence. Even the lack of evidence can be evidence to people taken in by conspiracy theories.
Same as how China secretly paid the liberals to create the global warming hoax, that's another one along the same lines as the Russia collusion one that some people actually believe.
This is how conspiracy theories hook people, they tell people what they desperately want to be true, and they falsely claim there is this vast amount of solid, air-tight evidence, and it will all soon come out. That gets people invested, hooked, convinced that it is true. When things eventually get disproven much later and it turns out there is no such evidence forthcoming, the believers are so invested in it that they are incapable of accepting the reality, so they cling to whatever flotsam they possibly can -- "Trump did collude with Putin to hack the election, therefore this joke at a campaign rally must be a message to Putin, therefore it is irrefutable evidence that Trump colluded with Putin to hack the election". It works on probably a subconscious level, it is a very difficult to step back and see this when you are in the hole, let alone dig yourself out of it.
No report into this including the vaunted Mueller Report has ever produced any evidence that Trump colluded or conspired with Putin to hack the election. I have read them. Mueller Report On The Investigation Into Russian Interference In The 2016 Presidential Election, Volume I, p. 181, second paragraph:
For that reason, this Office’s focus in resolving the question of joint criminal liability was on conspiracy as defined in federal law, not the commonly discussed term “collusion.” The Office considered in particular whether contacts between Trump Campaign officials and Russia-linked individuals could trigger liability for the crime of conspiracy—either under statutes that have their own conspiracy language (e.g., 18 U.S.C. §§ 1349, 1951(a)), or under the general conspiracy statute (18 U.S.C. § 371). The investigation did not establish that the contacts described in Volume I, Section IV, supra, amounted to an agreement to commit any substantive violation of federal criminal law—including foreign-influence and campaign-finance laws, both of which are discussed further below. The Office therefore did not charge any individual associated with the Trump Campaign with conspiracy to commit a federal offense arising from Russia contacts, either under a specific statute or under Section 371’s offenses clause.