The 25 subplots to watch in the Mueller Investigation

1.

Trump fires James Comey

Special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigators have focused on whether President Donald Trump obstructed justice by firing FBI Director James Comey. Trump gave differing reasons to justify his decision, including saying in an NBC interview that the firing happened because of “this Russia thing.”

2.

Trump leans on his own DOJ

The president’s attacks on his own Justice Department have long defied norms, and they’ve put the government investigators in an awkward spot where their only real recourse is to ignore the commander in chief. That’s hardly easy when one considers Trump repeatedly griped about Sessions, berating him in the Oval Office after Mueller’s appointment and later telling Hill.TV, “I don’t have an attorney general.”

Others at DOJ haven’t been spared either, with the president turning the firehose on everyone from the FBI agents and DOJ prosecutors assigned to the special counsel’s team to Mueller himself.

The attacks could be a part of Mueller’s obstruction probe.

3.

Trump tweets his anger

The president isn’t known to use email. He eschews more than one-page briefing materials. But he sure loves Twitter. And Trump’s incessant social media feed — logged forevermore as official presidential records — have represented something else for Mueller and his investigators: evidence that can be used to establish intent.

“They’re a gold mine,” a former DOJ prosecutor told POLITICO just weeks after the special counsel’s appointment. While not all of the nearly 7,000 posts since Trump’s inauguration are about the special counsel probe, many of them are, including a March 2017 suggestion that Flynn “should ask for immunity” and his December 2018 post calling cooperating witness Michael Cohen, the president’s former personal lawyer and fixer, a “Rat.”

Mueller has examined these heated missives to determine whether they constitute obstruction or perhaps even witness intimidation.

4.

Trump makes hush-money payments

Mueller’s investigators were interested in Michael Cohen early on in their probe, requesting a search warrant on him in July 2017.

The following spring, the FBI raided Cohen’s office, home, safety deposit box and a hotel room, collecting evidence eventually used to charge the president’s personal lawyer for his role in a hush-money payment scheme to keep two women silent about alleged extramarital affairs with Trump. According to court documents, Trump directed Cohen to make these payments, essentially making the president an unindicted co-conspirator in the crime.

Cohen ultimately pleaded guilty and has been cooperating against Trump both with Mueller and with investigators in the Southern District of New York. Whether any of what he’s privately shared comes out in the special counsel’s report remains to be seen.

7.

Julian Assange releases Democrats’ private emails

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange orchestrated several online dumps of the stolen Democratic emails during the 2016 campaign. The releases created endless distractions for the Clinton campaign and provided Trump with regular rally fodder.

U.S. intelligence agencies have blamed Russian agents for stealing those emails and laundering them through WikiLeaks, although Assange has repeatedly denied that the Kremlin was his source. In November, the Justice Department accidentally revealed that it may have secretly charged WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

8.

Roger Stone tries to talk to WikiLeaks

Roger Stone, a veteran GOP lobbyist who embraces his reputation as a practitioner of the political dark arts, spent years encouraging Trump to run for president. When the reality TV star finally did make a White House bid, Stone was a pugilistic supporter — briefly with the campaign and then as an outside booster.

As part of those efforts, Stone made several attempts to get in touch with WikiLeaks to learn about their strategy for releasing information on Clinton. Stone claims that those efforts amounted to no more than passing information through an intermediary.

But in a February court filing, Mueller’s team included a tantalizing nugget suggesting federal prosecutors might have obtained “Stone’s communications” with WikiLeaks, raising the possibility that Mueller knows about more direct communications than Stone has acknowledged.

9.

Cambridge Analytica enters the picture

There are also outstanding questions about the relationship between the Trump campaign and Cambridge Analytica, a data analytics firm that helped the Trump campaign target voters using information it harvested from millions of Facebook users.

Mueller’s team has been gathering information from the firm amid accusations that the company’s data was accessed from Russia, as well as reports about Cambridge Analytica’s possible business ties to Russian firms

10.

George Papadopoulos hears about Russian dirt

George Papadopoulos, originally a campaign aide to Ben Carson who was a late appointee to Trump’s foreign policy advisory team, is arguably the reason the FBI launched its investigation into the Trump campaign’s contacts with Russia.

