Here are the biggest takeaways from the Russia indictments

Special counsel Robert Mueller just indicted 13 Russians and three Russian companies for allegedly mounting a sophisticated and wide-ranging effort to help Donald Trump win the White House.

The 37-page document outlining the charges is potentially good news for the White House all the same.

That’s because the indictment explicitly states that the Russians were posing as Americans when they communicated with “unwitting” members of the Trump campaign. In other words, as far as this indictment is concerned, nobody on the Trump campaign knowingly colluded with the Russians who were just indicted.

And what the indictment doesn’t say is also good for Trump: It doesn’t say this operation was directed, funded, or carried out by the Russian government or Vladimir Putin himself, and it doesn’t say the interference had any effect on the outcome of the 2016 election.

That helps bolster the core arguments Trump and his allies have been making for months: that there was no collusion, and that Russian meddling isn’t what got Trump elected. And indeed, shortly after the indictments were announced, the president tweeted: “The results of the election were not impacted. The Trump campaign did nothing wrong — no collusion!”

But it’s not all roses for Trump. The indictment outlines a vast conspiracy by Russian operatives to help Trump win the election, involving thousands of fake social media accounts and numerous staged pro-Trump rallies in multiple states across the country.

The sheer magnitude of the document — which outlines the movements and activities of 13 separate individuals and three businesses in minute detail — also shows for the first time just how much investigative muscle the Mueller probe really has. So if there is anything to find on Trump or his associates, Mueller almost certainly has the ability to find it.

Source: vox News