Collusion vs Criminal Conspiracy

Defendants, together with others known and unknown to the Grand Jury, knowingly and intentionally conspired to defraud the United States by impairing, obstructing, and defeating the lawful functions of the Federal Election Commission, the U.S. Department of Justice, and the U.S. Department of State in administering federal requirements for disclosure of foreign involvement in certain domestic activities.

So what does this mean, in a nutshell?  First of all, it doesn't mean what some liberals are suggesting. Contrary to some arguments, it is not a catch all charge for some form of generic "collusion". There is a difference between "collusion" and "conspiracy".

In the case of the Russian trolling farm, the entire conspiracy was cited as breaking several actual laws. These infringements included stealing American identities, falsely posing as those people, concealing their funding from the FEC,  obtaining travel visas under false and fraudulent pretense, and (yep, you guessed it - the tried and true Mueller favorite of) failing to "register" as foreign agents.

The reality is that the conspiracy charges are directly tied to the fact that the "co-conspirators" broke laws to accomplish their goals. No Americans were charged in the indictment, because no Americans were widely complicit with any of the actual transgressions of the law. One American was charged for actually selling the stolen identities, but was not considered part of the larger conspiracy. Otherwise, simply participating in a rally or otherwise engaging with the group is not illegal.

So by this argument, the fact that the DNC and Hillary Clinton hired a foreign agent to dig up dirt on Donald Trump may be considered collusion, but not a criminal conspiracy. The reason would that the agent (Richard Steele) did not break any laws in gathering the information. (At least as far as we know. Nobody in the FBI seemed very concerned with looking into that possibility).  Either way, the argument then becomes that this is considered legitimate "opposition research" rather than conspiracy.

But by the same standards, the idea of the Trump campaign being provided with dirt on the Hillary campaign would not be considered a criminal conspiracy unless that information was obtained illegally. The Trump Tower meeting, for example, never materialized anything substantial (or anything illegally obtained) on the Clinton campaign. It did not (as some have suggested) involve stolen emails. Rather the dirt was a vague allegation of Russian campaign contributions to Clinton. Moreover, the Trump campaign did not actually use any of that material gathered in the campaign. So by the same reasons the Richard Steele dossier may be collusion, but not conspiracy, you must also consider the Trump Tower meeting to be the same.

This is why there is such a big focus on the "email" situation. The emails were hacked and then distributed, which is a crime (albeit a seldom charged crime). This was really the only significant "crime" committed that could conceivably be tied to Americans. So if it could be shown that the Trump campaign played a part in either hacking or distributing the DNC and Clinton emails, then a criminal conspiracy charge could probably be made. But short of the Trump campaign assisting the Russians in breaking some sort of law, there isn't anything that rises to the level of criminal conspiracy.

It's really that simple.