A New Insiders’ Account of the Mueller Investigation

This summer, five years after the release of Robert Mueller’s report on Russian election interference during the 2016 presidential campaign, the Washington Post broke a blockbuster story about the Mueller team’s work. In addition to probing election meddling from the Kremlin, the paper reported, Mueller had also looked into a mysterious withdrawal of $10 million in cash from the National Bank of Egypt in the days before Donald Trump ascended to the presidency in 2017. U.S. intelligence indicated that the money might have been linked to an effort by Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi to aid Trump’s campaign. The story of how the Trump campaign welcomed 2016 election interference, in other words, wasn’t just about Russia. It might also have been about Egypt.

According to the Post, Mueller dug into the potential Egyptian plot, examining Trump’s bank records from before he took office. But the team was unable to establish a clear connection, and Mueller held back from pursuing documents dating to after Trump’s inauguration. After Mueller’s team wrapped up its work, the Egypt probe passed to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia—where it died after sustained pressure from Attorney General William Barr, who months before had publicly undermined Mueller’s report. “Every American should be concerned about how this case ended,” a person familiar with the Egypt investigation told the Post.

The Post’s recent reporting is representative of the initial promise, grinding frustrations, and lingering mysteries of the Mueller investigation. The special counsel’s office, which worked from May 2017 through March 2019, did valuable work in uncovering the truth of 2016 election interference and Trump’s abuses of power during his time in office. Yet it also struggled to make headway against a president and attorney general unconcerned with norms and all too willing to turn the power of the executive branch into a shield against accountability. And, in the end, the Mueller report’s revelations—which in another era might have prompted the president’s impeachment and removal from office—were no match for a political landscape defined by hyperpartisanship and a frenetic news cycle that left little space for Americans to process and respond to shocking news. Even the recent Post report about Egypt—a bombshell about potential foreign interference aimed at helping a candidate currently seeking the presidency once again—vanished without making a mark on the 2024 campaign. 

It’s into this less-than-hospitable environment that three former top investigators on the Mueller team have arrived with their new memoir about their time on the investigation. “Interference,” by Aaron Zebley, James Quarles, and Andrew Goldstein, rounds out a trio of books by former members of the special counsel’s office, following “Where Law Ends” by prosecutor Andrew Weissmann and “Compromised” by former FBI special agent Peter Strzok. The latter two volumes were published in September 2020, just before Trump’s first bid for reelection. “Interference” appears prior to his second. Despite the book’s stentorian warnings about the continued dangers of election interference, however, it never quite makes the case for why its authors felt it important to tell their story now, or what they hope to achieve by sharing it. 

“Interference” boasts something that neither Weissmann’s nor Strzok’s accounts of the Mueller probe offered: the endorsement of the special counsel himself. In his preface to the book, Mueller expresses his characteristic unwillingness to comment publicly on his time investigating the former president, repeating his insistence—offered at the single press conference he held during his time as special counsel—that “the work of the special counsel’s office should speak for itself.” Nevertheless, he acknowledges, he has become “persuaded” that “there is value in identifying lessons learned from the decisions we made and how we made them, mistakes and all.” 

This suggestion might whet the reader’s appetite for more in the way of self-criticism than Zebley, Quarles, and Goldstein wish to provide. Weissmann and Strzok, while insiders to the investigation, were in a sense writing as outsiders, and were more willing to criticize the special counsel’s work. Strzok, who moved to the special counsel’s office after shepherding the Russia investigation through its early days at the FBI, was removed from the probe and ultimately fired by the bureau after the discovery that he had sent text messages critical of Trump during the campaign. Weissmann stayed through the end of Mueller’s probe but was self-consciously writing as a bomb-thrower, harshly criticizing Zebley in particular—though less so Mueller himself—for what he saw as failures to investigate with the necessary aggression. “Interference” provides an informative balance to these accounts from a perspective closer to that of Mueller himself. But for this same reason, it also reads as somewhat of an authorized biography, perhaps too close to its subject to provide a full accounting.

“Interference” marches through the special counsel’s investigation from the hectic days immediately preceding Mueller’s appointment through his final testimony before Congress in July 2019. The three authors write from a shared perspective, often speaking for Mueller as well. Zebley (who worked in the special counsel’s office as Mueller’s principal deputy) and Quarles (the special counsel’s senior adviser) both joined the office alongside Mueller after working with him at the law firm WilmerHale. Goldstein came on board from the public corruption unit at the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, and would go on to lead the office’s investigation into Trump’s possible obstruction of justice and efforts to undermine Mueller’s work.

