[F]or almost a year, the Justice Department investigation into President Donald Trump’s ties to Russia, led by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, has been a constant topic of interest in Washington, D.C. While new information in the case is released at a careful pace, the resulting subpoenas and indictments have dominated dozens of news cycles.
According to one local expert, that’s not likely to change anytime soon.
“I think we’re probably somewhere around the third or the fourth inning of this game right now,” says Garrett Graff, a journalist and cybersecurity expert based in Burlington, who covers the investigation for Wired magazine.
Graff, a Montpelier native, wrote a book about Mueller in 2011 called The Threat Matrix. He says he was “momentarily surprised” when Mueller was named the special counsel in the Trump investigation last May, but that the former FBI director’s famously nonpartisan credentials make him uniquely qualified for the job.
That makes it all the more surprising, Graff says, that Mueller has become the target of an unprecedented effort by the White House to discredit federal intelligence agencies and the Department of Justice.
On this week’s podcast, VTDigger’s Washington reporter Elizabeth Hewitt talks to Garrett Graff about why the Mueller investigation matters — and how Vermont’s members of Congress are playing an active role in what they see as an effort to safeguard democracy from future attacks.
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