After a period of quiet, the special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation is seizing headlines yet again. In the past week, we learned that Paul Manafort, Donald Trump’s former campaign chairman, broke the terms of his cooperation agreement by lying to Mr. Mueller’s investigators, all while his lawyer was briefing Mr. Trump’s legal team on what Mr. Manafort told the special counsel. The conservative author Jerome Corsi, facing possible indictment, made public a potential draft plea agreement with Mr. Mueller that contains incendiary allegations of attempted coordination between Mr. Corsi and the Trump campaign adviser Roger Stone with WikiLeaks.
We also learned that Mr. Mueller had reached a plea agreement with Michael Cohen, Mr. Trump’s former lawyer, for lying to Congress about the Trump Organization’s plans to construct a property in Moscow — plans that extended into the 2016 campaign and reportedly involved an effort to give Vladimir Putin the gift of a $50 million penthouse apartment.
Mr. Mueller’s team has given no hint of what’s to come next. The National Archives’ recent unsealing of a “road map” by the Watergate special prosecutor Leon Jaworski — provided to Congress in 1974 to inform potential impeachment proceedings against Richard Nixon — has fueled speculation on what a Mueller report might look like, but the question remains: Just where is all this going?