ROBERT MUELLER has concluded his investigation into links and/or co-ordination between President Donald Trump’s electoral campaign and the Russian government. This is a big moment. The special counsel’s probe has already been the downfall of some of Mr Trump’s closest former advisers. Many of the president’s opponents are hoping his final report, now sitting on the desk of Attorney-General William Barr, is about to hook an even bigger fish: the president himself.

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It will take some time for Mr Mueller’s final conclusions to come to light. Mr Barr, who returned to run the Justice Department for the second time last month, is only obliged to divulge the gist of them to Congress, and in his own time. In a letter to the House and Senate justice committees on March 22nd he said he nonetheless hoped to brief them on the report’s “principal conclusions as soon as this weekend”. He added that he would take longer to consider what “other information” he might make available from the report.

In the meantime, Washington, DC is already half-mad with gossip and speculation about Mr Mueller’s findings and Mr Barr’s putative handling of them. The Democrats’ leaders in Congress, Senator Chuck Schumer and Speaker Nancy Pelosi, greeted the news that Mr Mueller’s report had landed by warning the attorney-general not to allow Mr Trump a “sneak preview” of it. (The White House claims not to have seen it yet.) All the main Democratic presidential candidates, including senators Bernie Sanders and Cory Booker, then urged Mr Barr to make the full report public.

Amid the speculation, a couple of things can be said with certainty.

First, Mr Mueller’s now-completed probe has been very successful. Over the past two years his team has uncovered details of an extraordinary propaganda and influence campaign by Russian agents to bend the course of the 2016 election in Mr Trump’s favour. It also found that several members of Mr Trump’s campaign had shady communications with people connected to the Russian government—some of whom were probably spies—and then lied about them.

It charged 34 people with over 200 federal crimes, including two dozen Russians, and six Trump advisers. Paul Manafort, the president’s former campaign chairman, was sentenced this month to seven-and-a-half years in prison, for various financial and other crimes. Mr Mueller’s investigation did not look at Russia’s continuing efforts to attack American democracy. Yet it has certainly helped raise America’s defences against them.

Second, despite a relentless attack on Mr Mueller by the president, who branded the probe a “witch-hunt” and slandered its investigators, it appears to have been conducted without political interference. The Justice Department has intimated that Mr Mueller does not intend to issue any further indictment. And in his letter to Congress Mr Barr said Mr Mueller had not been refused permission to take any “proposed action”. Given the fears Mr Trump’s behaviour raised, this is in itself cause for considerable relief.

It may also be worth adding to the speculation a bit—by noting that the president’s opponents could well end up disappointed by Mr Mueller’s conclusions.

It seems likely that a draft version of them is already available in the hundreds of pages of court filings that support the indictments his team has handed out. They underline the painstaking nature of the Mueller probe. They also provide no clear evidence that the Trump team, for all its lies and evasion, illegally participated in the Russian plot. Nor do they point to criminality on the part of the president.

The final report could contain additional incriminating details about Mr Trump. If, for example, the special counsel was deterred from indicting him only by the Justice Department’s policy of granting immunity to a sitting president, Mr Mueller might be expected to inform Mr Barr of the charges he would otherwise have brought. This is clearly possible. But there is nothing in the available evidence to suggest it is likely.

Even If Mr Mueller did not find evidence of law-breaking by Mr Trump, his critics hope his report might provide lots of evidence of lesser misdemeanours nonetheless. Yet this would also be unlikely. By longstanding convention, prosecutors should not pass judgements on or reveal salacious details about individuals unless they are related to a case they are bringing against them. That is why former FBI Director James Comey’s decision to criticise Hillary Clinton over her email arrangements in 2016—despite the fact that he had found no case for her to answer—was so controversial.

Only a full disclosure of Mr Mueller’s report would settle the matter. The House of Representatives has already voted unanimously that this should happen. Mr Trump has also said he wants the report to be made public. Yet it probably won’t be, because it is not incumbent upon the careful Mr Barr to do so, and for an additional reason that Mr Trump might take comfort from.

The most damaging misbehaviour by the Trump team—and conceivably Mr Trump himself—examined by the special counsel concerned its communications with Russians. Yet this is subject to a continuing counter-intelligence investigation, and therefore most likely to be kept under wraps by Mr Barr. The fact that the attorney-general has a history of taking an expansive view of executive power, which in this hypothetical case could be cited on national security grounds, makes that seem likelier still.

It is fitting that an investigation that has given rise to so much speculation over the past two years should give rise to yet more at its conclusion. Yet there is one other thing that can be said with some certainty. Even if Mr Mueller’s probe has not provided the silver bullet that Mr Trump’s critics crave, it has already done the president tremendous damage.

It has shown that the initial rumours of illicit Russian support for his campaign—which of course Mr Trump denied—grossly underestimated the extent of the Russian operation. It has shown that his campaign had several liars and charlatans, greedy for a favour from any hand, at the helm. And, perhaps most damaging of all, Mr Mueller appears to have unearthed evidence against Mr Trump on other matters, which has in turn helped sparked a proliferating number of additional investigations.

The special counsel is known, for example, to have been cooperating with federal prosecutors from the Southern District of New York, who are investigating the president’s campaign finances and those of his inauguration committee. Mr Trump has already been named by prosecutors as a co-conspirator in a campaign finance violation committed by his former personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, who has been sentenced to three years in prison for it and other offences.

Whatever may be in the Mueller report, it will not be the end of Mr Trump’s legal troubles, in other words. It may barely be the end of the beginning.