Papadopoulos purportedly learned early on that the Russians had obtained damaging emails on Hillary Clinton from a conversation in London with Joseph Mifsud, a mysterious professor the FBI says was connected with the Russian government. Papadopoulos pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his interactions with Mifsud and later served two weeks in prison. But since his guilty plea, Papadopoulos has been making the rounds claiming he was the victim of a “deep state” setup.

The Mueller report may shed more light on Mifsud, and his role in kickstarting the Russia investigation.

11.

The Steele Dossier is created

The so-called Steele Dossier is a collection of raw intelligence memos compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele that describes a years-long Russian plot to cultivate and compromise Trump and propel him to the White House.

Steele himself also delivered some of his findings to the FBI around the same time the bureau was picking up indications the Russians had hacked the Democratic Party and that another Trump aide, Papadopoulos, had been told the Russians had dirt on Hillary Clinton.

But revelation’s that Steele’s work was indirectly bankrolled by the Clinton campaign fueled Republican claims that the dossier and its explosive allegations were exaggerated, inaccurate or downright fictional. Yet its central allegations have never been clearly proven or disproven. Mueller’s report may for the first time lay out whether the FBI verified any elements of the dossier.

13.

The Agalarovs play organizer

Trump’s ties to Russia also included a warm relationship with Aras Agalarov, a Kremlin-aligned Russian billionaire who helped Trump bring Miss Universe to Moscow in 2013.

It was Agalarov’s son, pop musician Emin, who reached out to Donald Trump Jr. to facilitate the mysterious Trump Tower meeting in June 2016 between Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, Paul Manafort and a Russian lawyer promising “dirt” on Hillary Clinton.

14.

The Trump campaign meets with Russians offering “dirt”

Fewer events exemplify the mystery of the Trump-Russia saga than the Trump Tower meeting in June 2016 involving several top Trump campaign officials and Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya.

The meeting was organized on the premise that the Russian government had “dirt” on Hillary Clinton that it wanted to offer to the Trump campaign. Hearing about the offer, Donald Trump Jr. enthusiastically responded, “I love it.” Jared Kushner and Steve Bannon, the Trump campaign’s CEO at the time, also attended.

Questions remain about how much Trump knew about the meeting, and what, exactly, was said during the gathering.

15.

Michael Flynn talks to the Russian ambassador

The former Trump national security adviser admitted to lying about conversations he had during the presidential transition with Russia’s ambassador to the U.S. In those chats, Flynn discussed just-imposed Obama administration sanctions with the Kremlin official, causing Moscow to “moderate” its response, according to prosecutors.

It appears that at least two transition team members, Jared Kushner and K.T. McFarland, knew about or gave input on the calls. Since pleading guilty, Flynn has also participated in 19 interviews with the special counsel and other DOJ investigators, another trove of information that the Mueller report might detail.

16.

Jared Kushner has lots of Russian contacts

The senior White House adviser and Trump son-in-law has been under scrutiny since the start of Mueller’s probe on multiple fronts. During the 2016 campaign, he handled everything from financing to scheduling, speechwriting and polling, giving him insight into the campaign’s innerworkings. But perhaps most notably for Mueller, Kushner served as a point of contact with foreign government officials throughout the 2016 run.

After the election, Kushner was forced to make repeated updates to his security clearance forms to reflect undisclosed interactions with foreign officials, including the 2016 meeting at Trump Tower with a Russian attorney promising dirt on Hillary Clinton. Kushner also reportedly talked to the Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak during the presidential transition about arranging a secret line of communication with the Kremlin, using secure lines at Russian diplomatic offices to avoid intelligence monitoring.

Kushner also urged Michael Flynn to contact the Russian ambassador in December 2016 ahead of a pending U.N. vote related to Israeli settlements — one of the conversations Flynn later admitted to lying about to the FBI about.

17.

Paul Manafort shares data with a Russian-linked associate

The former Trump campaign chairman is currently serving 7.5 years in prison for a series of lobbying, financial fraud and witness tampering crimes, the longest sentence by far for anyone ensnared in the Mueller probe.

