I, of course, have no inside information regarding the contents of the Mueller report. Here, however, is a nice interactive from the Wall Street Journal about what is already known.
My take is Mueller could easily decide what Comey did with HRC, which is to say there was a prosecutable crime in HRC's carelessness regarding her use of governmental email accounts, but decide a prosecution wouldn't likely be successful. To me, what is already known reveals Trump's campaign coordinated with a foreign government in a manner that, had it been Alger Hiss and Harry Dexter White doing the same for the Truman or FDR administrations, there would be no doubt in anyone's mind of collusion from any political standpoint, forget the definition of "treason" in the Constitution for a moment (though "giving aid and comfort" to an enemy may well have applicability with respect to Trump's behavior and policies with respect to lifting sanctions against the Russians).
The Mueller investigation, and the journalism around it, has been an important educational exercise for those who wanted to believe this is just a "witch-hunt" or somehow a DNC-diversion attempt to avoid facing the reason for the DNC/HRC Electoral College loss to Trump in 2016. There is, in fact, a "there" there.
We know, for example, Trump was negotiating with the Russians for a Trump Tower in Moscow right through the fall 2016 election. We know various Trump Towers, starting in NYC, were a favorite destination for Russian mobsters and oligarchs (a lot of overlap in those two groups, of course). We know about the Russian oligarch who followed Trump's campaign around in the oligarch's private plane. We know top and mid level Trump campaign officials were maintaining direct and indirect contacts with Russian operatives, and conduits such as Jerome Corsi and Roger Stone, regarding Wikileaks' activities, and we know the campaign knew, in advance, when leaks from the Clinton/DNC email accounts were coming. We know, too, Trump Jr.'s meeting at Trump Towers in NYC with the Russian intermediary, where the issue of US anti-Russian sanctions was in fact discussed, had Trump's blessing and acceptance, which led directly to changes in the Republican platform regarding Ukraine-Russian issues, and Trump saying he wanted to lift sanctions against Russia.
Vice-President Pence was a leading participant in Trump's transition team, and there were plenty of interactions with Russians throughout that period, and a pay-to-play that went beyond anything seen in inauguration balls and activities. Pence is also reasonably seen as the fruit of the poisonous tree.
I find it amusing how Pelosi is one of the various leading Democratic Party leaders who do not want to move to impeach Trump and Pence. It is amusing, too, how Comey doesn't want Trump impeached, either. It is why I wonder just how far will an insider-player such as Mueller go in his report.
But again, any right wingers not wanting to face the meaning of what we already know owes a major apology to Jane Fonda, Harry Dexter White, and Alger Hiss. Heck, Laughlin Currie and Nathan Silvermaster, two guys who really were playing footsie with the Russians in the period of WWII while working in the US government,* are owed an apology, too. And what about Manhattan Project scientist Ted Hall, who admittedly escaped detection, until he was nearly 90 years old, for his providing information on the bomb to the Soviets? May as well apologize to Ted Hall, too, while the right wingers are at it, as The Smyth Report, which the US government authorized published in 1946, gave out most of the information to build an atomic bomb, and the earlier Franck Report, said it only would take other nations (which obviously included the Soviet Union) three or four years to build a bomb, even without Franck's committee knowing about the espionage from Hall, Fuchs, and the minor player Rosenbergs. The Russians exploded the first atomic bomb in 1949, four years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
I have always said one may make the argument that the entire Mueller investigation is a criminalization of politics. But to do that, one must say that about the entire series of investigations against the Clintons, and must say most of the Red Scare investigations were that, too. And even then, one can say, as I do, that most of the Red Scare was about politics, not security, and the attacks on the Clinton trivially based and definitely political, while still concluding that what we already know about Trump and his relationship with the Russians is something significant and ominous in American history. Regardless of what the Mueller report ultimately says, one may build a reasonable argument that President Trump is a Russian asset and is compromised. That is not something that could be said about FDR or even Alger Hiss. It is that damning.
