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Credit to Author: Garrett M. Graff| Date: Tue, 01 May 2018 15:27:54 +0000<\/strong><\/p>\n The beginning of <\/span>May marks the longest period of public silence from special counsel Robert Mueller\u2019s team<\/a> since his first charges last October<\/a>\u2014more than two months without any new plea deals, fresh indictments, or publicly \u201cflipped\u201d witnesses.<\/p>\n At the same time, though, it\u2019s been a period of aggressive moves that continue to illustrate an investigation that is far from complete, including the raid by federal prosecutors on Trump lawyer Michael Cohen\u2019s office, court evidence that shows Mueller\u2019s team<\/a> successfully sought<\/a> permission to expand the scope of the probe, the release<\/a> of former FBI director James Comey\u2019s<\/a> memos documenting his interactions with the president, continual hints that the special counsel is probing<\/a> the UAE, the odd meeting<\/a> by Blackwater founder Erik Prince in the Seychelles, and numerous other aspects of the complex, multi-part investigation<\/a>.<\/p>\n Recent weeks have also seen President Trump tweeting regularly about the investigation and the capital W, capital H \u201cWitch Hunt,\u201d and in his train wreck of a phone interview with Fox & Friends<\/em> last week, he hinted that his patience is wearing thin, referring<\/a> to \u201cour Justice Department, which I try and stay away from, but at some point I won't.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019ve taken the position\u2014and I don\u2019t have to take this position and maybe I\u2019ll change\u2014that I will not be involved with the Justice Department. I will wait until this is over. It's a total, it's all lies and it\u2019s a horrible thing that\u2019s going on, a horrible thing,\u201d he said. \u201cThey have a witch hunt against the President of the United States going on.\u201d<\/p>\n It\u2019s clear that this is no made-up 'witch hunt.'<\/p>\n Then, last night, the final hours of April held one final surprise: The New York Times<\/em> published a list of questions<\/a> that, according to Donald Trump\u2019s legal team, Mueller\u2019s office wants to ask the president. The more than four dozen questions span a spectrum from the Steele dossier<\/a> to suspicious, Russia-friendly changes to the GOP\u2019s party platform during the 2016 Cleveland convention, but most of the questions focus on the president\u2019s own statements and reactions to various steps of the investigation, and his interactions with three key figures: former national security adviser Mike Flynn, attorney general Jeff Sessions, and Comey.<\/p>\n Donald Trump himself tweeted<\/a> about the questions early Tuesday, saying it was a \u201cdisgrace\u201d that they leaked, but the Times<\/em> story sources the leak to people on Trump\u2019s side; Mueller\u2019s team continues to operate almost entirely leak-free. It\u2019s also hard to read the leaks as anything other than an attempt to bring public pressure on Trump to refuse an interview with Mueller\u2019s team. (According to media reports, Trump has been keen to sit down with Mueller, but his legal team has advised against it.)<\/p>\n Mueller\u2019s proposed questions are primarily high-level\u2014presumably the starting point for what would then be increasingly detailed follow-ups, backed up by specific emails, documents, telephone records, and other files Mueller\u2019s team and FBI investigators have accumulated in an investigation stretching back more than two years. While the initial 49 questions are intriguing on their own, they primarily line up with what\u2019s publicly known about the investigation so far. There\u2019s nothing out of left field. Thus, the real mystery is the follow-ups: Why, precisely, is Mueller interested?<\/p>\n Taken as a whole, the leaked questions help shape and underscore some key takeaways:<\/p>\n 1. Mueller always knows more than we think.<\/strong> Every single indictment has been deeper, broader, and more detailed than anyone anticipated. This \u201cmisunderestimating\u201d of what Mueller knows has been true of both the public and media reports, and of his witnesses and targets: Both Rick Gates<\/a> and Alex van der Zwaan were caught in lies by Mueller\u2019s team, who have known far more specific information than their targets first realized. Presumably, Mueller\u2019s questions to Trump are informed by even more evidence that we haven\u2019t seen.