Toward the end of the 2016 Presidential election, Donald Trump was running a beleaguered campaign, trailing in the opinion polls and operating under a cloud of scandal and outrage. Many Republicans had given up hope of him winning. Some, including Paul Ryan, the Speaker of the House, had explicitly distanced themselves from the candidate. Through it all, though, Rudy Giuliani, the former mayor of New York City, stuck with Trump. In the campaign’s closing days, Giuliani served as Trump’s warmup act at campaign events.

On November 7, 2016, the day before the election, I caught their buddy routine at an evening rally in Scranton, Pennsylvania. To get the crowd going, Giuliani focussed some of his remarks on Hillary Clinton, saying, “We have never had a person running for President who is so thoroughly corrupt.” The Trump supporters loved it. “Lock her up! Lock her up!” they chanted.

According to some reports, rabble-rousing wasn’t the only service that Giuliani provided to the Trump campaign. Appearing on Rachel Maddow’s show on Thursday night, James Comey, the former director of the F.B.I., said that, under his leadership, the agency had looked into whether Giuliani received advance notice, from sources within the agency, of Comey’s controversial decision in October of 2016 to reopen the investigation into Clinton’s use of a private e-mail server while she was Secretary of State. Comey couldn’t say what the outcome of the inquiry was; he was fired before it was completed.

After Trump won the election, Giuliani wanted to be his Secretary of State, but during the transition, he withdrew his name from consideration. According to some accounts, his overt campaigning for the job had put off Trump. Other reports said that Trump’s staffers were concerned that Giuliani’s conflicts of interests—related to the work of his security-consulting firm, which he set up after leaving City Hall at the end of 2001—would make him impossible to confirm in the Senate. “Probably about half the companies on Earth have paid him money for security advice,” a Trump transition aide told Politico.

So Giuliani, Trump’s loyal ally, didn’t go to work for the Trump Administration—until Thursday, when he announced that he was joining the White House legal team that is dealing with special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation. “I’m doing it because I hope we can negotiate an end to this for the good of the country and because I have high regard for the president and for Bob Mueller,” Giuliani told the Washington Post. Giuliani will take a leave of absence from his law firm, which is separate from his security firm, and work alongside Trump’s attorneys Jay Sekulow and Ty Cobb. (The Wall Street Journal reported that the former mayor will be an unpaid volunteer.)

The news about Giuliani came amid a raft of other developments related to the Russia probe and the Department of Justice—so many, in fact, that it was hard to keep up. On Thursday, Bloomberg News reported that Rod Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general, personally informed Trump last week, during a meeting at the White House, that “he isn’t a target of any part of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation or the probe into his longtime lawyer, Michael Cohen.” The Bloomberg story went on to say that Trump subsequently “told some of his closest advisers that it’s not the right time to remove either man”—Rosenstein or Mueller—“since he’s not a target of the probes.”

Also on Thursday, the Justice Department sent over to Congress copies of a series of memos that Comey composed about the dealings he had with Trump before he was fired from the F.B.I. The Republican-run committees that received the memos—Intelligence, Judiciary, and Oversight—had threatened to hold the Justice Department in contempt if it didn’t release them. (Comey himself seemed unfazed by this development. “I don’t care,” he told CNN’s Jake Tapper during an interview about his new book, “A Higher Loyalty,” in which he is highly critical of Trump. “I am totally fine with transparency.”)

The recruitment of Giuliani and the leaking of the news about Rosenstein’s statements to Trump looked like part of a White House effort to promote the narrative that Mueller’s investigation is entering its final stages, and that the President is largely in the clear. In an interview with the New York Post on Thursday, Giuliani said he that intended to contact Mueller, whom he has known for a long time, and request a list of what is needed to “comply” with the rest of the investigation. “I don’t know yet what’s outstanding,” he said. “But I don’t think it’s going to take more than a week or two to get a resolution. They’re almost there.” In yet another interview, with CNN, he described Mueller as fair and said firing him would be “counterproductive,” because it would delay the completion of the probe. “Bob is the best we can do,” he said.

But the idea that Mueller may be almost done, and that Giuliani may be able to wrap things up quickly and graciously, seems like it might well be wishful thinking on Giuliani’s part. Other developments suggest that both sides are still girding for a lengthy battle. For one thing, Giuliani isn’t the only new lawyer coming on board at the White House. Two experienced criminal-defense attorneys are also joining Trump’s legal team: Jane Serene Raskin and Martin Raskin, a married set of former federal prosecutors. Jane Serene Raskin is a former counsel to the head of the criminal division at the Justice Department. Martin Raskin prosecuted cases in New Jersey and Florida. Presumably, it will take the Raskins some time to get up to speed with the special counsel’s investigation, in which, according to Trump, the White House has already turned over more than a million documents.

The fact that Rosenstein informed Trump that he isn’t currently a target of the Mueller and Cohen investigations doesn’t necessarily mean very much, either. “Rosenstein’s message may have been based on a technicality,” the Bloomberg story said. “Trump may not officially be a target, but Mueller hasn’t ruled out making him one at some point in the future, according to a U.S. official with knowledge of the unfolding investigation.”

Right now, Mueller is still exerting pressure on a number of former Trump aides, including former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort. In a Washington courtroom on Thursday morning, a lawyer for the Department of Justice asserted that Manafort’s business background, which includes extensive dealings with Russian interests in Ukraine, justified Mueller looking into whether any of his business connections served as “back channels to Russia.” The government lawyer made the statement during a hearing at which Manafort’s lawyers were trying to persuade a judge to drop the charges against him, which include money laundering, tax evasion, and bank fraud.

If Manafort’s effort to have the charges dismissed fails, as many experts expect, he will come under enormous pressure to coöperate with Mueller. As could Michael Cohen, Trump’s personal lawyer, who appeared in a New York court on Monday to try and delay federal investigators from examining materials that the F.B.I. seized from him in a series of raids last week. In the Cohen case, the investigators are working for the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York rather than Mueller. But people close to Trump, including another lawyer who worked for him for many years, Jay Goldberg, have warned the President that, if the New York prosecutors bring charges against Cohen, he would almost certainly agree to coöperate with Mueller.