5
Trump might often come to the brink of firing Mueller, but he kept stepping back from it, too. This was not so much restraint as a cat-and-mouse game: threatening to fire him and then not firing him was Trump’s legal strategy. You were intimidated or you intimidated was Trump’s legal theory. Several rounds of imminent Mueller-to-be-fired stories came from Trump’s own direct leaks. “You’ve got to mess with them,” he explained.
As the leak-free investigation continued—its silence among the most aberrant things in Trump’s aberrant Washington—the special counsel came to be a sort of hologram in the West Wing, always there, but yet not there. Though the constant presence of Mueller’s investigation often annoyed Donald Trump, its ghostly, amorphous quality also seemed to encourage him. He believed that if they had something, well, of course they would be leaking it.
“It’s all chicken shit, what they have,” said Trump shortly after the end of his first year in office to a friendly caller. “Chicken shit, chicken shit, chicken shit. When I say witch hunt”—the sobriquet he applied, often on a daily basis, to the Mueller investigation—“I mean chicken shit.”
Trump believed he knew what he was doing. After all, he had been in litigation virtually nonstop for all of his professional life. His was a career of legal conflict. He believed he could spook the other side. Mueller was the kind of opponent he had always felt contempt for—a guy who played everything straight down the middle—and he knew just how to handle him. Everyone else might see Mueller’s rectitude as his strength, but Trump saw it as his weakness.
“Remember,” he told McGahn, “Mueller does not want to be fired. What happened to that guy Nixon fired? Saturday Night Massacre, sure. But do you remember the guy who got fired? No.”
Mueller was a “phony,” Trump said, a “joke,” a guy who “thinks he’s smart, but is not smart”—by which Trump meant not street-smart, not willing to do whatever it takes. “I know this kind of guy—acts tough but isn’t.”
Trump and Mueller had, curiously, parallel biographies. Parallel but, at the same time, mirror images of each other.
Trump was born in 1946 in New York; Mueller was born in 1944 in New York. Both descended from German immigrants who arrived in New York in the nineteenth century. Both grew up in the postwar years, their parents members of the exclusive and salubrious upper-upper-middle class.
But here the similarities ended. Trump was the son of one sort of American archetype: his father, Fred, who, with animal instincts, operated in what he viewed as a cutthroat and zero-sum world, believed in winning at all costs. Trump, from a very young age, meant to outdo him. Mueller was the son of another type: his father, a buttoned-down white-collar executive at DuPont, who, with 1950s sublimation, operated in a world in which success was inextricably bound up with not rocking the boat. And Mueller, from a very young age, meant to follow his father’s example.
Robert S. Mueller III, Princeton class of ’66, was a member of the last generation of Ivy League Republicans—moderate, establishment, upper-class Republicans. Since the 1960s, the Ivy League had inexorably transformed into a left-wing cultural club, but within modern memory its true self was better represented by the Bush family and other country club sorts. Its higher version was the Mueller family: unemotive WASPs, they eschewed personal vanity and were absent any feeling of entitlement. Bob Mueller was a scholar-athlete—an old-fashioned ideal combining brains and muscle—at St. Paul’s School in Concord, New Hampshire, he captained a sport every season. He was a figure to be found in certain novels and stories of the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s: John Knowles’s A Separate Peace, published in 1959, wherein the sense of class and propriety is already passing; Louis Auchincloss’s novels, about the pain and disappointments of the American aristocrat; and short stories from the New Yorker of the period that depicted a preppie stoicism and a constricted emotional life. These were figures quite roundly mocked in later fiction.
Like his St. Paul’s classmate John Kerry—future senator, presidential candidate, and secretary of state—Mueller went to Vietnam after college in 1968. The antiwar movement was shortly to sever any tradition of Ivy League soldiers, and Kerry would rise to political prominence as an antiwar spokesman and build a career in liberal politics. But Mueller, with a parallel career in government, managed somehow to remain at a remove from the next forty years of cultural and political turmoil. “He was above it or out of it—you couldn’t necessarily tell which,” said one DOJ colleague.
