Darren Samuelsohn is a senior White House reporter for POLITICO.

In mid-July, four months after Robert Mueller delivered his investigative findings to the attorney general, a podcast called “The Report” aired its very first episode. You might have thought that, after 2½ years of obsessive coverage, another voice in the media din would have a hard time finding an audience.

You would be mistaken.


The 39-minute podcast—a deep dive into the minutiae of the special counsel’s much debated 448-page work on the Russia probe, complete with dramatic narration, ominous sound effects and carefully enunciated foreign names—was an instant online hit. Goosed along by a Rachel Maddow mention and by die-hard fans of its makers at Lawfare, a wonky online repository for national security and intelligence news, the podcast racked up 300,000 downloads. With a dozen or so more episodes still in the pipeline, the producers of “The Report” see their work’s popularity as proof that, despite the president’s proclamation Mueller cleared him of committing any crimes while in office, Americans are nowhere near ready to declare “case closed.”

“They’re not sick of talking about it, and I can show you the numbers to prove it to you,” Susan Hennessey, a Lawfare executive editor and the main narrator of “The Report,” said the day after the former special counsel delivered his terse and undramatic testimony to Congress.

“The Report” is but one example of a little remarked phenomenon of the Russia scandal: While the special counsel’s office has shut down and the boss himself has returned to life as a private citizen, the universe of pundits, podcasts, journalists and others focused on Mueller’s work has continued to expand.

On top of the major networks and dominant national newspapers, all of which have seen their audiences grow substantially since 2017, more than a dozen podcasts have emerged to pore over the Mueller saga and Russian election meddling. Mueller’s report is still selling well, too: a version published by the Washington Post has been on the New York Times best-seller list for 15 weeks even though it’s available for free online. And you can expect, in the coming weeks, more details about a miniseries adaptation of James Comey’s memoir, A Higher Loyalty, which told the story of the former FBI director whose firing by Trump led directly to Mueller’s commission. And Bob Woodward himself is eyeing a second book on the Trump era that looks “deeply into all of these issues direct and indirect,” he told POLITICO.

Call it the Mueller Media Complex, and it thrives despite the former special counsel’s admonition that all the answers are contained in the report.

All the ingredients exist for this hydra to keep on growing: Trump’s constant tweets invoking the Russia investigation; a daily drumbeat of “will they or won’t they?” impeachment chatter in Congress; lawsuits and testimony that promise to keep dredging up details from the special counsel’s report; Roger Stone’s trial this fall in Washington, D.C.; and warnings from Mueller himself that some of the same forms of foreign sabotage are happening again in the 2020 election cycle.

Just hours after Mueller completed his doubleheader appearances before Congress last month, “The Asset,” another popular podcast that could only be made in the Trump era, taped a special edition of its show at a bar just blocks from the Capitol. About a hundred people downed free cocktails while watching the live panel discussion, which included former agents from the FBI and the CIA trying to put the special counsel’s low-key testimony into larger context. The hosts were also eager to promote their show’s 12-part series, which was winding down after a three-month run of weekly episodes drawing connections involving Trump’s business dealings, Russia and the Mueller investigation.

“I feel there’s a huge appetite for more information about this, for more stories to be told and hopefully at some point in time to reach a satisfying conclusion that is more definitive than where we are right now,” Paul Woodhull, producer of “The Asset,” which is affiliated with the left-leaning Center for American Progress’ lobbying arm, told me.

That House Democrats are eyeing impeachment “breathes a lot of life into this” because of the prospect more could be learned if Congress is able to get its hands on an unredacted copy of the Mueller report, Woodhull explained. The podcast’s funders are weighing whether to greenlight a second season, Woodhull added. “I can say I’m aggressively lobbying for it.”



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As Bob Woodward’s career demonstrates, every major scandal since Watergate—even some outside of Washington politics—has seen large media ecosystems build up around it. Each is also frequently a reflection of the technology of their times: Think of the print investigative reporters who helped take down Richard Nixon, the cable TV legal analysts like Jeffrey Toobin and Greta Van Susteren who made names for themselves during O.J. Simpson’s murder trial, or how the brand new Drudge Report website scooped Newsweek reporter Michael Isikoff to reveal Bill Clinton’s affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky.

The Russia investigation may be remembered as the probe built perfectly for the podcasts. Sure, long-form audio shows have been around since the tail end of the George W. Bush presidency. But here during the rise of Trump more than a dozen programs have taken form with roots in discussing the shenanigans of 2016—and what’s happened since. All political perspectives are available, like the “Special Prosecutor with Larry Klayman” show where the founder of the conservative group Judicial Watch gets introduced to the sound of helicopters flying overhead and then frequently uses his airtime to impugn the Russia probe’s origins. Over on “Mueller, She Wrote,” which features three Southern California female comedians, one of the more popular segments is called “fantasy indictment draft.”

