newyorker.com

Some readers of “Crime in Progress” may begin to wonder if the special counsel Robert Mueller didn’t miss the mark. The authors praise Mueller for documenting more than a hundred and forty suspicious contacts between Trump’s campaign and Russians, and for criminally indicting thirty-four individuals, including six in Trump’s inner circle and a dozen Russian agents behind the hack of the Democrats’ e-mails and thirteen individuals and three companies tied to Russia’s Internet Research Agency. But they criticize Mueller’s probe for failing to heed the main lesson of Watergate: to “follow the money.” Simpson and Fritsch note that “there is no indication in his report that the investigation looked at Trump’s taxes, his outstanding debts, his curious relationship with Deutsche Bank, or his long history of financing real estate projects with foreign cash of unknown origin—precisely the places where Russian influence efforts were most likely to surface.”