I concur with 99% of this but there's a crucial point I need to make. According to the Mueller report, they specifically investigated "conspiracy", and never even touched the idea of "collusion":

  "In evaluating whether evidence about collective action of multiple individuals constituted a crime, we applied the framework of conspiracy law, not the concept of 'collusion.' In so doing, the Office recognized that the word 'collusion' was used in public reporting about the investigation, but collusion is not a specific offense or theory of liability found in the United States Code, nor is it a term of art in federal criminal law. For those reasons, the Office’s focus in analyzing questions of joint criminal liability was on conspiracy as defined in federal law." (Mueller Report, Volume I, p. 2)

This is important for two reasons. First, because during the election, the prime claim made by people who were pointing this out was that collusion was happening. An actual conspiracy between Trump and Russia was thought to be too outlandish even by the people like Seth Abramson, who was one of the most ardent proponents of the collusion idea.

So it's a sleight of hand:

- raise the bar from collusion to conspiracy

- say the bar for conspiracy is not met

- therefore Trump is exonerated of collusion

But the charge of collusion still stands. And as I laid out in my other post, the facts support the plain meaning of collusion - "secret or illegal cooperation or conspiracy, especially in order to cheat or deceive others".

> After thorough investigation, it was concluded that there was not substantial explicit collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.

The second reason this is important is that because the bar was raised to conspiracy, we cannot claim that the investigation that was performed was sufficient. It wasn't a thorough investigation of conspiracy, so we can't even say they didn't find enough evidence when they didn't look under the biggest rocks.

For starters, the investigators were essentially barred from investigating any financial links. In 2008 Trump's own son is quoted saying "In terms of high-end product influx into the US, Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets", so any serious investigation of links between Trump and Russia should necessarily include financial links.

And of course now we have hindsight to know why financial links were verboten -- after the investigation concluded, it was revealed by none other than Michael Cohen, that Trump was actually brokering a "Trump Tower: Moscow" deal during the 2016 campaign. He had already signed a non-binding letter of intent with a Russian company, and the deal included a penthouse dedicated to Vladimir Putin. But Trump when asked about his dealings in Russia in 2016 had said this:

  "I have nothing to do with Russia. I have nothing to do with Russia – for anything. I don’t have any deals there. I have no deals that could happen there because we’ve stayed away."

The most frustrating part about this is we didn't learn it through the Mueller Investigation, although we should have. The investigation was kneecapped, cut short, and then the results were spun and lied about (a federal judge admonished AG Barr for a "lack of candor" in the way he selectively quoted ad redacted the "executive summary" of the Mueller report he released before the full report, which allowed Trump to take a "exoneration" victory lap, that was anything but).

No, we know about this because Michael Cohen was arrested for campaign finance violations, for crimes he committed in 2016 on the behest of Trump, to buy the silence of a porn star Trump had an affair with.

And this doesn't even get into the second volume, which details the myriad ways Trump obstructed the investigation, which included firing investigators (Comey), witnesses tampering (dangling pardons in front of Manafort), lying to investigators (according to Mueller's testimony), etc. etc.

So it's safe to say the investigation was not thorough or complete.

This is just an infinite fractal mosaic of malfeasance, degeneracy, ineptitude, buffoonery, and all around disappointing behavior, from all parties.