“Everyone owes Robert Mueller a dinner or something for all of this, at the very least,” said Chris Bannon, chief content officer at Stitcher, a free online radio service that hosts many of the aforementioned Mueller-themed podcasts, including “The Mueller Report: A Radio Dramatization” and “Stay Tuned with Preet,” a talk show hosted by the former U.S. attorney from the Southern District of New York that covers a cross-section of topics but often returns to the special counsel’s work. Bannon explained that the Russia probe has lent itself so well to the medium because of its complexity—and the interest of listeners who want to hear it all pieced together.

“It’s the reasonable voices talking in a room together,” he said.

Isikoff, now chief investigative correspondent at Yahoo! News and host of two podcasts with ties to the 2016 election, said the range of new online audio shows related to Trump and Russia “are a natural marriage of a new medium with the hot story of the day.”

“It’s not a surprise that there’d be so many podcasts that’d revolve around the events of Trump’s presidency. It’s the dominant news story of the era and podcasts are the increasingly dominant way in which we get our news,” he said.

The Russia probe has meant new career options for scores of former federal prosecutors and others with backgrounds in national security and law enforcement. Several signed lucrative contracts with cable networks eager to have their own on-call analysts. Many had spoken up first in print news accounts and via their own extensive Twitter threads, where they pitched their services to a confused public eager to make sense of the most arcane legal maneuvers.

“I think it’s safe to say this is a moment in which there has been more interest in legal analysis than there has ever been in my lifetime,” said Renato Mariotti, a former assistant U.S. attorney from Chicago who said he had fewer than 100 Twitter followers when the Mueller probe launched but has parlayed his expertise into a CNN analyst contract, a podcast and a recurring column in POLITICO Magazine. His Twitter followers now exceed 200,000.

“For someone like me it was an opportunity. It allowed me to present facts and analysis to a lot of people and it spread very quickly,” he said.

The same went for Lawfare, a side project of the nonprofit Brookings Institution that for years had been a backwater venue for detailed policy conversations about everything from government surveillance to terrorism and cybersecurity. Then came Russian election meddling, and its top editor, Benjamin Wittes, often responded to big Mueller media revelations by posting on Twitter short videos of a miniature cannon explosion. The website published hundreds of Mueller items, including a real-time dissection of the Trump campaign’s 2016 Trump Tower meeting with a Russian lawyer who approached Donald Trump Jr. offering dirt about Clinton. Thanks to the Russia investigation, the web site has seen its traffic surge at exponential rates and boasts of about 15 million page views combined for 2017 and 2018.

“We have all been very surprised at the degree to which this giant new audience has shown up at our door wanting to participate in that conversation,” Wittes said. “Yeah, it crept up on us, except there was nothing subtle about it. … It hit us over the head like a sledgehammer.”

Mueller media coverage hit its peak in 2019 as the probe came to an end. But even the end didn’t feel particularly final, with the debate over Attorney General William Barr’s summary, Mueller’s subsequent press conference about Barr’s summary and then seven hours of House hearings. The long goodbye drove coverage through the roof.

Nearly 5.6 percent of MSNBC’s total airtime this year through early August was devoted to the special counsel, according to data compiled by the TV News Archive. The online research outfit, which measures closed-caption mentions in 15-second intervals for the three major cable networks, also found that 4.5 percent of CNN’s coverage and 2.9 percent of the Fox News airtime covered Mueller so far this year. For all of the networks, that’s more than a twofold increase compared with the attention they each gave the topic during the second half of 2017, when the Russia investigation got rolling.



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Mueller beat reporters are done with their courthouse stakeouts. Patriot Plaza, the southwest D.C. office complex where the special counsel and his team of lawyers and FBI agents were housed, has returned to bureaucratic anonymity.

But that doesn’t mean the media ecosystem is dying. In fact, it’s just changing shape, or at least location.

Lawmakers are actually getting help from some of the people who played featured roles in the media’s coverage. One of the House Judiciary panel’s senior attorneys is Norm Eisen, the former top Obama White House ethics official who early in the Trump era was a frequent CNN pundit and, from his previous perch at the Brookings Institution, co-authored an extensive analysis of why the president obstructed justice. It’s a similar story over on the House Intelligence Committee, which started the year by hiring Daniel Goldman, a former federal prosecutor and MSNBC analyst to lead the panel’s investigations, and Diana Pilipenko, a money laundering and sanctions expert who had been part of the Center for American Progress’ Moscow Project that’s dedicated to digging into Trump’s financial ties to Russia.

