Darren Samuelsohn is a senior White House reporter for POLITICO.

There I was, getting a flat tire replaced, when my cellphone rang.

It was Rudy Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer, and it wasn’t the first time over the past few years that I’d gotten an important call at an awkward time. Over the 22 months of the special counsel’s probe into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election, I’ve had conversations with sources and crashed on stories at baseball games, on the Metro, at the dentist and in the middle of many family meals.


With this particular “Rudy call,” as they’re now known in my household, the conversation kicked over to speakerphone as I sat down in the front of my car to better position myself and my laptop. For some reason, the astonished mechanic got in the car too and listened in as I tried to understand the president’s legal strategy toward an adult film actress who said she had slept with Donald Trump—and that he had tried to buy her silence during the 2016 campaign.

During one especially strange day, both Rudy and Lanny Davis, Trump’s former lawyer’s lawyer, butt dialed me and left lengthy garbled messages on my voicemail by mistake. Yeah, that happened.

On another occasion, amid the trial of former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, I was the one who accidentally butt dialed Rudy. Only I did it with FaceTime. Imagine my surprise to pull my phone from my pocket and see the president’s personal lawyer, smiling back at me and saying, “Hi, Darren!” while wearing a white undershirt and complaining about a Red Sox-Yankees game on ESPN that had turned into a blowout for his favorite team.

I probably talked to Rudy 50 times over the course of Robert Mueller’s investigation and sent thousands of emails, texts and encrypted messages to various sources. The story became so all-consuming that I was living it, breathing it, even dreaming about it. Yes, I’ve had Mueller dreams. That’s what a beat is all about.



***

In the heat of the chaotic 2016 presidential campaign, when my editors assigned me to a new beat we half-jokingly called “shenanigans,” I had no idea it would grow into a nearly three-year mission and turn me into an expert on legal knife fights and White House scandals.

Why did we call it “shenanigans”? Because back then, basically, we didn’t know what we were dealing with—we just knew that somebody was up to no good.

The Democrats had been hacked. That much we knew. We’d soon hear officially that the Russians were to blame.

But other strange things were happening too. It was a confusing period. That summer I interviewed Roger Stone, Trump’s colorful political guru and soulmate, about his “Stop the Steal” plan to send Trump supporters to the polls to make sure Democrats weren’t stuffing the ballot boxes. I was talking with conspiracy theory experts who helped me consider the ramifications of Trump’s repeated claims that the election was already rigged. On Election Day, I was glued to my desk and on the lookout for any kind of mischief, including Wolf Blitzer’s teleprompter getting hacked.

When Trump won, my job detoured to look closer into the ethical questions and norm-busting that arise when an international businessman becomes president. We scored a membership list for Mar-a-Lago and I finagled an invitation for brunch at the president’s private club when he was in South Florida. Over salad and iced tea, I took in his private beach-side enclave that the world had been hearing so much about—and that the new leader of the free world was attempting to turn into the “Winter White House.” Then, Jared Kushner, Ivanka Trump and their kids sat down at the next table. Everyone gawked, but all my host and I could overhear were parental reprimands.

The rapid-fire events of May 2017 — FBI Director James Comey’s firing and Mueller's appointment — quickly brought me back to the shenanigans beat. Other news outlets had assigned teams of veteran reporters to investigate the president’s ties to Russia, which had emerged as one of the dominant story arcs of Trump’s young presidency. I contacted as many defense lawyers as I could find, asking them for help understanding what was happening and what might be around the next corner. I also went back into the archives and studied the history of presidential scandals from Watergate to Iran-Contra, Monica Lewinsky and Valerie Plame.

My first stories that spring reflected all of that, including one published just hours after Mueller’s appointment about how complicated life would get in the West Wing now that a special counsel was on the job. By that first weekend, I wrote about the legal bills people on Trump’s team would be facing. Two weeks into the investigation I took an in-depth look at how Trump’s prolific Twitter feed wasn’t just messaging his base, it was also "a gold mine” for investigators.