Readers looking to refresh their memories as to the progress and findings of the special counsel investigation will find “Interference” to be a useful overview. Zebley, Quarles, and Goldstein devote multiple chapters to summarizing their findings, particularly regarding Russia’s efforts to aid Trump in 2016 and the campaign’s openness to Kremlin outreach. (Egypt does not get a mention.) For all that Trump and his allies have succeeded in downplaying these revelations, the Mueller team’s discoveries remain genuinely shocking—and the experience of 2016 continues to shape the U.S. government’s approach to countering foreign influence during this election cycle, with the Justice Department and other agencies rolling out ever more indictments, sanctions, and restrictions in response to election interference by Russia, Iran, and other nations. 

This aspect of the special counsel’s work is clearly important to Mueller and the three co-authors, and they seem frustrated by the extent to which partisan politics has overshadowed the seriousness of their findings. “Americans have not learned the lessons of Russia’s attack on our democracy in 2016,” Mueller writes ominously in his preface. This, he suggests, is why he has given his blessing to this project: “This threat deserves the attention of every American. Russia attacked us before and will do so again.”

For close students of the investigation, though, there is little new in the book’s description of Mueller’s findings on election interference. More thought-provoking are the sections of “Interference” that focus on the behind-the-scenes deliberations concerning how best to conduct an investigation into a norm-breaking president. Zebley, Quarles, and Goldstein provide a painstaking overview of their negotiations with Trump’s legal team and the Justice Department over obtaining testimony from the president. The Mueller team wanted a live interview, but Trump managed to whittle that down to a sheaf of unsatisfying answers to written questions, heavy on “I don’t recall.” Previously redacted material from the Mueller report since released under a Freedom of Information Act request suggests that the special counsel’s office may have believed that Trump lied in answering at least one of those questions.

Why, then, did Mueller never pursue a subpoena of the president? Weissmann expresses frustration over the decision in “Where Law Ends,” arguing that this choice “set … a destructive precedent.” In “Interference,” Zebley and his co-authors tell their side of the story, including a great many new details that have not been previously reported. After getting nowhere with a voluntary interview, Mueller had planned to move forward with a subpoena—but he was hampered by a Justice Department that repeatedly promised it would back the special counsel if Mueller only took one more crack at negotiating with Trump’s team, and then reneged when those additional negotiations failed. Finally, the department told the special counsel’s office that it would support a subpoena only after the office received written answers. But after those answers came back, delayed and cagey, Mueller decided it wasn’t worth it.

Zebley, Quarles, and Goldstein were clearly aggravated by this back-and-forth. But reading these chapters is a frustrating experience, because the three never explain why Mueller chose not to push further. As they write, if they’d moved forward with a subpoena without the Justice Department’s approval, the department “would have ordered us to withdraw it or prevented us from enforcing it in the courts.” But that dust-up could itself have played a valuable role in informing the public of what was going on. Under the special counsel regulations, the attorney general must notify Congress of any instance “in which the Attorney General concluded that a proposed action by a Special Counsel was so inappropriate or unwarranted under established Departmental practices that it should not be pursued.” 

Had the Mueller team decided to push, they could at the very least have forced a public reckoning—a possibility noted by Weissmann in “Where Law Ends.” Instead, they held back, and Attorney General Barr’s letter closing out the Mueller investigation informed Congress that the department had never blocked an investigative step by the special counsel. Perhaps this was technically true—but it turns out to have been extremely misleading, and it obscured the extent to which the department worked to shield Trump. 

Given how Barr went on to quietly leverage his position to protect the president—in the Egypt case and in many others—an open record of how an attorney general more committed to the president’s political survival than to the rule of law had protected the president could have been a valuable warning. 

But Zebley, Quarles, and Goldstein do not address this at all. Their silence is all the stranger because they are sharply critical of Barr, who successfully distorted public conversation around the office’s findings by delaying the Mueller report’s release—presenting his own misleading overview of the document and, when finally announcing publication of the report, doing so while arguing for the president’s innocence in what Zebley and his co-authors describe as the manner of a defense lawyer. At the book’s close, the three set out principles that, they say, must be followed for the special counsel system to function, writing—in a clear shot at Barr—that “the attorney general should not replace a special counsel’s findings with his or her own.” They also state that “a special counsel must be exceptionally careful and deliberate about the information included in his or her report,” lauding Mueller’s “principled” approach. 