<\/p>\n 2. Mueller is building a bulletproof case.<\/strong> Paul Manafort spent the spring trying to argue that Mueller was a loose cannon, a reckless, out-of-control prosecutor straying far beyond his assignment. His court case, though, proved just the opposite: The release this spring in court of a previously classified memo<\/a> by Rod Rosenstein makes clear just how cautiously and conservatively Mueller is proceeding legally. One of the key members of Mueller\u2019s team, Michael Dreeben, specializes in looking down the road at potential legal pitfalls and how cases might appear not just at initial trials but in later appellate courts. And Dreeban\u2019s work has paid obvious dividends: After reviewing the evidence in Manafort\u2019s effort to dismiss the charges against him and Mueller\u2019s highly detailed 282-page rebuttal, Judge Amy Berman Jackson told<\/a> Manafort\u2019s lawyers, \u201cI don\u2019t really understand what is left of your case.\u201d<\/p>\n 3. There are more loose threads than ever.<\/strong> Perhaps the most troubling conclusion after reading Mueller\u2019s proposed questions is just how many questions exist about the behavior and motivations of the President of the United States during his first year in office. The 49 questions lay out just how much remains unanswered and unknown, publicly at least, nearly a year into Mueller\u2019s special counsel work. It\u2019s hard to tell from the questions alone which ones represent the most possible jeopardy for the president, but when matched against the five core areas of Mueller\u2019s investigation<\/a>, it\u2019s clear that Mueller wants to talk with President Trump about nearly all of them, from obstruction of justice to the Trump Organization\u2019s business deals in Russia to the 2016 Trump campaign\u2019s involvement with various Russian officials. Add in the full breadth of the investigation, from New York taxi medallions<\/a> to Virginia rug stores<\/a>, and the \u201csupporting players\u201d\u2014including Erik Prince, Jeff Sessions, Jared Kushner, Tony Podesta, Carter Page, Sergey Kislyak, Sergey Gorkov, Michael Cohen, Roger Stone, as well as the hackers of Fancy Bear and Cozy Bear<\/a>\u2014and it\u2019s clear that this is no made-up \u201cwitch hunt.\u201d There are likely more indictments yet to come.<\/p>\n 4. We still don\u2019t know the biggest, most important evidence.<\/strong> There\u2019s an ever-growing pile of evidence that exists that hasn\u2019t become public yet. That includes, obviously, the evidence that George Papadopoulos, Michael Flynn, and Rick Gates all traded to Mueller for their plea deals over the last seven months. Presumably, Mueller considers each defendant\u2019s testimony worthy of trading months\u2014and even years\u2014off of a potential prison sentence, so it seems significant that more than seven months after Mueller \u201cflipped\u201d Papadopoulos, we still haven\u2019t seen a single iota of the evidence he presumably provided to the investigation.<\/p>\n 5. Mueller likely already knows how this story ends.<\/strong> Add up the four above points and it seems clear that Mueller might actually be relatively close to wrapping up the investigation. Given that the FBI raid on Michael Cohen\u2019s office, stemming from an investigation by federal prosecutors from the Southern District of New York, was sure to provoke a reaction from President Trump\u2014the investigative equivalent of kicking a hornet\u2019s nest\u2014it seems likely that Mueller and deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein, who approved the raid, understood that one or both of them might be fired by the president in its wake. It seems likely that before they took such a provocative step on the case that they could see their way through to the investigation's end.<\/p>\n The Mueller investigation is farther along than anyone thinks<\/a><\/p>\n What happens if Robert Mueller gets fired? The investigation won't suddenly stop<\/a>, that's for sure<\/p>\n The special counsel has assembled a dream team of legal minds<\/a><\/p>\n Garrett M. Graff (@vermontgmg<\/a>) is a contributing editor for WIRED and the author of The Threat Matrix: Inside Robert Mueller's FBI<\/a><\/em>. He can be reached at garrett.graff@gmail.com.<\/p>\n