More opportunities may hinge on impeachment and the Democratic congressional investigations, and whether anyone can turn up stones that the special counsel didn’t already publicize. Some of the people who have established brands around Mueller say they have no trouble shifting to other topics of expertise.

“As long as people keep listening, we’ll keep putting the content out,” said A.G., the host of “Mueller, She Wrote,” which she launched in late 2017 and now has 1 million monthly downloads, advertisers and a live road show selling $30 tickets to deep-blue audiences in Chicago, San Francisco, Seattle and Boston.

The San Diego comedian, who doesn’t use her real name because she also has a day job in the federal executive branch, recently launched a second podcast called “The Daily Beans” talking through the news headlines. “It wasn’t supposed to be a forever situation,” she said of the “Mueller, She Wrote” persona. “It’s kind of up in the air, just like our democracy is.”

Most of the big shows are also up in the air. But they’re not coming in for a landing anytime soon.

“We’re talking about that right now,” Isikoff said of Conspiracyland, the six-episode podcast he hosted that examined the unsolved 2016 murder of Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich in Washington, D.C. The show has garnered nearly 1 million listeners. “It’s really hit a nerve out there,” he said.

Chuck Rosenberg, a former acting head of the Drug Enforcement Administration and ex-FBI staffer under both Mueller and Comey, launched a podcast in April with 10 episodes logged as of the end of July. It features in-depth biographical interviews with several of the top national security and law enforcement officials at the center of the Russia probe, including Comey, former acting Attorney General Sally Yates, former FBI acting director Andrew McCabe, former FBI general counsel James Baker and former Obama White House homeland security adviser Lisa Monaco. Rosenberg is now working on a second season for the podcast, scheduled to resume in early to mid-September, and he’s also continuing to do on-air work as a legal analyst with MSNBC.

And some members of this robust ecosystem are in it, whether they like it or not.

Andrew McCarthy, a former federal prosecutor and National Review columnist who kicked off his own podcast around June 2018, said he expected to keep talking about issues including Mueller, impeachment, and Democratic lawsuits to enforce the emoluments clause of the Constitution and try to gain access to Trump’s tax returns.

“I don’t say that with any great joy. I think it’d be better if we actually moved onto what is going to happen in the country after 2020,” said McCarthy, a Fox News commentator dating to the George W. Bush administration. “If that meant my little piece of the industrial complex had to fade away, I would be OK with that.”

Broadway and Hollywood have had their roles to play as well.

A celebrity cast reading in New York last month featuring Kevin Kline playing Mueller and John Lithgow in the role of Trump has gotten more than 3 million online views, and a tool kit explaining how to mount a live production including a free version of the script written by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Robert Schenkkan has been downloaded more than 13,000 times. Hundreds of local groups, many of them chapters of the pro-impeachment group Indivisible, are already planning their own readings.

Details on any Hollywood productions dealing with Mueller or the 2016 campaign remain under wraps, though several sources with ties back to the entertainment world say they’ve been privy to discussions on film projects about the Russia investigation. Given the lack of an actual ending to the overall Trump story and studio squeamishness about getting into the president’s cross hairs, it could be years before anything memorable gets made about the Mueller probe. Just look at the late-blooming interest in the Clinton impeachment: The Slate podcast “Slow Burn” didn’t come out until last year, and a new Monica Lewinsky-produced season of “American Crime Story” is set to air next fall on the FX network.

“I think that there’s endless potential in that I think what has unfolded as a matter of fact is infinitely more fascinating than what fiction writers could have thought of two years ago,” said Eric Schultz, the former Obama White House deputy press secretary who consulted on the recent Netflix reboot of the presidential television drama “Designated Survivor.” For starters, he called the FBI’s predawn raid in the summer of 2017 on former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort’s Alexandria, Virginia, condominium “a scene that writes itself.”

“It felt incredibly cinematic throughout the course of the investigation, the revelatory nature of how it unfolded,” Schultz added. “In terms of the chronology of the underlying facts and how we learned them, I think would make a lot of Hollywood writers jealous. It’s powerful raw material and can certainly translate on screen.”

For now, it’s up in the air who, if anyone will emerge as the next Woodward or Isikoff—a name brand forever linked back to the 2016 campaign, Trump and the Russia investigation. Mueller himself won’t ever be a talking head. He’s made that abundantly clear. But could one of his deputies emerge in that role?

So far, no one who worked on the special counsel probe is talking publicly about their work, though a memoir from former prosecutor Andrew Weissmann is reportedly coming. Whether Weissmann would ever migrate from the cloistered realm of the prosecutor into the noisy media world remains unknown. Back in April, while sitting in the D.C. federal courthouse cafeteria, POLITICO asked him whether he’d consider breaking the special counsel office’s well-documented silence to opine publicly the next time there’s a major presidential scandal.

He replied, “God help us.”