In their view, in other words, the struggles of the Mueller investigation arose primarily not from anything that Mueller did, but from the failures of others to live up to the high standards observed by the special counsel. This is a pattern throughout “Interference.” Zebley, Quarles, and Goldstein don’t hold themselves above reproach: They voice some concern about the political allegiances of the special counsel’s staff and suggest that it was a mistake to bring charges against a Russian organization that would successfully drag the Justice Department into a years-long slog in court for little benefit. But there is a persistent unwillingness to engage in a deeper reexamination of some of the office’s choices. 

In an early passage, for example, “Interference” blithely explains that Mueller chose to rework the Russia investigation from a counterintelligence-focused probe—as the FBI had fashioned it—into an investigation focused on criminal wrongdoing, explaining that the office “established procedures that would identify and convey foreign intelligence and counterintelligence information to the FBI.” Yet as Strzok identifies in his book, there is real reason to doubt that the FBI ever bothered to do anything with that material. If Zebley, Quarles, and Goldstein know of any reason to believe that the bureau held up its end of the bargain, they don’t share it here.

At times, this relatively serene tone seems to reflect a lack of recognition on the Mueller team’s part as to just what they were up against: how easily Trump, with Barr’s support, would abuse his power, and how much the political and media environments worked to his advantage. In one striking anecdote, the three explain that the special counsel’s office “didn’t give much thought” to what would happen if Trump fired Mueller, on the grounds that, as Quarles put it, “that didn’t work out so well for Nixon.” But as Trump’s presidency demonstrated, the circumstances that boxed Nixon in during the Watergate investigation and ultimately brought about his resignation are no longer in force. The congressional Republican Party under Trump, unlike under Nixon, had no interest in pushing back against his abuses. And Nixon lacked the aid of a right-wing media ecosystem that could spin away even the most damning revelations. 

Along similar lines, Zebley, Quarles, and Goldstein express irritation that Congress demanded that Mueller testify in person following release of his report. Yet they state outright that they intended the report to act as an impeachment referral, on the grounds that “it was Congress’s role to make judgments about a sitting president, not a lone prosecutor’s.” It’s not clear how they expected Congress to behave after receiving that referral. During Watergate, the “road map” passed from Special Prosecutor Leon Jaworski to the House Judiciary Committee was enough to get impeachment proceedings moving, and Zebley and his co-authors similarly insist that their report provided Congress with “a road map for where to look.” But the dynamics of Congress have changed since Watergate, and publicly televised hearings are the coin of the realm in the first branch. Think of the slickly produced convenings held by the House Jan. 6 committee.

Perhaps it’s not the job of a special counsel to consider how best to present the results of an investigation, and along these lines, Zebley, Quarles, and Goldstein insist that they were right to take a cautious, by-the-book approach. Still, lurking throughout “Interference” is the uncomfortable awareness of having been outplayed. The authors seem to recognize the need to have done something differently, but they’re not quite able to identify what it is they did wrong. 

In that sense, the fact that “Interference” exists at all is a recognition that the report wasn’t enough on its own. The Mueller team remains stubbornly devoted to text as a medium. Trump, though, is a creature of reality television. Despite the hopeful note in “Interference” about the value of explaining the Mueller investigation and election interference to the public, it’s hard to see how the book will make any difference in Americans’ understanding of these topics—for exactly the same reasons that the original report failed to bring about any real consequences for Trump. 

It’s easy to argue that the Mueller investigation should have pushed harder. All the same, though, there is a limit to what even a more aggressive special counsel investigation could have achieved. If Congress wanted to impeach and remove the president, the Mueller report provided more than enough evidence. The investigation was hemmed in by larger structural problems outside the Mueller team’s control—not only political dynamics within and outside Congress but also the limitations of the authority provided by the special counsel regulations. As Zebley, Quarles, and Goldstein write, there is something intrinsically paradoxical about “investigating the president using what is ultimately the president’s own power.” 

The great irony here is that, when it comes to questions of presidential accountability, any limitations of the Mueller investigation are a rounding error after the Supreme Court’s ruling on presidential immunity this July. Zebley, Quarles, and Goldstein note at the beginning of “Interference” that the Court released its decision just as the book was going to press, and “Interference” is studded with footnotes and brief asides identifying areas of investigation that would have been entirely foreclosed to them under the immunity ruling—in addition to the Court’s decision in Fischer v. United States, narrowing the scope of the statute that the Mueller team relied on in evaluating Trump’s potential obstruction of justice. 

“We might never have learned all that we did about Russia or Trump” under these rulings, Zebley and his co-authors warn. Who can imagine what future presidential wrongdoing will never be uncovered? In that respect, when it comes to investigations of sitting presidents, the Mueller probe may look less like a missed opportunity and more like a last hurrah.