Read: The White House has no plan for confronting the Mueller report

So if you imagine that “wrapping up” means this first option, then Mueller and his team have largely finished probing the story of the links and coordination between individuals associated with the Trump campaign and the Russian government. They have largely finished investigating efforts to obstruct the probe. And they are probably spinning off the matters that arose in the course of investigating these core things. Yes, there are still issues to be resolved, but those issues are squarely within the realm of what can be gleaned from filed documents. Some of these might include examining newly seized evidence from Roger Stone; waiting to see whether investigators will learn anything truly significant from Andrew Miller, a matter that is currently before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit; and resolving the mystery grand-jury case, which pertains to some foreign-government-owned institution. In this iteration of “wrapping up,” the team largely knows where it is heading, and it’s just a question of getting there. Think of James Comey’s comments about the Hillary Clinton email investigation; by the time the FBI sat down to interview her, he has said, it was quite clear there wouldn’t be a case unless she lied. But the interview had to happen anyway. The FBI was wrapping up.

The problem is that this explanation doesn’t answer the question of how significant those loose ends are to the investigation or how long they will take to tie off—putting aside the fact that it is now mid-February and the investigation still shows no signs of ending. The famed biographer Robert Caro has been wrapping up the fifth volume of his five-volume biography of Lyndon Johnson—the first volume of which was published in 1982—for years. The scope of work is known. He presumably knows what he’s going to say. And yet, as Caro has said, he is “still—at the age of 83—several years from finishing it.” Countless Game of Thrones fans have been waiting since 2011 for George R. R. Martin to wrap up The Winds of Winter, the next volume in his “Song of Fire and Ice” series.

There’s another plausible way to understand Mueller’s “wrap-up” phase. It could mean that the investigative phase of the probe is nearly complete—with or without significant loose ends—but that major decisions are still to come. In other words, if the Mueller team has all or almost all the information it needs, it may still have to decide exactly what to do with that information. Will there be more indictments when the investigation “wraps up,” or will prosecutors ride off into the sunset, leaving a report on Bill Barr’s doorstep?

To say that the investigation is done, in other words, doesn’t answer the question of investigative outcome. If you’re one of those people who have invested a great deal in the Mueller investigation, you might—quite plausibly—see in this decision point the great cataclysm, the moment in which Mueller reveals all in a set of climactic charges. Conversely, if you’re one of those people who think the premise is wildly overstated and the whole thing is a “witch hunt,” you’re waiting for the emperor to be revealed as naked. But the point either way in this iteration is that “wrapping up” is not necessarily the end; it’s merely the end of the investigation.