One last point: For those who lived during Nixon's scandals, we heard over and over how the cover-up was worse than the crime, and that was enough for the House to begin preparing articles of impeachment, which led to Nixon resigning. Here, Trump has admitted his obstruction of justice in public statements, and, even more than with Nixon's scandals, the conduct is worse than the cover-up. I also should say I am one who says Nixon's conduct is far more than the Watergate hotel burglary, and had to do with the criminal foreign policy in Southeast Asia, particularly Cambodia, Nixon setting up a rouge CIA within a CIA, and his initial actions in the fall of 1968 to block peace in South Vietnam.
One last point: For those who lived during Nixon's scandals, we heard over and over how the cover-up was worse than the crime, and that was enough for the House to begin preparing articles of impeachment, which led to Nixon resigning. Here, Trump has admitted his obstruction of justice in public statements, and, even more than with Nixon's scandals, the conduct is worse than the cover-up. I also should say I am one who says Nixon's conduct is far more than the Watergate hotel burglary, and had to do with the criminal foreign policy in Southeast Asia, particularly Cambodia, Nixon setting up a rouge CIA within a CIA, and his initial actions in the fall of 1968 to block peace in South Vietnam.
* Historians such as Klehr and Haynes are, in my view, naively breathless about whether Silvermaster's and Currie's activities actually mattered in terms of national security, and whether there were other ways the Russians could learn, for example, about FDR's position on Poland leading up to Yalta. In their discussion of Soviet espionage on the subject, they seem blissfully unaware about Churchill having already agreed, in the fall of 1944, to "give away" Eastern Europe to the Russians. Where the two otherwise naive historians are on more reasonable ground is their reasonable speculation it was Currie who learned the US was on the verge of breaking Soviet Russian codes late in WWII, and that he was likely the one who let the Russian handlers know that information. Currie also learned about FBI investigations into Silvermaster, and told that to Silvermaster. Any good historian can show how breathless Klehr and Haynes are by carefully reviewing newspaper and journal accounts in the time period, and search for articles (usually at the end of front page articles, somewhere around A19 of major newspapers) for leaks directly from government officials to reporters on each topic the spies supposedly told Russian handlers about. There was a joke around DC in the years after WWII that the only people who read the Congressional Record were the KGB and I.F. Stone, and the same may be applied to reading newspapers carefully for leaked information.
And please do not get me started again about Harry Dexter White, who was merely doing what FDR and Treasury Secretary Morganthau wanted, which was to cajole the Soviet Union into joining the World Bank and International Monetary Fund that were being set up as part of global institutions for a post-WWII world. My take on Hiss, too, is just what evidence is there of anything of importance he supposedly gave to the Soviets in the late 1930s, and why does it end after 1938? The Pumpkin Papers had minor information, and a query about an American woman who was missing in Moscow, who had been married to a Russian who had disappeared--turns out the Soviets had seized them and had killed the Russian already. Hiss had been concerned because the fellow was a Red pro-Soviet guy, but did not know the fellow was just another victim of Stalin's purges. Most important, why is it that Hiss fought successfully against Stalin's proposal for separate U.N. votes for Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, etc. during his time advising Hopkins and FDR at Yalta, as Conrad Black noted in his magisterial bio of FDR? Some spy.
What remains true is how naive most American historians have been about the period of WWII through the early post-WWII years, refusing to reflect about Churchill's refusal to allow for a second front led the Soviets to fight it alone from Moscow to Berlin, and thereby gain control over Eastern Europe, so that by 1944, Churchill knew the Russians would control that "sphere of influence" and FDR had to maneuver with that at Yalta in February 1945; how most of the information from the so-called pro-Soviet voices in the US government were more than matched by British spies, and how most of the information the pro-Soviet people provided was of little strategic value--with many, like Hiss and White, pushing hard for pro-American interest positions in the waning days of WWII (White was particularly hard at Bretton Woods and establishing a Pax Americana); and that each breathless assumption one may read should be greeted with a larger perspective of what was known in newspaper leaks already or around the time. I still say the old Red labor official, Carl Marzani's "We Can Be Friends," written while he was serving prison time for conviction of contempt related to Smith Act charges, provides a much more sober understanding of the period (though he fell into I.F. Stone's initial trap about who really started the fighting in the Korean peninsula in late June 1950; Stone, however, got pretty much everything else correct, starting with this was no surprise attack as far as MacArthur and American observers in Korean politics were concerned) than most of the historians who get to study the period in major American universities.