With only a tight circle of intimates, few people would learn much about what he felt, what he believed, or what, if anything, he might want to truly express. While some found him cryptic in a way that could be construed as wise or brilliant, others often suspected he merely had nothing to say. He was arguably the most important modern FBI director: stepping into the job just days before 9/11, he converted the FBI from an organization focused on prosecuting U.S. crime to one focused on fighting worldwide terror. And yet, Garrett Graff, whose book The Threat Matrix chronicles the War on Terror and the making of a new FBI, finds Mueller’s public profile so modest that he appears to be little more than “a sideline character.”
Mueller’s keen suspicion of personality became his personality. He was a prosecutor in the old sense of representing the bureaucracy; he operated by the book and never promoted his own independence, a kind of anti-Giuliani. He had no press aptitude or interest and found it nearly incomprehensible and morally troubling that anyone did. He was, in the old nomenclature, a decent family man, married to his high school sweetheart, the father of two children. In short, he was a hopeless square, and he remained that way even as American culture sent squares to the dustbin of history—which, curiously, now made him a hero to left-wing, culturally hip, anti-Trump America.
In a notable change of practice, his ten-year term as FBI director was renewed in 2011 for an additional two years by Barack Obama. The two men, Obama aides report, neatly bonded, alike in their code of government service and personal virtue, their analytic approach to all problem solving, and their dislike of personal and professional drama.
It is difficult to imagine a greater opposite to Robert Mueller than Donald Trump. Possibly no two men of the same age and general milieu could be more different in outlook, temperament, personal behavior, and moral understanding. Possibly no two men better illustrated the difference between institutional weight and rules, and individual savvy, risk taking, and presumption. But it may not have so much been a clash of cultures as much as a simple mismatch: symmetrical against asymmetrical, earnest versus disruptive, restraint against all-in.
“He’s got no game,” Trump characterized Mueller to a friend.
When Steve Bannon appeared before the special counsel in January 2018—fifteen FBI agents and eight prosecutors crowding into the room to see Darth Vader—Mueller came in just before the deposition began. He walked directly to Bannon, greeted him in a gentlemanly way, and then said, wholly catching Bannon off guard, “I really think Maureen is going to enjoy West Point.”
Bannon’s daughter, Maureen, an army captain, had, unbeknownst even to her closest friends, just accepted a post at West Point. Recalled Bannon, “I’m thinking, ‘Damn, what the fuck?’”
During the break, Bannon queried his lawyer Bill Burck: “What do you think that was about?”
“I know what it’s about,” said Burck. “He’s saying, Don’t ever forget that your daughter is one of us. He’s telling you that you’re one of us.”
Almost immediately after his appointment in May 2017, Bob Mueller had recruited Andrew Weissmann, the Justice Department’s chief of the criminal fraud division and its most experienced white-collar prosecutor. Many believed Weissmann was the most aggressive white-collar prosecutor in the nation.
Donald Trump thought he knew all about Weissmann. He was a screw-up and a loser, said Trump. Weissmann had prosecuted Arthur Andersen, the Big Five accounting firm, in the Enron case. Weissmann had gotten a conviction and put one of the world’s largest companies, with eighty-five thousand employees, out of business. And then the conviction had been overturned. That, Trump said, was a business tragedy, and Weissmann should have been disbarred. The president called him “Arthur Weissmann.”
To the degree that the Andersen case might have tainted Weissmann, it also reinforced his reputation for waging total war. For Weissmann, overreach was something of a philosophical belief: in his view, white-collar criminals were trying to beat the system, so the system had to beat them. And Donald Trump’s entire life and career were about beating the system.
By March 2018, Mueller’s team was contemplating an audacious move. In an initiative led by Weissmann, the special counsel’s office laid out an indictment of the president. The proposed indictment provided a virtual road map of the first year of Trump’s presidency.
There were three counts in “UNITED STATES OF AMERICA - against - DONALD J. TRUMP, Defendant.” The first count, under Title 18, United States code, Section 1505, charged the president with corruptly—or by threats of force or threatening communication—influencing, obstructing, or impeding a pending proceeding before a department or agency of the United States. The second count, under section 1512, charged the president with tampering with a witness, victim or informant. The third count, under section 1513, charged the president with retaliating against a witness, victim or informant.
