The nation's TRUE NORTH

For more than a year, while serving as a CIA officer, I was his daily intelligence briefer in his role as director of the FBI. Five, often six, days a week I delivered to him the president’s daily brief (PDB) as well as voluminous other pieces of intelligence information and analytic assessments, primarily on terrorism.

The relationship between daily intelligence briefers and their “customers,” as CIA officers for many decades have called senior policy makers, is a special one. The details of the briefing materials—including, but not limited to, information about intelligence sources and methods—and the sensitive conversations in that room remain sacred. I won’t discuss those things here, or anywhere.

But presenting complex information to Mueller, watching him digest it, answering his inevitable questions, and chatting with him and his staff on the margins of the sessions afforded me insight that I can appropriately share regarding his approach to complex problem sets—from L’Affaire Russe to Mueller’s personal style. This experience gave me confidence then about the fight against terrorism and the integrity of the Bureau under his watch, and it gives me confidence now in the work he is doing as special counsel.

What stood out to me most upon my starting the job, just months after 9/11, were Mueller’s attention to detail and his desire to understand how the CIA analysts arrived at their assessments. For a while, most of my briefings devolved into de facto intelligence hazing rituals. I discovered the hard way that when my presentation casually offered judgments lacking robust sourcing or logic, Mueller would ask me about the substantiation or argumentation until either my desperate searching through background materials could satisfy him or—more often in those first few months—I admitted that I’d have to get back to him after talking to the experts on that issue.

He wasn’t sending me down rabbit holes for the joy of doing so; he simply didn’t seem to trust analysis anchored to weak evidence or unclear reasoning.

Today, nearly three eventful decades later, what makes this Great Escape more than just a faded episode from yesteryear’s gangland chronicles, but rather relevant and even instructive, is the identity of the man who ultimately had to sign off on the operation: then U.S. Assistant Attorney General for the Criminal Division Robert Mueller.

It is, one person close the administration recently observed, a “classic Gambino-style roll-up.” To understand how Mueller might now proceed, to get a sense of the compromises he’d be willing to make to bag the larger prosecutorial targets in his sights, it’s eye-opening to go back to the deal he cut with Sammy the Bull.

When Mueller is finished, he must turn in a “confidential report explaining the prosecution or declination decisions” — essentially why he chose to bring charges against some people but not others. His reasoning, according to veterans of such investigations, could be as simple as “there wasn’t enough evidence” to support a winning court case.

Then, it will be up to DOJ leaders to make the politically turbo-charged decision of whether to make Mueller’s report public.

Government officials will first get a chance to scrub the special counsel’s findings for classified details, though, involving everything from foreign intelligence sources to information gleaned during grand jury testimony that the law forbids the government from disclosing.

As for the crafting of the report itself, Mueller has significant leeway. He can theoretically be as expansive as he wants. But sources who have worked closely with Mueller during his lengthy career at the Justice Department say his by-the-books, conservative style is likely to win out, suggesting he might lean more toward saying less than more.

Robert Mueller’s report is finally here and without having read it I can make you a promise: It isn’t going to settle anything.

Fights like this never end conclusively. The subject is too big and complicated to give a single, clean inarguable answer. And people’s partisanship is too strong to override a consensus consideration of the merits at scale.

So what are you supposed to do if you’re in the camp that’s persuadable and wants to take the Mueller report seriously? There are three things: read the report; grapple with the facts; and try to come to reasonable conclusions—accepting right out of the gate that all stories this big will be messy and incomplete.

But before you read the report, there are four arguments that you are absolutely, positively, 100 percent going to hear from Trump supporters that you should dismiss out of hand:

(1) It’s fruit of the poisonous tree.
(2) None of this is about Russian collusion.
(3) It’s not an impeachable offense.
(4) There’s no smoking gun.