In the political and popular vernacular, collusion has been incorrectly conflated with its legal equivalent: criminal conspiracy. Mueller said that he found insufficient evidence of a criminal conspiracy between the Trump campaign and the Russian government—a finding that Trump keeps insisting means there was “no collusion.”
But the special counsel noted in his report that there were “numerous links (i.e., contacts) between the Russian government and the Trump Campaign.” The report also found that affiliates of the Trump campaign repeatedly promoted the work of Russia’s innocuously named Internet Research Agency (I.R.A.), which carried out Moscow’s election-interference operations through a social-media campaign and used various means to communicate directly with the campaign.
The report notes that “on multiple occasions, members and surrogates of the Trump Campaign promoted—typically by linking, retweeting, or similar methods of reposting—pro-Trump or anti-Clinton content published by the IRA through IRA-controlled social media accounts.” Both sides then lied about the meetings and other contacts, which were designed to help Trump win the election.
Collusion is defined by Merriam-Webster’s as a “secret agreement or cooperation, especially for an illegal or deceitful purpose,” such as “acting in collusion with the enemy.” Under that definition, the contacts between Trump’s campaign and Russia, an avowed enemy of the United States, at least amounted to coöperation with a deceitful purpose.
