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Credit to Author: Garrett M. Graff| Date: Mon, 16 Jul 2018 11:00:00 +0000<\/strong><\/p>\n When the history<\/span> books are written, Rod Rosenstein might just be the most interesting figure of the Russia investigation\u2014the beleaguered deputy attorney general whose memo<\/a> in his first days on the job was used to justify the firing of James Comey<\/a>.<\/p>\n After that he <\/span>quickly appointed Robert Mueller<\/a> as the special counsel and spent the following year supervising his investigation while under immense pressure<\/a> from President Trump and congressional wolves seeking to undermine his credibility, even impeach<\/a> him.<\/p>\n As congressional Republicans have sought to undermine<\/a> the Justice Department\u2019s integrity and independence, Rosenstein has made numerous short-term, tactical concessions to his critics, bending traditional rules and handing over documents to Congress about confidential sources and ongoing investigations\u2014compromises that previous administrations would never have made.<\/p>\n Why would anyone put up with the abuse, vitriol, and daily haranguing from the president\u2019s Twitter account<\/a> that Rosenstein has endured? Why would Rosenstein seemingly set precedents that undermine the core principles of the Justice Department, an institution that he\u2019s devoted nearly his entire career to serving?<\/p>\n I have a simple theory: In a world of hedgehogs and foxes<\/a>, Rosenstein today is the ultimate hedgehog.<\/p>\n Rosenstein knows one very big, monumental, history-shaping thing<\/a>\u2014how Trump\u2019s presidency will end\u2014and he\u2019s wagered that if he can hang on long enough, justice will be done and the good guys, in his eyes, will win. His early actions, around Comey\u2019s firing, will be vindicated by history when seen by the light of his bravery and personal sacrifice and refusal to be bullied into quitting, a move that would almost surely lead to Mueller\u2019s investigation being shut down or circumscribed by whichever Trump appointee takes over supervising it next.<\/p>\n Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein knows what he\u2019s protecting by staying in his job and fighting each day to preserve Mueller\u2019s investigation<\/p>\n Remember, Mueller is keeping Rosenstein informed and has returned to him regularly for briefings, to ask for permission<\/a> to expand his investigation in key ways, and to hand off<\/a> parts of the investigation to other Justice Department units. Which is all to say: Rosenstein knows how the next dominoes fall.<\/p>\n Which means Rosenstein knows what he\u2019s protecting by staying in his job and fighting each day to preserve Robert Mueller\u2019s investigation\u2014and to ensure it has the time to come to a public denouement that he surely already knows. Rosenstein is fighting a guerilla war against Republicans on Capitol Hill and Donald Trump, knowing that he can lose lots of small battles because ultimately he will win the war.<\/p>\n The reason that Rosenstein has stayed on appeared to be on full display Friday, as he\u2014and he alone\u2014announced the historic indictment of 12 Russian military intelligence officers<\/a> responsible for the 2016 attacks on the presidential election. It was only the second time Rosenstein has personally issued the special counsel\u2019s indictments, the other being February\u2019s equally monumental indictment of the Russians involved in the Internet Research Agency\u2019s social media campaigns<\/a> during the election.<\/p>\n It was hard <\/span>not to view Friday\u2019s press conference as a victory lap of sorts by Rosenstein, as he announced that the US government had proof beyond a reasonable doubt that the Russian military attacked American democracy\u2014an announcement he made just one day after a marathon, 12-hour Republican congressional pigpile on the FBI agent, Peter Stzok, who helped launch that very investigation and execute it in secret throughout the fall 2016 campaign.<\/p>\n The highly detailed, 29-page indictment<\/a> of 12 Russian military intelligence officers was a reminder, too, of the incredible level of detail known by Special Counsel Robert Mueller\u2019s team.