According to the draft indictment, Donald Trump’s scheme to obstruct justice began on the seventh day of his administration. It traced the line of obstruction from National Security Advisor Michael Flynn’s lies to the FBI about his contacts with Russian representative, to the president’s efforts to have James Comey protect Flynn, to Comey’s firing, to the president’s efforts to interfere with the special counsel’s investigation, to his attempt to cover up his son and son-in-law’s meeting with Russian governmental agents, to his moves to interfere with Deputy Director of the FBI Andrew McCabe’s testimony and, as well, to retaliate against him. The indictment also spelled out what the special counsel considered the overriding theme of Trump’s presidency: since the beginning of his tenure, Trump had gone to extraordinary lengths to protect himself from legal scrutiny and accountability, and to undermine the official panels investigating his actions.
Since Watergate, now forty-five years ago, the question of whether prosecutors could haul a sitting president into court and try him for breaking the law like an ordinary citizen had hovered around the edges of constitutional theory and White House scandals. The Office of Legal Counsel, a little-known adjunct to the Justice Department that supplies legal advice to the attorney general, had, during Watergate, and after the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, offered an opinion that a sitting president could not be indicted. Although this was far from a legal prohibition or a court ruling against the indictment of a president, it had become the default position, not least because no one had ever tried to indict a president.
In some constitutional circles, the question of whether a president could be indicted provoked quite a raging debate. Over the objections of many liberals, Ken Starr, the independent counsel investigating Bill Clinton, argued that the Constitution did not immunize a sitting president from indictment, and that like any other citizen or federal official, he or she was subject to indictment and criminal prosecution. Some had called Starr’s position overreach.
By the end of March, the Mueller team had not only the particulars of the proposed indictment but a draft of a memorandum of law opposing the “defendant’s”—that is Donald Trump’s—anticipated motion to dismiss his indictment.
The memorandum explicitly contradicted the standing opinion issued by the Office of Legal Counsel. Nowhere, it argued, does the law say the president cannot be indicted; nowhere is the president accorded a different status under the law than other federal officials, all of whom can be indicted and convicted as well as impeached. The Constitution is precise in the immunity it grants—and there is none provided for the president.
“The Impeachment Judgment Clause, which applies equally to all civil officers, including the President,” argued the brief, “provides that a civil officer may be impeached and removed from office but that the Party convicted shall nevertheless be liable and subject to Indictment, Trial, Judgment, and Punishment, according to law.
“The Impeachment Judgment Clause takes for granted … that an officer may be subject to indictment and prosecution before impeachment. If it did not, the clause would be creating, for civil officers, precisely the immunity the Framers rejected.”
The argument was clear and basic. There was no statutory exception from the law for the president; quite the opposite, in fact, since the entire Constitutional framework made clear that the president was not above the law in any respect. Impeachment was a remedy that could be used against all civil officers of the United States, but it did not protect them from indictment; hence, the impeachment clause should not protect the president from indictment. The so-called balancing argument—that the burden of a criminal process on the president would interfere with his ability to carry out his elective duties—was specious because the weight would be no greater than the significant burden involved with an impeachment proceeding.
But Bob Mueller had not risen to the highest levels of the federal government by misconstruing the limits of bureaucratic power. Indeed, he was among the government’s most accomplished players.
On an almost daily basis, Mueller and his staff continually weighed the odds that the president would fire them. The very existence of the special counsel’s investigation had in a sense become the paramount issue of the investigation itself. Shutting it down, or delaying it, or damaging it was, in an underappreciated irony, the natural next step by the president or his chosen surrogate, given the obstruction case that the Mueller team was building against him.
Throughout the winter and spring of 2018, while piecing together an obstruction case against the president, the special counsel’s office was trying to get up to speed on this potential ultimate act of obstruction. What it learned was not reassuring.
“Can President Trump order Sessions to withdraw the special counsel regulations (and fire him if he doesn’t)?” asked one of the memos circulated internally.
“The short answer is yes,” concluded the team’s research. Even though he had recused himself from the investigation, Attorney General Sessions could repeal the special counsel regulations and open the way for Trump to fire Mueller directly.
The only thing that seemed to stand in the way of such a drastic move was fear of a repeat of Nixon’s Saturday Night Massacre; firing the special counsel could cause a domino drama of resignations and firings that might backfire despite a Republican Congress, and, in turn, damage Republican chances in the midterms. Indeed, Mitch McConnell, willing to do nearly anything to protect his Senate majority, sent dark warnings to the White House that the Senate could not be counted on to stand with the president if he acted recklessly toward Mueller.
