2018 Elections update.

The President* Is in an Outright Frenzy Over the Mueller Probe

The Mueller probe-what he knows and about whom and when in god's name is he going to tell the rest of us-hangs over everything in our politics now. In many ways, it has entered the realm of legend, since the facts Mueller and his team have accumulated remain their own private property. The investigation now has taken on a talismanic quality; the great Democratic sweep in the recent midterm elections have presented us with an incoming House majority that will take a more active interest in Mueller's findings than the departing Republican majority would have.

Because of this, and before they even discover where to get a decent takeout lunch in the Capitol, the new members of Congress enter into their jobs knowing that a huge and consequential series of acts already predetermined are about to fall upon them, but nobody knows exactly what those will be, and most of the newcomers are positively nerve-struck at the idea of talking about what those acts might be.

Even worse, down at Camp Runamuck, the target of the investigation is shredding his last nerves and flinging them out onto the electric Twitter machine in what only can be called an outright frenzy. To wit, and just from Thursday morning:

I pity the poor staffer who's tasked every morning with scouring the White House trying to find the president*'s hinges. All of this is simply a farrago of Foxified nonsense. Mueller is a Republican who also worked for the Bush Administration and, oh, why bother?

There is, however, a sense of something big suddenly Closer Than It Appears in the White House side-mirrors. And the new members of the House are going to have to get comfortable with the fact that history is going to be dropped on them in one big and unwieldy lump as soon as they're all sworn in. They may have come to Washington to work on infrastructure or education or healthcare or the opioid epidemic, but confronting a renegade profiteer (and, very likely, criminal) president* is going to tie up a great deal of their first term in Congress.

Because the president* is losing it bigly, and because Bob Mueller, with no expression on his face, is reaching across his desk for another file.

It's been investigated for over two years.

The investigation, since it began May 17, 2017, has been conducted by the United States Department of Justice Special Counsel's Office, headed by Robert Mueller, a former Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).