Read: After Mueller, the ongoing investigations surrounding Trump

The initial reaction from the White House was triumphant. “As we already knew, NO COLLUSION! Nothing different from what President @realDonaldTrump has been saying for the past TWO YEARS!!!” the White House’s social-media director, Dan Scavino, tweeted moments after Barr’s letter was posted online. Shortly thereafter, Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders offered an official statement from the White House. “The findings of the Department of Justice are a total and complete exoneration of the President of the United States,” she tweeted. Soon, the president himself broke his silence. Speaking to reporters before boarding Air Force One for his flight home from Palm Beach, Florida, Trump said, “It was complete and total exoneration. It’s a shame that our country had to go through this. To be honest, it’s a shame that your president had to go through this.”

The coming days and months will show how widespread that interpretation of Mueller’s report will be. Trump is hardly out of the woods legally, with congressional committees and other prosecutors at the federal and state levels examining his connections to Russia, his business dealings, and his private charity, among other matters. Indeed, the next two years could be just as busy for Trump’s legal team as the past two. But their mission is likely to stay the same: All along, they took the view that Trump had committed no crimes and couldn’t be indicted under Justice Department policy. They largely saw their role as preserving Trump’s electability—and that included inoculating him from a potentially damning final report from Mueller.

Their methods, however, differed.

At an early point, Trump’s lawyers sought to accommodate Mueller, in hopes of bringing the probe to a quick end. That’s what Trump wanted. He detested the investigation and wanted it stopped. “It was impeding and interfering with his ability to be president, which was an outrage,” Trump’s former lead outside lawyer, John Dowd, told The Atlantic. “It’s very upsetting when you’re in the middle of really important negotiations—trade negotiations and other things. And [Trump] would get asked about it.”

One of Trump’s complaints was that Mueller had a personal grudge. He has made reference to a 2011 dispute with Mueller over membership fees at Trump’s golf course in Northern Virginia. But his lawyers never made that an issue, believing that cooperation was the path to ending the probe. They made witnesses and documents available, avoiding legal showdowns over executive privilege.

In hopes of speeding things along, Trump and his legal team considered giving an interview to Mueller, discussing a sit-down at Camp David at the end of January 2018. But in the end, Trump’s lawyers concluded that face-to-face testimony would be too risky. They instead gave answers to Mueller in writing. “I didn’t want to put [Trump] in that position,” Dowd said, adding that “he does the best he can, but isn’t always right on the money.”