With the exception of President Trump’s 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[1]), 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[2] in San Francisco to decode the Russia probe and answer the question: What happens next?
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.
A more hotly anticipated government report there may never have been. As Trump’s legal teams prepare their defenses—arguing as recently as last week that it was perfectly legal[3] for the campaign to use materials stolen by Russia to further Trump’s chances—the nation waits.
“Everyone is so focused on ‘When is Mueller going to release the Mueller Report?’, 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,” Graff said.
In the short year and a half that Mueller has been investigating Russia’s attack on the 2016 election and the Trump campaign’s ties to it, he has indicted some of Trump’s 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’s military intelligence GRU