> "The Office considered in particular whether contacts between Trump Campaign officials and Russia-linked individuals could trigger liability for the crime of conspiracy

you missed a lot of context there... starting with the sentence just before your selection where they make it clear they're not talking about "collusion" but about conspiracy. Not finding evidence for conspiracy is not the same thing as not finding evidence for collusion.

"For that reason, this Office’s focus in resolving the question of joint criminal liability was on conspiracy as defined in federal law, not the commonly discussed term “collusion.”"

Even before that though the section opens with:

"As explained in Section IV above, the Office’s investigation uncovered evidence of numerous links (i.e., contacts) between Trump Campaign officials and individuals having or claiming to have ties to the Russian government."

and further states

"Finally, although the evidence of contacts between Campaign officials and Russia-affiliated individuals may not have been sufficient to establish or sustain criminal charges, several U.S. persons connected to the Campaign made false statements about those contacts and took other steps to obstruct the Office’s investigation and those of Congress."

This is part of the problem. They've got a ton of evidence of collusion. In this same section they make that clear by calling out the meeting between "campaign officials and Russians promising derogatory information on Hillary Clinton". That alone is evidence of collusion.

When you say there's no evidence of collusion it's just wrong. The problem they had is that "collusion" itself isn't a crime you can charge someone with. They instead had to see if other crimes (like conspiracy) were committed in the course of the collusion that took place. Nothing they had was enough to meet that standard.

Now, they also make it very clear that their lack of evidence may be due deliberate efforts to impede the investigation, but again, they say they don't think Trump is innocent of obstruction, yet they don't think they can successfully charge him with it either. This is the ambiguity that has the left and right talking past each other.

> Claims by some person that some other person claimed that they somehow knew about Russia having damaging information isn't evidence to open an investigation of treason on a political campaign.

Information from a trusted ally that one or more individuals working on Trump's campaign may have information about an attempt by a foreign nation to influence US elections sure is! The information came from a diplomat (not just some random person) who heard it directly from someone working on Trumps campaign (also not a random person).

I guess we can disagree on if that should be enough information to investigate, but the FBI felt that it was. I suspect that people telling other people things is a pretty common way to gather intelligence and you'd probably find a lot of foreign intelligence the US government feels is actionable to be insufficient to warrant even an investigation.

> Imagine thinking that justified wiretapping and investigating a political campaign -- you could spy on anybody.

Um... amusing you're in the US literally every communication you have transmitted over a wire (including this one) is being spied on. It's been true for ages. Same for everyone else in the US. I'm not saying that it's right, but in the US the justification for spying is not something our government is concerned about. Maybe you are right and they should need more evidence but with things as they right now, they had all the evidence they needed.

> There isn't even good evidence that it was Russia that exfiltrated the emails.

Here you've made a pretty big claim that goes against the views of many experts: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/cyber...

Mandiant, CrowdStrike, FireEye, and several others all agree it was Russia. It's not always easy to pin any particular attack or malware on a specific group of hackers. I always leave room for some doubt, but I see no reason not to trust these experts to give us the best analysis they can and they all reached the same conclusion. It would take stronger evidence or at least a larger consensus of expert analysis of our current evidence to convince me Russia wasn't involved. What convinced you?