Which non-crime is being investigated?

Ace of Spades writes,

Hey, Anybody Remember RUSSIAN COLLUSION??!!
—Ace of Spades
The FBI executed raids to seize documents about payments to Stormy Daniels and the other one– yet such payments are not, of themselves, a crime. You can pay people to keep quiet. You only can’t do so to thwart an investigation, and there was no investigation into the important case of Trump Banged a Porn Star in 2006 when the payments were made. Or thereafter.

Well, now apparently there is. So which non-crime is being investigated? Infidelity, which isn’t a crime, paying a mistress to keep her mouth shut, which also isn’t a crime, or conspiring to do things which are not crimes, which is therefore not conspiracy?

There’s a legal word for conspiring to do thing which are not crimes — it’s called “talking,” and it’s not a crime. (Well, it hadn’t been, but a lot of people are coming around to the position that talking, and thinking, ought to be crimes, if what’s being talked about or thought about is Badthought.)

Claims are made that this could have been an in-kind donation by, I suppose, Michael Cohen to Trump. This all depends upon the assumption that this wasn’t Trump’s money. It may have been his money, with Cohen simply claiming the money was taken from a corporation. Trump may have filled this corporation with money just for this sort of purpose.

Seems a lot of mights and maybes there to justify raiding the confidential files of the sitting president’s personal attorney, seizing all memos of privileged conversations between them.

Meanwhile, Byron York asks — anyone remember RUSSIAN COLLUSION, you know, the pretext for this apparently limitless, infinite-jurisdiction zero-subject-matter investigation?

He notes that the charges Mueller has brought against Manafort do not involve collusion, and this latest criminal referral obviously must not involve collusion, or else he would have done this himself, instead of farming it out to his pals in the Southern District of New York Attorney’s office.

Barone writes,

It is always possible that Mueller has more charges in mind for Manafort. But it is important to note that the no-knock raid on Manafort’s apartment took place on July 26, 2017. Manafort, along with business partner and fellow Trump campaign official Rick Gates, was indicted on Oct. 27, 2017. On Feb. 22, 2018, Mueller expanded the charges against Manafort in what’s called a superseding indictment. In none of those many charges is the accusation that Manafort was involved in a scheme with Russia to influence the 2016 campaign.

Again, it is important to note how little we know about what Mueller is doing. For all the public knows, a big collusion indictment could be coming tomorrow. But it is also important to note what we do know. And we do know who Mueller has charged, and with what, after an FBI investigation that began in July 2016 and a special counsel probe that began in May 2017. And so far, there have been no charges – -not against Manafort or Gates, not against Michael Flynn, not against George Papadopoulos, or others — involving alleged collusion.

The Mueller investigation is marching on, and in the case of Cohen, giving birth to new farm-team investigations, but so far at least, the story has not been about collusion.

Read more here.