President Trump, following the lead set by his legal adviser Rudolph W. Giuliani on Monday, is drawing a tricky line on the Russia investigation. Month after month, Trump’s line has been that there was no collusion between him (or his campaign or between some generally unidentified group) and Russian interference efforts on his behalf in the 2016 election. …

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“Every conspiracy is a form of collusion,” Stanford law professor Robert Weisberg said when we spoke by phone on Tuesday. “Conspiracy is an agreement to do a crime plus some overt act in that direction. It’s really that simple.” An advantage of the law from a prosecutorial standpoint, Weisberg added, was that “you can punish the agreement and the overt act even if no one comes very, very close to committing the crime.”

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In other words, no crime even needs to have been committed. If you and I agree to rob Fifth Third Bank and then buy masks to conceal our identities — the overt act — we’ve engaged in a criminal conspiracy, even if we never rob the bank. “Overt acts” can be any number of things; Weisberg said that conspiracy indictments often “list about nine million overt acts,” like making a phone call or looking something up online. “The overt act is a nothing requirement,” Weisberg said.

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“If you have a lot of actors in a conspiracy with lots of them doing ancillary acts which might help towards the accomplishment of the target act, lots of people in lots of places can be guilty of lots of crimes,” he said.

Colluding can also be illegal in another way.

“There’s accomplice liability law,” Weisberg said. “Even if we didn’t have a conspiracy law, if you are engaged in an act with a certain mental state which would make you guilty of a crime and if I aid and abet you — and sometimes aiding and abetting can be really a form of really active encouragement, no more than that — I am an accomplice to the crime, and an accomplice to a crime commits the crime.”

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“There isn’t any separate crime called ‘complicity’,” he continued. “It’s just a way of committing a crime.”

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“The collusion term is a red herring,” Weisberg said. “Both accomplice liability — which is the same thing as complicity — and conspiracy could easily be described as forms of collusion, and they’re both ways of committing crimes.”

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