But a fear of drama, or of unintended consequences, or of McConnell’s nervousness, could obviously not be considered among the overarching concerns of this president. What’s more, the drama might be limited if Trump could avoid everybody else’s fears and dithering and just fire Mueller directly. Was that possible?
It was in fact possible, the Mueller research concluded: “The president could fire the special counsel directly and justify that action by arguing that the special counsel regulations are unconstitutional insofar as they limit his ability to fire the special counsel.” That, the research argued, would likely be found to exceed presidential authority. But “there is at least some chance the president’s actions could be upheld if reviewed in court—especially because the relevant regulations [governing the office of the special counsel] were never enacted by Congress into the U.S. code.”
The special counsel, as it turned out, was a weirdly fragile and iffy construct.
Asked another of the Mueller team’s existential memos: “What happens to the special counsel’s office, staff, records, pending investigations, and grand juries reviewing the evidence presented if the special counsel is fired, or, alternatively, if his investigation is discontinued?”
The short answer: “The question does not lend itself to a conclusive answer grounded in statute or case law.” And then the research hammered the point: “For better or worse, there is no statute or authoritative case law that neatly delineates the effect that … termination would have on this office, staff, pending investigations, and investigative materials.” Overnight, the entire operation might be dismantled and its work shredded.
Still, there could be a window of time during which the special counsel might be able “to share grand jury materials with fellow prosecutors for the purpose of enforcing federal criminal law.” In fact, that process—moving part of the investigation, such as the Michael Cohen case, to the Southern District of New York—had already begun, both to protect the case if Mueller was fired and to anticipate any criticism of overreach by the special counsel.
And then there was the looming July 1 deadline. That’s when Mueller’s budget request was due—ninety days before the beginning of fiscal year 2019. The attorney general—or, with his recusal, the deputy attorney general—had the unilateral right to refuse this budget request and shut down the special counsel’s investigations as of September 30, 2018.
True, Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein, who had told Congress that he would not carry out a presidential order to remove Special Counsel Mueller absent “good cause,” would, according to this hopeful perspective, “be concerned about the political fallout that would accompany” a decision to defund the office. On the other hand, the president was regularly threatening to fire Rosenstein.
But what if the budget request was refused and the investigation shut down? “If the special counsel’s office is shuttered it is possible, and perhaps likely, that the mandate of any special grand jury impaneled by Special Counsel Mueller would expire and prompt the court to discharge it.” And, just as possible, the work product would be headed, via shredder, to the dustbin.
Still, the research went on to describe a more hopeful scenario: “It is also possible that another ‘authorized attorney for the government,’ most likely a U.S. attorney’s office, would continue the grand jury investigation, in which case the court would not necessarily discharge the grand jury.”
And what if the worst did happen? What if the president fired the special counsel? Or if there was a systematic massacre of the chain of command responsible for the investigation? Could anybody fight back? Alas, neither an attorney general nor a deputy attorney general could fight their own removal, because they are both appointed by the president, the special counsel’s research concluded.
The questions kept coming. Could the special counsel, because he was not a presidential appointee, challenge his own firing? Almost certainly not, because there is “no private right of action” under the special counsel regulation. Reaching, he might claim a constitutional violation—that his firing was, itself, an instance of obstruction of justice. Furthermore, members of Congress might have standing to sue, the special counsel’s research theorized. Maybe even individual members of the special counsel’s staff could sue. Or perhaps there might be “third-party standing”—such as the American Bar Association or Judicial Watch—that is, grounds for an exception to be made to the rule that a plaintiff cannot bring suit to assert the rights of others. But by this point there was a dwindling set of possibilities, the research suggested, and mostly only tortured scenarios.
Pages and pages of research explored many different scenarios involving any attempt to shut down the special counsel and his operation. But the truth of the matter was straightforward: as long as the president had the continued support of the majority party in Congress, he held a very strong, and likely winning, hand.
On May 2, after drinks at a midtown restaurant, Rudy Giuliani went on Hannity for one of the most peculiar television appearances in modern politics, combining, in an eighteen-minute interview, the nonsensical and incoherent. Here was a bar-stool lawyer delivering the president’s legal strategy.
“I know James Comey. I know the president. Sorry, Jim, you’re a liar—a disgraceful liar,” said Giuliani to Hannity. “It would have been good for God if God had kept you out of being head of the FBI.”
