Mueller investigation by the numbers: 675 days, 500 witnesses
Boyd Matheson, former chief of staff to Sen. Mike Lee, Melanie Zanona, Politico Congressional reporter, and David Brown, former senior adviser to Sen. Patty Murray, on the political fallout from the Mueller report.
After nearly two years of investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, the results of special counsel Robert Mueller’s long-awaited report were made public on Thursday morning to Congress and the general public.
During a press conference ahead of the report's release, Attorney General William Barr told reporters that the Mueller team found no evidence of collusion.
"So that is the bottom line," Barr said. "After nearly two years of investigation, thousands of subpoenas, and hundreds of warrants and witness interviews, the Special Counsel confirmed that the Russian government sponsored efforts to illegally interfere with the 2016 presidential election but did not find that the Trump campaign or other Americans colluded in those schemes."
Barr, however, has been accused by Democrats of waging a media campaign on behalf of the president.
And still uncertain is whether the president is guilty of obstruction of justice; the redacted report recounted 10 episodes involving Trump and delves into legal theories for connecting these actions to an obstruction offense. However, Mueller never made a prosecutorial judgement regarding this allegation.
Here’s a look at the sprawling two-year-long Mueller investigation and report by the numbers:
Time: 22 months (or 675 days). The Justice Department appointed Mueller on May 17, 2017. The investigation ended on March 22, 2019.
Length: 448 (redacted) pages
Indictments: Mueller ultimately indicted, convicted or got guilty pleas from 34 people and three companies.
Team: Mueller employed 19 lawyers, who were assisted by a team of about 40 FBI agents, intelligence analysts, forensic accountants and other professional staff.
The investigation: The Mueller team issued more than 2,800 subpoenas and executed close to 500 search warrants.
The team also obtained more than 230 orders for communication records, issued 50 orders authorizing use of pen registers to monitor electronic communications, and made 13 requests to foreign governments for evidence. The special counsel interviewed approximately 500 witnesses, according to a letter sent to Congress by Barr.
Cost: The total cost of the investigation is still unknown.
But so far, Mueller’s office has released three expenditures statements. Direct and indirect costs totaled $25.2 million through Sept. 30, 2018, from the start of the investigation (May 17, 2017). Although Mueller turned in a proposed budget to the Department of Justice in July 2017, officials declined to make it public, instead committing to releasing reports of the team’s expenditures every six months.
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Facebook: The St.Petersburg-based Internet Research Agency, which is financed by Yevgeny Prigozhin, purchased 3,500 Facebook ads. The expenditure cost the the group $100,000, according to the report.
Twitter: On Twitter, the Russian IRA was responsible for 3,814 accounts. Ahead of the election, these accounts were responsible for posting about 175,993 tweets. About 84 percent of those tweets were election related. Twitter said it contacted about 1.4 million people who it believed were in contact with the IRA-controlled accounts.
Redactions: In total, there 865 redactions in the entirety of the report. There were four types of information that were redacted: matters that could affect ongoing investigations (405), sensitive intelligence (87), infringements on personal privacy (66) and grand jury material (307).