<\/p>\n The sheer volume of what Robert Mueller knows is staggering<\/a>. Perusing his various court filings since last September makes clear he knew the individual changes Paul Manafort made in a specific Microsoft Word document<\/a>; he knew that Dutch lawyer Alex van der Zwaan was lying<\/a> about what he did on behalf of Manafort and Gates; he knew the specific times Russia military intelligence officers were searching specific words<\/a> way back in 2016; he knew the specific cryptocurrency transactions used to register the Russian intelligence agency accounts; he knows what the hired trolls at the Internet Research Agency were writing<\/a> in emails to their family members in 2017; he knew the messages<\/a> Manafort was sending on encrypted messaging services.<\/p>\n Former Trump Campaign Chairman Paul Manafort faces a series of indictments brought by the special counsel for money laundering and is scheduled for trial next month.<\/p>\n Even those who think<\/em> they know turn out to be surprised by the scale and specificity of what Mueller knows. Last month, the senior Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, Mark Warner, joked<\/a> to donors, \u201cIf you get me one more glass of wine, I\u2019ll tell you stuff only Bob Mueller and I know. If you think you\u2019ve seen wild stuff so far, buckle up. It\u2019s going to be a wild couple of months.\u201d But after Friday\u2019s indictment, Warner said\u2014impressed\u2014that the \u201cvast amount of information<\/a>\u201d in Mueller\u2019s latest documents were new to him and the Senate Intelligence Committee.<\/p>\n Mueller\u2019s four buckets of indictments\u2014stretching from the IRA\u2019s information operations to the Russian intelligence active cyber attacks to the Kremlin-backed business deals of Paul Manafort to the 2016 Trump campaign contacts of George Papadopoulos and Michael Flynn\u2014appear to outline the possible four corners of a conspiracy that stretches from the Kremlin to Trump Tower, one that involves Putin-friendly oligarchs, the Russian military, and senior level campaign and transition officials whose motives weren\u2019t necessarily \u201cAmerica first.\u201d<\/p>\n What lies in between those four corners is presumably what Mueller and Rosenstein know\u2014and we can expect that the next round of indictments to begin to connect those dots, particularly in regard to the role of Americans who participated, wittingly or unwittingly, in the attacks. Rosenstein has been careful to point out that neither the the indictments aimed at the GRU\u2014Russian\u2019s main intellegence arm\u2014nor the IRA allege the involvement of Americans, yet those words seem carefully chosen to stave off President Trump\u2019s immediate outrage while preserving the possibility that future<\/em> indictments will very much target Americans.<\/p>\n Examining the public bread crumbs of Mueller\u2019s investigation, though, gives some indication about what\u2019s left that we don\u2019t know\u2014the active and ongoing investigative work that Mueller\u2019s team is pursuing that hasn\u2019t seen the light of day. In broad buckets, there are at least nine significant areas of the investigation yet to be penciled in by Mueller.<\/p>\n Spoiler alert: Nearly <\/span>all of these open avenues involve not only Americans, but sometimes even senior campaign, transition, and White House aides to Donald Trump.<\/p>\n While it\u2019s entirely possible that some investigative avenues for Mueller\u2019s team won\u2019t pan out into criminal charges, we do know that he and the FBI have had sustained, sometimes even years-long interest in the following lines of inquiry\u2014none of which have yet appeared publicly in court:<\/p>\n 1. How do Erik Prince, the Seychelles, and the inauguration fit in?<\/strong><\/p>\n The Blackwater mercenary founder (and brother to Education Secretary Betsy DeVos) traveled to the remote islands in the Indian Ocean just before Trump\u2019s inauguration to have a secret meeting with a Kremlin official. He\u2019s denied the meeting had anything to do with Trump\u2014saying it was a routine business meeting for himself\u2014but the FBI met him at Dulles to question him, and Mueller has reportedly gathered Prince\u2019s telephone records<\/a>. Similarly, Russian oligarch Viktor Vekselberg, who\u2014oddly\u2014attended<\/a> Trump\u2019s inauguration just days after meeting<\/a> with Trump lawyer Michael Cohen at Trump Tower and was at the infamous RT TV dinner<\/a> in Moscow in 2015 with Putin, Michael Flynn, and Jill Stein, was surprised<\/a> on the tarmac at a US airport by FBI agents from Mueller\u2019s team when he visited the US.<\/p>\n 2. How do the UAE, Qatar, and Jared Kushner fit in?