As his case proceeded, Manafort’s lawyers inadvertently disclosed that their client had shared political polling data with a longtime business associate who has ties to Russian intelligence — an interaction that Mueller’s prosecutors said goes “very much to the heart” of their mandate to probe Russian influence on the 2016 campaign.

Manafort met 12 times with special counsel prosecutors and the FBI and made two grand jury appearances after pleading guilty. A federal judge later ruled, however, that Manafort intentionally lied during some of those sessions. Prosecutors also said that Manafort offered little of value during his cooperation period.

18.

Jeff Sessions has undisclosed meetings with Russian ambassador

Trump’s first attorney general recused himself from the Russia probe in March 2017 because of the prominent role he played in Trump’s presidential campaign. He also stepped back from the case after it was revealed that he had failed to mention several meetings he held with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak during the 2016, while he was serving as a prominent Trump campaign surrogate.

Sessions decision opened himself up to withering criticism from Trump, attacks that have been part of Mueller’s look into whether the president obstructed justice. The former attorney general was pushed out the day after the 2018 midterm elections.

21.

Duelling pro-Russian Ukrainian peace plans

During the election, foreigners were trying to get at least two “peace plans” before Trump’s team in the hopes of ending the conflict between Moscow and Ukraine over the Kremlin’s 2014 annexation of Crimea. But the plans both appeared to heavily favor Russia and were funnelled through Trump associates now caught up in Mueller’s investigation.

The first plan brought together Michael Cohen, Trump’s personal attorney, Felix Sater, a Trump business associate involved in the Trump Tower Moscow project, and Andrii Artemenko, a Ukrainian politician and member of a pro-Russian political party. According to The New York Times, the plan involved leasing Crimea to Russia for 50 years in exchange for ending the ongoing war in Ukraine’s Donbass region. The pact also called for the Trump administration drop sanctions against Russia imposed by the Obama White House.

After Sater introduced Artemenko to Cohen, the offer made it all the way to Flynn’s desk during his brief tenure as national security adviser, the Times reported. Cohen has denied that account, saying he threw the document away instead of giving it to Flynn. Artemenko was ejected from his party when his back-channel scheming was revealed, and later investigated for treason. Mueller subpoenaed him and he appeared before a grand jury last May.

The second plan was apparently a plot hatched between Paul Manafort, the now-imprisoned former Trump campaign manager, and Konstantin Kilimnik, a Russian-Ukrainian national that Mueller’s team said has ties to Russian intelligence.

The contours of that deal are less clear, but according to court filings, Manafort “‘conceded’ that he discussed or may have discussed a Ukraine peace plan with Mr. Kilimnik on more than one occasion.” Mueller accused Manafort of initially lying to authorities about these talks, which may have occurred both during and after the election.

23.

A Trump donor meets a well-connected Russian banker

Erik Prince, a Trump donor and campaign supporter, as well as the brother of future Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, met in January 2017 with Russian banker Kirill Dmitriev in the Seychelles, a tiny country in the Indian Ocean. Prince testified to a House panel that the visit was impromptu, lasted only about 20 minutes in a beachside hotel bar and centered around business opportunities.

But multiple media outlets have reported that Mueller has evidence the meeting was pre-planned via Lebanese-American fixer George Nader — who cooperated with the special counsel and testified in early 2018 to a grand jury — and came at the behest of United Arab Emirates Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed Al-Nahyan.

24.

A trial over ties to Turkey

Another spinoff from Mueller’s investigation is the case against Bijan Rafiekian, or simply “Kian,” who’s facing trial on charges of acting as an unregistered foreign agent for Turkey and conspiracy. Rafiekian was Flynn’s partner at the former military general’s consulting firm.

Prosecutors say the pair’s lobbying effort was aimed at persuading the U.S. to hand over a Turkish cleric, Fethullah Gulen, who has lived in Pennsylvania for decades under a claim of asylum. Turkish authorities have accused Gulen of leading a cult that attempted a coup against the Turkish government in 2016.

Flynn is expected to be the star witness at Kian’s trial, which is set to open July 15. Kian’s defense is already preparing an all-out attack on Flynn’s credibility, noting a series of alleged lies he has told, including those that led to his guilty plea in the Mueller probe.