He rambled on: “Look at what’s going on with North Korea. I told the president, you’re going to get the Nobel Peace Prize.”
And: “I believe, I believe that Attorney General Sessions, my good friend, and Rosenstein, who I don’t know, I believe they should come in the interest of justice, end this investigation.”
And: “I’m not going to have my client, my president, my friend, and a president that’s achieved more in a year and a half against all odds than anyone had a right to expect—I’m not going to let him be treated worse than Bill Clinton, who definitely was a liar under oath … I mean, he’s being treated much worse than Hillary Clinton … I’m not going to let him be treated worse than Hillary Clinton.”
And: “I’m sorry, Hillary, I know you’re very disappointed you didn’t win, but you’re a criminal.”
Bannon was horrified by Giuliani’s performance. “Dude, you can’t do this,” Bannon told Hannity afterward. “You can’t let him out there like that.”
“I’m not the babysitter,” Hannity replied.
“It’s Rudy. You’ve got to be.”
But Giuliani wasn’t done. A few days after the Hannity appearance, Giuliani was interviewed by ABC’s George Stephanopoulos. Giuliani denied Trump’s relationship with Stormy Daniels and, at the same time, acknowledged that Trump had paid her.
“What matters to me are two things,” Giuliani told Stephanopoulos. “There are two relevant legal things, which is what my job is. Number one, it was not a campaign contribution because it would have been done anyway. This is the kind of thing that I’ve settled for celebrities and famous people. Every lawyer that does that kind of work has. And number two, even if it was considered a campaign contribution, it was entirely reimbursed out of personal funds, which I don’t think we’ll even get to, because the first one’s enough. So … case closed—case closed for Donald Trump.”
Watching the show, Bannon remarked that Stephanopoulos had been almost gentle with Giuliani. “Stephanopoulos could have destroyed him, but you realize he’s a cripple. How can you kick the guy?”
Bannon shook his head in wonder. “Drinking aside, guys’ll tell you that Rudy can’t engage in a real conversation. You see that by the facial tics, the big eyes, and the asides—like he’s speaking to himself while he’s telling you some bombshell information. Come on: Rudy’s wife, future First Lady or at least, she imagined, Queen of Foggy Bottom, ain’t walking away from this unless she knows there’s no more squeeze in the lemon. It’s mind-boggling.”
Even Trump was bewildered by Rudy.
He was glad to see that Giuliani had embraced the nullifying legal theories with which Alan Dershowitz had so impressed the president in his many cable interviews: There could be no criminal liability for a president exercising his constitutional powers, no matter the reason he was exercising them. If the president chose to fire someone, the Constitution gave him the authority to fire, period. Even if the president was firing this person as part of, say, a cover-up scheme, there was no issue. Absolute presidential powers were absolute.
But Dershowitz’s theory about presidential impunity seemed peculiar in Giuliani’s mouth. As the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, he had made his reputation—and later his political career—on law-and-order cases and prosecutions that took down the powerful. Famous for his take-no-prisoners approach, he was quite the opposite of a wily, intellectually deft, morally relativist defense attorney. But now, suddenly, he seemed desperate to play this part.
Trump, ever fixated on physical details, kept rerunning Giuliani’s television performances and pointing out his “crazy, crazy eyes.” Trump also commented on his weight, which was climbing toward three hundred pounds, and his unsteady gait. “He looks like a mental patient,” said Trump.
To almost everyone in the White House—and especially to Don McGahn—Giuliani’s defense of the president was as wacky as it was alarming. Trump found himself in the unlikely role of trying to calm Giuliani down and, as well, to get him to stop drinking so much.
And yet, somehow, the more Giuliani seemed to come unhinged, the further he volubly traveled from conventional legal strategy, the more he seemed to be moving the needle away from the special counsel and in Trump’s favor. The sheer force of his assertions, together with an almost madcap confusion created by Giuliani’s off-the-cuff utterances, opened a new front. It was not a legal front but a television front. On the one hand was the special counsel—mum, plodding, buttoned-down, prosaic, utterly establishment. On the other was Rudy and Trump—improvisational, unpredictable, audacious, always a spectacle. How to predict what crazy men will do?