<\/strong><\/p>\n While we\u2019ve mostly talked about Mueller\u2019s probe as focusing on Russia, there are clearly some adjacent questions about other foreign influence in Washington involving Republican donor Elliott Broidy, among others. A key Middle East go-between, Lebanese-American businessman George Nader, is both cooperating with Mueller\u2019s investigation and has testified before his grand jury\u2014indicating a line of inquiry<\/a> that hasn\u2019t resulted in any public charges but is somehow central to Mueller\u2019s underlying investigation.<\/p>\n Qatar itself evidently gathered information<\/a> about the UAE\u2019s campaign to influence<\/a> Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner but opted against handing it over to Mueller. The special counsel has also been looking into Kushner\u2019s friend Rick Gerson<\/a>, in part over another<\/em>, separate meeting in the Seychelles in 2017. Unlike the probe into Trump lawyer Michael Cohen, Mueller hasn\u2019t handed this thread of the investigation off to another office, which appears to indicate that in ways not yet clear to the general public, the UAE and Qatari questions are related to the underlying Russia probe. This open line of inquiry could be related to why Kushner has still not been able<\/a> to receive the highest level of security clearance for his work at the White House.<\/p>\n 3. What role did Sergey Kislyak, the GOP convention, and the finances of the Russian Embassy play?<\/strong><\/p>\n The former Russian ambassador<\/a> to the US (who was replaced in September by Anatoly Antonov) has been a puzzling figure over the nearly 18 months since the investigation began. It was his meetings<\/a> with now-Attorney General Jeff Sessions, on the sidelines of the Republican National Convention\u2014a convention that saw still unexplained<\/a> attempts to make the platform more pro-Russia\u2014that led to Rosenstein taking charge of the investigation. And ongoing revelations about meetings with Sessions and Jared Kushner and telephone calls<\/a> with Michael Flynn have given him a shadowy Rasputin-like presence in the entire affair.<\/p>\n As the full scope of the Russian effort becomes clear, it\u2019s all but certain that such a high-level, coordinated attack would have never been attempted against the US without Kislyak\u2019s knowledge; he was\u2014and is\u2014a well-wired, savvy, loyal, longtime diplomat, a native Ukrainian who chose to remain Russian when the Soviet Union broke apart and whose term as ambassador coincided with increased espionage<\/a> efforts against the US (at least one of which involved attempting to recruit<\/a> future Trump aide Carter Page).<\/p>\n Add to all of that the news from Buzzfeed that Mueller is scrutinizing<\/a> numerous suspicious<\/a> payments and cash withdrawals from the embassy as well as hints about how Russians like Alexander Torshin might have sought to cultivate the National Rifle Association and Mueller\u2019s apparent interest in the NRA\u2019s funding<\/a>, and it seems like the special counsel is zeroing in on the way Russian money might have flowed through the American campaign illegally. Indeed, Torshin appears to be a central figure in a new criminal complaint<\/a>, filed Monday, charging a 29-year-old Russian gun rights advocate Maria Butina with acting as an unregistered foreign agent, as part of a conspiracy to make connections and influence the NRA and the GOP<\/a>.<\/p>\n 4. How do Roger Stone, Wikileaks, and other Americans and Brits fit into the GRU indictment?<\/strong><\/p>\n As Rosenstein noted, the GRU indictment stopped short of charges against anyone who interacted with the Russian hackers who masqueraded as \u201cGuccifer 2.0,\u201d but there are lots of bread crumbs about those interactions in the indictment that could, with additional facts, be grounds for possible criminal charges. A US congressional campaign solicited and received files on its opponent from Russia. Guccifer 2.0 interacted with \u201canother entity,\u201d certainly Wikileaks, about leaking the stolen Democratic files and the best timing to do so.<\/p>\n And longtime Trump aide Roger Stone says he thinks his interactions<\/a> with Guccifer 2.0 are mentioned<\/a> in the indictment too\u2014perhaps not surprising, since Stone notably tweeted in August 2016 that it will soon be \u201cPodesta\u2019s time in the barrel<\/a>,\u201d months after<\/em> the GRU had stolen Podesta\u2019s emails but months before<\/em> they were released publicly.<\/p>\n There are numerous previous indications that Mueller is keenly focused on Wikileaks and Stone. At least seven Stone associates<\/a> have been questioned by Mueller\u2019s team, including Stone\u2019s social media aide<\/a> last month and the sometimes-twitchy Trump adviser Sam Nunberg<\/a> back in March.