Until his brief Wednesday morning announcement, Robert Mueller had become the J.D. Salinger of federal law enforcement. Since releasing his report on Russian interference in the 2016 election last month—a report that, it should be noted, currently occupies three slots on The New York Times bestseller list, despite being available for free—he has given no interviews, dodged cameras, and attempted to avoid making any public comment about any of the 448 pages the country has spent the last several weeks debating.



This is, of course, all in character. Mueller has a carefully cultivated public image—an incorruptible public servant, a boy scout, the law man’s law man—and works diligently to avoid contaminating it with any of the grubbiness of politics. “He envisions himself correctly as a man of great rectitude and apolitical and he doesn’t want to participate in anything that he might regard as a political spectacle,” House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler, who has been trying to get the special counsel to testify before Congress, told MSNBC last week.



Mueller, it seems safe to assume, had hoped that his report would speak for itself; that it would transcend the partisan narratives that had engulfed the investigation from its inception. That hasn’t happened—not by a long shot. Attorney General William Barr and President Donald Trump have relentlessly spun Mueller’s decision to not prosecute the president as a “complete and total exoneration,” even though there is ample evidence of both collusion and obstruction in his report. Now, The Guardian’s Edward Helmore is reporting that Michael Wolff’s new book, Siege: Trump Under Fire—the sequel to his controversial bombshell Fire and Fury—contains evidence that the special counsel’s office “drew up a three-count obstruction of justice indictment against Donald Trump before deciding to shelve it.”



In Siege, Wolff writes that his reporting on the Mueller investigation is “based on internal documents given to [him] by sources close to the Office of the Special Counsel.” A spokesperson for the special counsel, however, denied this, saying “The documents that you’ve described do not exist.” Helmore, however, wrote that he had seen a corroborating document, and reported it includes charges relating to obstruction of justice, witness tampering, and retaliation. According to Wolff, the Mueller team also rejected the contention that a sitting president cannot be indicted. That idea has been the position inside the Justice Department since its Office of Legal Counsel drafted a memo during the embattled presidency of Richard Nixon, but it has never been tested in court.



These two statements—Wolff’s claim that Mueller drafted an indictment, and the OSC’s insistence it did not—seem, at first flush, to be contradictory. But it’s possible both are technically true—technically. Wolff, it should be legally required to note, has a long, long history of reporting gossip as fact. Fire and Fury sold five million copies, but contained several howlers—and plenty of unverifiable claims. Some of the dialogue in that book was worthy of Lee Child; Wolff also has a tendency to fictionalize events he heard about but didn’t see. He is lurid, pulpy, and prone to pushing facts as far as they can go. Sometimes it seems he’s just pulling stuff out of his ass—like when he implied while promoting Fire and Fury that Trump and then-UN Secretary Nikki Haley were having an affair.

