The breaking news hit a snowy Washington, DC, on Wednesday: Newly installed attorney general William Barr appears to be preparing to announce the end of special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation.

But what would “Mueller wrapping up” actually mean? And does the rapid movement, soon after Barr was installed at the Justice Department, indicate that he shut down the Mueller probe prematurely?

A recent New York Times article documenting Trump’s two-year-long campaign to obstruct and muddy the investigation exacerbated those fears, as did an ominous tweet by conservative commentator—and White House spouse—Matt Schlapp pronouncing that “Mueller will be gone soon.”

The tea leaves around Mueller in recent weeks seem especially hard to read—and they’re conflicting at best. CNN’s special counsel stakeout has spotted prosecutors working long hours, through snow days and holidays—just as they were in the days before Michael Cohen’s surprise guilty plea last fall for lying to Congress—yet there’s also been no apparent grand jury movement since Roger Stone’s indictment. So even as CNN’s stakeout spotted DC prosecutors entering Mueller’s offices—the type of people who Mueller might hand off cases to as he winds down—and the special counsel’s staff carting out boxes, there’s also recent evidence that Mueller still has a longer game in mind. The Stone prosecution is just getting underway; Mueller is still litigating over a mystery foreign company. And he’s pushing forward trying to gain testimony from a Stone associate, Andrew Miller.

What does “wrapping up” even look like?

In fact, the list of loose threads at this point is, in some ways, longer than the list of what Mueller has done publicly. There’s conspiracy theorist Jerome Corsi’s aborted plea deal; would-be Middle East power broker George Nader’s lengthy cooperation with Mueller, which has resulted in no public charges; the mysterious Seychelles meeting between Blackwater mercenary founder Erik Prince and a Russian businessman; and then, of course, the big question of obstruction of justice. Add to that the recent witness testimony from the House Intelligence Committee that Democratic representative Adam Schiff has turned over to Mueller’s office, in which other witnesses, according to Schiff, appear to have lied to Congress. Besides, there are a host of bread crumbs that Mueller left in the more than 500 pages of his court filings that would all prove superfluous if further action didn’t lie ahead.

Open questions remain, too, about bit characters like Carter Page. The seemingly hapless, hat-wearing onetime foreign policy aide was one of the starting points of the entire Russia probe—and the controversial FISA warrant that targeted him was renewed twice, in 2016 and 2017, meaning that investigators found evidence at the time that he was still being targeted by foreign agents. And yet he’s nearly disappeared from the public radar of the Russia probe. Does he reemerge—or is Page merely destined to become the Rosencrantz or Guildenstern of the Russia investigation?

Or what about the odd communications between a Trump organization computer server and a server belonging to Russia’s Alfa Bank, which The New Yorker’s Dexter Filkins dove into last October?

There remain many open questions, even as the consensus around Washington appears to be zeroing in on Mueller “wrapping up.” But what would that actually entail? Are we just hours away from a sweeping indictment that makes public the pee tape and explains every intimate detail of a years-long plot to co-opt Donald Trump as a Russian intelligence asset dating all the way back to 1987, as Jonathan Chait has argued? Or are we heading to what the president’s lawyers have said all along—that, as awful as the unrelated criminalities of Michael Flynn, Paul Manafort, and Michael Cohen were, none of that amounts to “collusion,” and this entire enterprise has been a worthless "witch hunt!" by 13 angry Democrats?