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Credit to Author: Emily Dreyfuss| Date: Sun, 14 Oct 2018 02:12:17 +0000<\/strong><\/p>\n With the exception <\/span>of President Trump\u2019s legal team, no one has been watching the Mueller investigation more closely than Garrett Graff. Graff, a historian and journalist, wrote the book on Robert Mueller (literally<\/a>), has interviewed him probably more than any other journalist, and covers the investigation for WIRED. He sat down with WIRED features editor Mark Robinson at the four-day WIRED25 anniversary event<\/a> in San Francisco to decode the Russia probe and answer the question: What happens next?<\/p>\n A lot. As even a casual follower of the Russia investigation knows, questions have swirled over whether Donald Trump and his campaign colluded with Russia to influence the 2016 election by hacking the DNC and launching a massive disinformation campaign. Though numerous indictments of Trump associates have already come out of the investigation, Mueller has yet to finish it, or release a conclusive report.<\/p>\n A more hotly anticipated government report there may never have been. As Trump\u2019s legal teams prepare their defenses\u2014arguing as recently as last week that it was perfectly legal<\/a> for the campaign to use materials stolen by Russia to further Trump\u2019s chances\u2014the nation waits.<\/p>\n \u201cEveryone is so focused on \u2018When is Mueller going to release the Mueller Report?\u2019, and I think that what people miss is that Robert Mueller has been writing the Mueller Report in public through all of these court filings,\u201d Graff said.<\/p>\n In the short year and a half that Mueller has been investigating Russia\u2019s attack on the 2016 election and the Trump campaign\u2019s ties to it, he has indicted some of Trump\u2019s most senior campaign officials. In each of those court filings he has included far more information than he needed to, notes Graff. For example, when Mueller indicted officers of Russia\u2019s military intelligence GRU agency for hacking, he noted in the criminal filing that the night that Donald Trump went on live TV and invited Russia to hack Hillary Clinton and find her missing emails, the GRU \u201creturned to the office and attacked Hillary Clinton\u2019s personal email server for the first time<\/em>,\u201d Graff says, emphasizing that last phrase.<\/p>\n \u201cMueller uses that phrase \u2018for the first time\u2019 in the indictment, which is totally unnecessary, unless Mueller wants us to know that further down the road,\u201d he says. \u201cMueller is making claims that I think point to breadcrumbs he is leaving us for where this is going to go.\u201d<\/p>\n Graff says that once you factor in the information hidden in plain sight in the indictments, as well as what is pointedly left out of them, you begin to see that Mueller is carving out the negative space where the heart of the investigation lies. \u201cHe is staying very, very focused,\u201d Graff explains, \u201cAnd anything that he\u2019s finding that is not directly related to Russia he is handing off to other prosecutors in a really interesting way because it gives us almost a negative relief of how to view Mueller\u2019s investigation.\u201d<\/p>\n That blank space can tell us where the investigation is going. And where is that? Straight toward Roger Stone, Graff surmises, pointing out that no one is more implicated by the information in the indictments that have already come out of the investigation. Short of that, Graff is hesitant to make predictions.<\/p>\n Normally, he says, as a reporter you always expect a story to end up being less weird than you are originally told. \u201cYou get these weird tips as a reporter, and it\u2019s never that good. It ends up being like 75 to 80 percent as weird as the tip. That\u2019s not true about any part of this story. Every single thing ends up being about 140 percent as weird as the original reporting,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n A few weird things he thinks Mueller is particularly interested in, that linger in that negative space carved out by the public indictments so far: A Trump campaign meeting with Betsy Devos\u2019 brother Erik Prince in the Seychelles in 2016, the role of the nation of Qatar in Russia\u2019s disinformation campaign, the Trump tower meeting, the Trump money trail, and \u201cweirder questions about money,\u201d says Graff.<\/p>\n \u201cI think almost certainly the bombshell\u2014if there is a bombshell\u2014is about money,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n How to watch WIRED25<\/a><\/p>\n WIRED staffers share their favorite books<\/a><\/p>\n Jason Pontin: Three commandments for reasonable technology optimism<\/a><\/p>\n From an insane race across the country to a profile of the most wanted man on the internet, our 25 favorite Wired magazine stories from the past 25 years<\/a>.<\/p>\n 25 years of WIRED predictions: Why the future never arrives<\/a><\/p>\n Our favorite covers of all time<\/a><\/p>\n