Abruptly there was a new sense in the White House of Giuliani’s quite inexplicable genius. Rudy was crazy, but crazy was working. Rudy was executing pitch-perfect Trump. He manically put up a defense that was nonsensical, outlandish, fatuous, and hyperbolic. But in terms of pure theatricality, it bested and belittled the small-bore technical points of law. In Trump’s long career as a litigant, bravado and confusion had always paid a substantial dividend. Now Rudy was gleefully executing exactly that strategy.
The silent prosecutor, toiling in anonymity, was on the defensive. Maybe the special counsel would be fired—maybe at any moment. As Trump liked to say, ever building suspense, Who knows what will happen? In Giuliani’s new interpretation of the law, whatever happened would be precisely what the president wanted to happen. The president, according to a brazen, dismissive, garrulous Giuliani, held all the cards, and he would decide when and how to play them.
As it happened, Mueller saw the situation much the same way.
In a world where no one knew the rules—or, for that matter, who might have the power, after the midterm elections, to set them—almost any claim was potentially valid.
Giuliani’s former partner and sidekick Marc Mukasey heard a rumor about the plan to indict the president. It would take Rod Rosenstein, in his role as the person overseeing the investigation, to approve the plan. To do so, the deputy attorney general would have to overrule the DOJ’s office of legal counsel’s opinion that a president could not be indicted.
Then again, you could hardly overstate how much Rosenstein abominated Trump. Trump was a con man, the prosecutor told friends. Trump was a liar. Trump was unfit.
Yet on May 16, relying on what reasoning nobody seemed quite able to imagine, or a direct line to God that no one knew he had, Giuliani declared that there would be no indictment of the president. And he went further, saying that the special counsel’s office—pay no attention to the indictment papers it had already drawn up—had told him that it agreed with the Justice Department’s standing opinion that a president could not be indicted.
This was a half-cocked, perhaps drunken Giuliani. Or a canny, asymmetric one. Or both.
Giuliani’s gambit—to publicly announce a legal position held by the special counsel—served as a kind of taunt. Now Mueller faced a choice. He could either publicly disagree with the president’s lawyer and, thereby, open the door and step into the political debate. Or he could remain quiet, continuing to keep his own counsel, and let everyone tacitly assume that what Giuliani said was true. Indeed, in the coming months almost every expert and media outlet blandly accepted that the president was not in danger of indictment.
As much as Andrew Weissmann wanted to indict the president, Bob Mueller wanted to stay in business. And as much as the Trump lawyers wanted to believe that a president could not be indicted, they appreciated that their client could be the exception.
Delay became the tool of both sides.
From Trump’s point of view, if the administration reached the midterms—which Trump still blithely assumed he and the Republicans would win—without Mueller having moved against the president, then he could fire Mueller, no problem. The Mueller team believed that if they reached the midterms without being fired and the Democrats won the House, then their investigation was home free.
In a conference call with Trump’s lawyers toward the end of April, members of the Mueller team had outlined the areas of interest in which they sought to question the president. Jay Sekulow then turned the points raised by the special counsel into a list of specific questions—and then leaked them, as though these were in fact the special counsel’s questions.
While this appeared to indicate that a showdown was coming, in some sense it was designed, on the part of both the prosecutors and Trump’s lawyers, to have the opposite effect: to caution Trump and stop him from going full speed ahead. For both sides, raising the prospect of the president testifying—and the absolute certainty on the part of everybody other than the president that unrestricted testimony would sink him—was a delaying tactic.
If the list of questions did not entirely dissuade Trump, they at least gave him pause. Even so, the determined, loquacious, ever confident president believed there was no room anywhere that his presence and persuasive powers could not sway. Nor, certainly, would he admit to any measure of fear. His lawyers might be afraid, but never him. He was, in his mind, a master salesman, an artful seducer, the most charming man on earth. When necessary, he wouldn’t hesitate to employ boot-licking flattery to achieve his ends. He could convince anyone of anything.
This approach may have worked well for Trump in New York, where the currency was salesmanship. But in Washington it had in the thousand instances when Trump had tried to apply his irresistible Trump charm succeeded, by Bannon’s count, exactly never.
Here were the terms of the de facto truce: as long as the special counsel and his people did not press him too far, the president would not yet confront them. And as long as Trump still had the power to carry out his threats to annihilate Mueller’s team, they would not yet confront him. Limbo held—for now.