<\/p>\n FBI agents that same month intercepted<\/a> another informal adviser at the airport in Boston to ask about Wikileaks and Stone. Stone himself has even made the odd statement that he\u2019s \u201cprepared<\/a>\u201d to be indicted. Stone associate Michael Caputo, another Trump campaign aide, told<\/a> ABC back in March after being interviewed by Mueller\u2019s team that the questions posed to him were focused on Stone: \u201cIn general they're talking about, you know, Guccifer and DCLeaks<\/a> and Wikileaks. They\u2019re talking about the timing of some things that happened at the campaign and at the convention.\u201d<\/p>\n Beyond just Stone, there are numerous open questions about Wikileaks, identified only as \u201cOrganization 1\u201d in Friday\u2019s indictments. Relatedly, Mueller appears to have zeroed in<\/a> on British politician Nigel Farage and other self-described \u201cBad Boys of Brexit<\/a>,\u201d including businessman Aaron Banks, who met repeatedly with the Russian ambassador in the UK as the Brexit campaign unfolded.<\/p>\n 5. What did Mueller learn from George Papadopoulos, Rick Gates, and Michael Flynn?<\/strong><\/p>\n Perhaps the most notable unanswered question in the Trump investigation so far is what Papadopoulos (whose loose lips<\/a> kicked off the entire original FBI probe<\/a>), former Manafort business partner Rick Gates, and former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn all traded for leniency in their own guilty pleas. Mueller has handed out nearly 200 criminal charges so far against dozens of targets. And yet\u2014by all appearances\u2014not a single one of those charges have stemmed from information provided by his cooperating witnesses. What did they give Mueller?<\/p>\n At the same time, the special counsel appears to be moving toward sentencing<\/a> Papadopoulos, meaning that his role in the investigation might be nearing an end, while Flynn\u2019s role<\/a> will apparently continue into the fall. At the same time, though, it seems clear that Flynn is under the impression that he will off scot-free: His team announced<\/a> this past week, prematurely it appears, that he plans to join a new DC consulting firm\u2014not exactly the behavior of someone who thinks he\u2019s heading to federal prison.<\/p>\n 6. What\u2019s in those 291,000 Michael Cohen documents?<\/strong><\/p>\n The investigation<\/a> into Trump lawyer and consigliere Cohen was spun off to New York federal prosecutors and appears to be moving quickly\u2014a federal judge put Stormy Daniels\u2019 lawsuit against Cohen on hold because of the likelihood he will soon be indicted<\/a>. We know that prosecutors seized upward of 291,000 items<\/a> from Cohen and that Cohen has been steadily dropping hints in recent days that he\u2019s preparing to cooperate with prosecutors, including changing<\/a> his Twitter bio to reflect he\u2019s no longer Trump\u2019s lawyer. What crimes will Michael Cohen be charged with\u2014and what can he tell prosecutors in exchange for leniency?<\/p>\n 7. What\u2019s up with that Trump Tower meeting?<\/strong><\/p>\n The email to Donald Trump Jr. from Rob Goldstone that kicked off the now infamous Trump Tower meeting in June 2016 has always appeared<\/a> as if it were picking up on a previous conversation. Goldstone wrote<\/a>, in part, \u201cThis is obviously very high level and sensitive information but is part of Russia and its government\u2019s support for Mr. Trump,\u201d a phrase that seems to indicate that he knows Don Jr. is already aware that Russia is supporting his father. Why was it phrased that way? And what transpired at the meeting with Kremlin-connected Russian lawyer Natalia V. Veselnitskaya\u2014and after?<\/p>\n Nearly every Trump campaign figure of consequence was in the room\u2014Manafort, Kushner, and Don Jr.\u2014and we now know the meeting came just as Russia ramped up its efforts with the IRA and GRU to hurt Hillary and help Trump. The fallout from that meeting, as it became public last summer, appears to be a central part of Mueller\u2019s investigation into obstruction of justice<\/a>. If Mueller\u2019s probe can be thought of as five distinct inquiries<\/a>, this final obstruction question is the only one he has left uncharged\u2014for now.<\/p>\n 8. How relevant is Cambridge Analytica and was there a coordinated effort by the Trump campaign or associates to gather intelligence or untoward opposition research on Hillary Clinton?