At that early stage, every Trump staffer, family member or former aide who hired a lawyer became a scoop. It was like playing whack-a-mole and truly a bit maddening trying to suss out each revelation. The hirings also signaled something else. Behind the scenes, the Mueller investigation was widening. It was going to be a long road ahead.

There were many late nights and weekends, chasing leads and trying to break news of our own. I essentially lived for a month in a hotel across the street from the Alexandria, Va., courthouse during Manafort’s trial last summer. Forevermore, thanks to Manafort’s spending habits and the identical scent the Westin hotel chain pumps into its lobbies, rooms and hallways, I will think of ostrich jackets and Oriental rugs whenever I visit one of its hotels.

This beat has had its share of heart-thumping moments. I was in the dentist's chair with my phone ringer turned off on the Friday morning that news broke that Michael Flynn, Trump’s first national security adviser, had pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI.

It’s had its disappointments too. I regret burying far too low in an October 2016 story a comment we got from a DOJ source on background essentially confirming there was an active investigation into the Trump campaign — something the New York Times a few weeks later would incorrectly report wasn’t happening and which Comey didn’t publicly acknowledge until March 2017.

There were definite highs. Stephen Colbert dedicated an opening monologue bit to a colorful quote from one of my stories raising questions about former Trump fixer Michael Cohen’s loyalty to the president after the FBI raided Cohen’s home, office and hotel room. My tireless colleague Josh Gerstein and I landed a big scoop about a mystery subpoena fight tied to the Mueller probe. The article came in part from reporting from the federal courthouse in Washington when I had camped out in the clerk’s office one morning in anticipation of a big filing deadline. I didn’t know what, or whom, I was waiting for but got lucky when someone connected to the case—we’d later learn he was representing a foreign-owned company—came in and asked for a copy of a Mueller filing he needed so he could file a reply brief.

I could have called it a day with that. But instead, I made the short stroll across the National Mall to Mueller’s office for a little stakeout, just to see what was going on over there. Sure enough, as I walked up to the outdoor plaza, I spotted a couple of Manafort’s lawyers by the food trucks talking to Mueller deputy Andrew Weissmann, taking a quick lunch break while the former Trump campaign chairman met with investigators upstairs as part of his guilty plea agreement. I captured the moment with my iPhone. Rachel Maddow featured the picture on air that night.

(Quick confession: That whole October afternoon I was preoccupied by the Cubs-Brewers National League Central one-game playoff for the division title and its incredibly reporter-unfriendly 1 p.m. East Coast start time. Yeah, I was listening to the first innings on my phone. #Priorities.)

There have been quick pivots on the beat, like the rewrite we had to do after Mueller’s office issued a late-night statement denying a key part of a big BuzzFeed scoop about evidence the special counsel was said to have concerning Cohen’s testimony to Congress. And just keeping track of the sprawling investigations was daunting at times. About midway through the probe, we turned what had been an internal Google spreadsheet helping us keep tabs of all the lawyers in the case into an interactive graphic that displayed the 270 people (now 323) mired in the Russia probe.

There’s been a lot of clamor and critique in recent days about the media and its overzealous coverage of “Russiagate.” I don’t think we overdid it, given the number of touch points between Trump associates and various Russians, as well as the lengths those involved went to to conceal their contacts. Given the stakes involved, how could we not try our best to discover the truth?

This has been an investigation unlike anything in American history, one in which we just got word from Attorney General William Barr that the special counsel has concluded the president of the United States did not conspire or collude with a foreign power to win the White House.

At the same time, journalists are humans. We make mistakes. When events are moving at epic speed, and with an investigation this sprawling and complex, that’s inevitable—but the best reporters fix their errors and check their biases at the door.

The end of this investigation has also felt abrupt, even though the Mueller beat isn’t quite over yet. Stone’s trial on charges he lied to Congress looms in November and seems destined to be a media circus. Federal and state prosecutors in New York and elsewhere aren’t done looking at the president’s businesses, charity, campaign and inauguration fund. The Democratic-led House is clamoring to get near complete access to the Mueller report—by next week. A court battle is possible.

So I can probably expect some more dreams about federal prosecutors. And, knowing Rudy like I do, I’m expecting more butt dials.