Jack Shafer is Politico’s senior media writer.

Like excited stock pickers calling the end of a bull market, journalists, lawyers, legal analysts and other specialists in Washington jabber have been predicting the end of special counsel Robert S. Mueller’s 18-month-long investigation into Russian futzing with the 2016 campaign for almost as long as it has been running.

Some of the most vocal predicters are Trump supporters who think that by shouting “hurry up” they can coerce Mueller into finishing before he’s truly done. Some of the journalists filing predictions are responding to the demands of editors, who love to print extrapolative what-if stories. As the late New York Times columnist Tom Wicker hinted in his 1978 book, On Press, journalists—especially political journalists—rush toward the predictive because what might happen makes a better story on slow news weeks than what actually did.


Perhaps the first seer to spot Mueller’s end was former White House special counsel Ty Cobb. He dramatically predicted an early close to the probe in August 2017, when Mueller’s investigation was only three months old. “I’d be embarrassed if this is still haunting the White House by Thanksgiving and worse if it’s still haunting him by year end,” Cobb told Reuters. “I think the relevant areas of inquiry by the special counsel are narrow.”

In April 2018, President Donald Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani told the New York Post that it wasn’t “going to take more than a week or two to get a resolution. They’re almost there. … I’m going to ask Mueller, ‘What do you need to wrap it up?’” Writing for Politico in May 2018, on the probe’s first birthday, former federal prosecutor Nelson W. Cunningham asserted that “Mueller will likely wrap up his investigation this summer.” Cunningham took two other fat swings before he struck out and returned to the dugout: Trump would testify or take the Fifth Amendment, and Paul Manafort would plead guilty rather than go to trial.

In August, Trump adviser and former U.S. Attorney Joseph diGenova predicted an end for the inquiry. When October arrived, my colleague Darren Samuelsohn quoted an anonymous defense attorney working on the Russia investigation who, reading the tea leaves of departures on Mueller’s staff, said, “I think they wouldn’t be letting people go unless they’re winding down, especially the way these things work.” In late November, my former boss and practiced Mueller-watcher, Garrett M. Graff, sighted the Mueller probe’s “endgame,” and at the beginning of December, Michael Isikoff of Yahoo News reported that Mueller prosecutors were telling defense attorneys that they were “tying up loose ends.”

The great thing about prognostication is that if you guess often enough, you might eventually get it right. After all of those expired predictions, Washington Post reporter Devlin Barrett appears to come closest. On Friday, he wrote that prosecutors don’t ordinarily sentence guilty defendants because they might need them to testify later and sentencing will give them leverage to continue cooperating. That Mueller’s team has arranged quick sentencing for Michael Flynn, George Papadopoulos, Michael Cohen and Manafort indicates he might be approaching his finish line. Only Rick Gates awaits the sentencing machine.

The winding down of the Mueller machine doesn’t mean that his show might end soon. The much rumored—and predicted—indictments of Roger Stone and Jerome Corsi have yet to be handed down. With both Gates and Cohen still willing to sing, Mueller might convert some of their warblings into new or expanded charges. Donald Trump Jr. and Ivanka Trump have come under Mueller’s gaze, says Yahoo News, for their work on the Trump Tower project in Moscow, which we now know was pursued by the Trump Organization until June 2016, six months longer than Cohen had told federal investigators. John Dean and Fox News legal analyst Andrew Napolitano have speculated that Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner will be indicted, perhaps in connection with the back channel work he did with a foreign government during the Trump transition. And then there’s the mystery witness who has been fighting one of Mueller’s grand jury subpoenas under cloak of secrecy in the federal courthouse. Main event or sideshow? Nobody knows. The Watergate investigation lasted four years. The Iran-Contra investigation went on for more than six years, and Whitewater for more than seven. In fact, were Mueller to call it a day before New Year’s, as some suggest he will, it would make this one of the shorter probes ever.

If Mueller has downshifted, that hardly spells the end of the investigations into Trump world—Russia is only one of the dishes on the investigative smorgasbord. New York prosecutors are examining spending by the Trump inaugural committee and donations by foreign nationals, specifically from Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. The New York attorney general has put Trump Foundation finances under the lens. Emoluments clause lawsuits against Trump are ongoing. The Trump Foundation faces legal scrutiny. Summer Zervos’ defamation suit against Trump is still alive, too. (For a good roundup of the Trump-related investigation, see this Bloomberg News piece.)

Other targets of investigations on the Trump periphery include Maria Butina, the alleged Russian spy who trafficked in NRA and Republican circles in recent years and who pleaded guilty this week to charges of conspiracy against the United States. She promises to cooperate with prosecutors. Trump friend David Pecker, who controls the National Enquirer, secured a nonprosecution agreement with federal prosecutors in the Cohen case in exchange for admitting his company’s role in funneling “catch and kill” hush money to one of Trump’s paramours. According to news reports this week, Trump was in the room when Cohen and Pecker discussed how best to squelch stories about Trump’s philandering. Should Trump not win reelection, he might be prosecuted for violating campaign finance laws by authorizing the payoffs (Cohen has already pleaded guilty). Speaking on CNN, correspondent Brian Todd said Trump hasn’t helped himself by changing his hush money story from I didn’t know to It’s not my fault to It’s not illegal. Longtime Pecker observer Ann Louise Bardach predicted in August (I’m sensing a theme here) that investigators will find more damning Trump material in Enquirer vaults if they excavate.

Criminal investigations, as Trump is learning, aren’t played against a clock, like a football game or a hockey match. They’re more like baseball games, which are played until completed. I think I’m on safe ground to predict that the Trump inquiries have many, many more innings to go.

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Send your predictions on when the investigations will end to [email protected]. My email alerts predict that my Twitter feed will go to jail before they do. My RSS feed never predicts because it’s always wrong.