<\/strong><\/p>\n We know that Mueller has been examining<\/a> the notorious\u2014and now defunct<\/a>\u2014data firm behind Trump\u2019s victory that was funded by top GOP donor Robert Mercer, including interviewing<\/a> former employees and the banks that worked with it. Investigators have evidently told those one-time employees that their focus is on the firm and \u201cassociated US persons,\u201d a phrase that seems to imply interest in as-yet-unknown Americans coordinating with the British firm.<\/p>\n But that\u2019s just one part of a spate of loose threads regarding the tech efforts of the Trump campaign in 2016, including a series of Wall Street Journal<\/em> interviews<\/a> with longtime Republican operative Peter Smith (just days before he killed himself<\/a> last spring) in which he outlined how he\u2019d assembled a team to find Hillary\u2019s stolen emails in the summer of 2016. Smith said at the time he was working with Flynn, but there are more unanswered questions than answers about the entire effort.<\/p>\n Focusing on the same timeframe, Mueller\u2019s GRU indictment seems to go out of its way to connect Trump\u2019s famous July 2016 \u201cRussia if you\u2019re listening\u201d comments to the fact that the GRU hackers began to attack Clinton\u2019s personal email accounts after business hours that same day<\/em>. Given that federal indictments are carefully written and edited mercilessly, it seems impossible to imagine that that phrasing was included by happenstance.<\/p>\n 9. Do people like Carter Page and Felix Sater matter?<\/strong><\/p>\n It\u2019s hard to keep track of the numerous figures who float in and out of the Trump-Mueller-Russia investigation orbit; some, like Michael Caputo<\/a>, may not end up mattering at all in the final outcome. Yet there are others, like Carter Page<\/a>\u2014who was a target of a federal counterintelligence surveillance warrant through much of 2016\u2014and Felix Sater<\/a>, a one-time intelligence asset himself, who may be bit players in the entire matter or may end up proving to be consequential figures.<\/p>\n These nine distinct <\/span>areas of open questions are hardly encyclopedic\u2014this list doesn\u2019t even count unanswered questions about, for instance, the role of the Russian intelligence service FSB in its own attacks<\/a> on Democratic targets (an operation known as Cozy Bear) or loose ends<\/a> from previous indictments, like the activities of DC superlobbyists Tony Podesta and Vin Weber. And it doesn\u2019t count the numerous salacious questions still unproven in the Steele dossier, like what exactly happened at the Moscow Ritz?<\/p>\n Potentially most consequentially of all, these nine questions are separate from one of the central questions of the Mueller probe: Is Bob Mueller done with Paul Manafort? The former Trump campaign chairman is moving toward trial<\/a> later this month on charges related to a money laundering scheme apparently unrelated to the Trump campaign\u2014and he\u2019s in jail pending trial after allegedly attempting to tamper with witnesses while out on bail\u2014but that doesn\u2019t mean that Mueller won\u2019t bring additional charges or that Manafort won\u2019t decide to cooperate with Mueller in exchange for leniency. Manafort is in his late sixties, facing hundreds of years in prison, and, if convicted on an even a few charges in what experts say is a particularly strong case by Mueller, might never walk free again\u2014unless, that is, he has something big to offer the special counsel.<\/p>\n Does he? That\u2019s a question Rosenstein himself may not yet know the answer to, but you can be sure that the deputy attorney general knows most of the answers to the rest of these questions already.<\/p>\n After all, the signature lesson of Mueller\u2019s inquiry at every turn has been that his investigators knows far, far, far more than anyone in the public expected. Just ask the GRU military intelligence officers who are sitting in their office wondering how Mueller knew that on June 15, 2016, between 4:19 pm and 4:56 pm Moscow local time, they searched the web for the English phrase \u201ccompany\u2019s competence\u201d hours before it appeared in the inaugural blog post by \u201cGuccifer 2.0\u201d?<\/p>\n Editor's note, 1:39 pm PDT, July 16, 2018: This article has been updated to reflect the indictment of Maria Butina.<\/p>\n Garrett M. Graff (@vermontgmg<\/a>) is a contributing editor for WIRED and the author of<\/em> The Threat Matrix: Inside Robert Mueller's FBI<\/a>. He can be reached at garrett.graff@gmail.com.<\/em><\/p>\n