There’s an assumption in much of the media coverage of the Mueller report that has been nagging me for quite a while. With the report filed but not yet public, it’s the last opportunity to say something about that assumption, and lay out some standards for evaluating the report itself, without being accused of engaging in motivated reasoning. So here goes.

An awful lot of commentators are treating the question of Trump’s relationship with Russia, and the questions related to election interference, as if they were one and the same. An investigation that resolves one issue, it’s assumed, will necessarily resolve the other. If Trump is a Russian puppet, uncovering the full interference campaign will reveal that fact. On the other hand, if uncovering the interference campaign doesn’t show Trump is somehow in hock to Russia, he isn’t.

The problem with this assumption is that there’s no logical reason for it to be true, and it doesn’t even track the actual evolution of the Russia scandal very well. Suspicions were being voiced about Trump and Russia well before it was known for certain that Russia was working on his behalf. Certainly suspicions were raised long before anything at all was known about the Trump Tower meeting, the Steele dossier, Trump Tower Moscow, Kushner’s efforts to secure a diplomatic backchannel, or Flynn’s calls to the Russian ambassador.

Instead, the original source of those suspicions — unexplained to this day — was Trump’s own strange and consistent oversolicitousness towards Russia and its leader. This was evident early on, and grew considerably over time, peaking during the Helsinki meeting. (Frankly, many commentators today seem to have forgotten how uncharacteristic and strange Trump’s groveling during that meeting seemed.) As the other developments emerged, they served to expand this original mystery, and deepen the questions surrounding Trump and Russia. But they did not displace that original question.

The trouble is, talking about Trump as personally compromised has always seemed a bit scurrilous and melodramatic. So most mainstream commentary has focused instead on the proven fact of election interference, since it had demonstrably occurred. Trump’s relationship to Russia was treated as if it were incident to the interference campaign.

It’s certainly possible that Trump was personally wrapped up in the interference campaign in some way. But that’s never been the sole possibility of his involvement. Indeed, there are perfectly good reasons Russia would not seek to involve him, even if he was already personally compromised at some earlier date. High among these is that the interference campaign was an elaborate affair involving dozens of individuals, and thus involving Trump would potentially increase the odds of any illicit relationship being discovered. (Of course, Trump being compromised would provide a compelling rationale for the 2016 interference, even absent American participation. This is how the interference campaign was originally interpreted: first and foremost, evidence that Russia very much wanted a Trump victory, for reasons unclear.)

Nor does it follow that any contacts with the campaign or Trump’s associates are incident to Trump’s own relationship with Russia. For Russia, it might be tempting to attempt such contacts if the campaign were compromised at the very top. But that’s quite different than attempting them through the person of Trump himself. Indeed, to the extent we know about such contact, it seems to be through fairly unreliable individuals like Donald Trump, Jr. Jared Kushner, or Roger Stone — not individuals you’d want to entrust with weighty and potentially important information.

Put in simplest terms, you can’t reliably determine if the Trump campaign and Russia were joined at the head by investigating whether they were joined at the hip. Yet much of the commentary has assumed that you can.

Finally, it’s worth noting that if Trump himself had been compromised by Russia, it would be possible to protect this knowledge by keeping it away from campaign operatives and the like, but of course there would inevitably be one weak link: Trump. The president is a habitual liar but not an especially subtle one, which is why his over-the-top obsequiousness towards Putin has always seemed so suspicious.

What does this mean for the Mueller report? It means that it’s vital that the report directly address the question of whether Trump is personally compromised, rather than simply focusing on the interference question and assuming that any personal links between Trump and Russia will arise in the course of that investigation.

This has always been why, for instance, it’s vital to investigate Trump’s own personal finances prior to his presidency, or directly investigate the allegations of blackmail in the Steele dossier: it could reveal links that would not arise incidentally.

As I said earlier, in many ways the central mystery of the Trump-Russia affair is “Why is Trump so friendly to Russia?” If Mueller has indeed conducted a thorough and searching investigation of Trump’s own background, his finances, the intelligence supporting or contradicting the claims of blackmail, his personal visits to Russia, and any potential avenues of communication between Trump and Russia, then I’m happy to accept his report’s conclusions on that mystery.

But it’s worth recalling that Mueller’s original mandate focuses on the 2016 election and the interference that took place during that election. If his investigation focuses instead on the practical aspects of that interference campaign, then I don’t see how it can be considered the final word on Trump’s own relationship with Russia.