Is the Mueller Probe Really Winding Down?

For months, really years, we’ve been hearing conflicting accounts about when the Mueller probe would end. Remember that President Trump’s lawyers at least were telling him it would be done by Thanksgiving of 2017. Not 2018, 2017! Then it was the end of the year. Then President Trump canned those lawyers. Since then there have been numerous reports claiming the investigation was about to wrap up. But for a long time most of those reports seemed to stem either from the President’s lawyers or people near the President. It was only very recently that we heard reports from reporters we believe are reliable — people like NBC’s Pete Williams — saying more or less the same thing: that the probe was entering its final stages or appeared to be in the process of winding down.

I don’t think reporters like that are going to take Rudy Giuliani’s word for it or the word of some Trump appointee flunky at the Justice Department.

Then finally we had acting AG Matt Whitaker say last week that he’s been “fully briefed” and that the investigation is “close to being completed.”

So what’s going on here?