Following the investigation of the special counsel, Robert Mueller, is an enduring lesson in humility, and not merely because no one — not the president, not legal analysts or anyone else — has been able to predict what his office will do next. Mr. Mueller is much more than a prosecutor. To many, he has become Mr. Trump’s opposite: an avatar of justice and probity.

As special counsel, he’s also a storyteller, unwinding the tale of what happened during the 2016 election, while revealing only glimpses of the overall narrative. It’s not clear whether he’ll ever make public the whole of what he knows, or whether the regulations governing his appointment even allow him to do so.

The country is living through an astonishing story without a full sense of what that story is. But as the public waits to discover what the Trump team knew and when they knew it, Mr. Mueller has been telling another story, about “draining the swamp.” And how that story plays out stands to have a major effect on how our politics moves forward after the investigation is complete.

The themes of corruption and white-collar malfeasance link the cases of those caught up in the special counsel’s inquiry. Their indictments shed light on the culture of influence peddling and less-than-savory financial transactions that Mr. Trump promised to root out if elected president. (He has done the opposite.)