May 17, 2017: Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein appointed Robert S. Mueller III to serve as special counsel investigating any coordination between Russia and individuals associated with the Trump campaign, as well as any matters that might arise from the investigation.
October 5, 2017: George Papadopoulos, a former adviser to the Trump campaign, pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his Russia contacts during the presidential campaign. His plea was unsealed and made public at the end of October; he was arrested over the summer in secret and had been negotiating with prosecutors.
October 30, 2017: Former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort and his deputy, Rick Gates, were charged in Washington, DC, with conspiracy to defraud the United States and other crimes related to their work as political consultants in Ukraine prior to joining the Trump campaign.
December 1, 2017: Former national security adviser Michael T. Flynn pleaded guilty in federal court in Washington, DC, to lying to the FBI about his interactions during the presidential transition with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak.
February 16, 2018: Thirteen Russian nationals and three Russian companies were charged with conducting an elaborate two-year scheme to influence the US election by disseminating fake news and divisive advertising online and posing as Americans to inject toxic messages into online debate.
February 22, 2018: Manafort and Gates were charged again, this time in Alexandria, Virginia, with thirty-two counts related to tax and bank fraud.
February 23, 2018: Gates pleaded guilty to conspiracy to defraud the United States and lying to federal investigators and agreed to cooperate with Mueller.
June 8, 2018: Manafort was charged, along with Konstantin Kilimnik, a Russian with alleged ties to Russian intelligence who worked with Manafort in Ukraine, in a plot to obstruct justice by contacting potential witnesses against Manafort and suborning perjury. Kilimnik has denied having ties to Russian intelligence, but has not publicly addressed the obstruction charge.
July 13, 2018: Twelve Russian military intelligence officers were charged with participating in a scheme to hack email accounts of Democrats and publish correspondence stolen from the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta, via WikiLeaks.
July 16, 2018: Manafort’s bail was revoked in the wake of witness-tampering accusations; the former Trump campaign chairman was jailed.
August 21, 2018: After a three-week trial, Manafort was convicted of eight counts of tax and bank fraud by a jury in Alexandria, Virginia. The star witness against Manafort was his former deputy Gates.
August 31, 2018: W. Samuel Patten, a political consultant, pleaded guilty to failing to register as a foreign lobbyist and admitted in an agreement with prosecutors that he steered $50,000 from a Ukrainian politician to Donald Trump’s inaugural committee. Patten’s case was technically handled by the US Attorney’s Office in Washington, not Mueller’s team, though it started with a referral from Mueller.
September 7, 2018: Papadopoulos was sentenced to serve fourteen days in prison for lying to investigators, becoming the first Trump adviser to be incarcerated as a result of the Mueller probe.
September 14, 2018: Avoiding a second trial in Washington, Manafort pleaded guilty to conspiracy against the United States and other crimes, admitting he committed bank and tax fraud, failed to properly register as a foreign agent while working as a political consultant in Ukraine, and attempted to tamper with witness testimony. He agreed to cooperate with Mueller.
November 7, 2018: After months of badgering Attorney General Jeff Sessions over his decision to recuse himself from the Russia investigation, President Trump requested Sessions’s resignation. He was replaced by Acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker, who assumed supervisory control of the Mueller investigation, and later rejected the advice of career ethics officials who thought he should recuse himself.
November 20, 2018: After months of negotiations over whether Trump would sit for an interview, lawyers for the president submitted answers in writing to questions about the campaign from prosecutors. The president’s lawyers refused to answer questions about Trump’s decisions after taking office.
November 26, 2018: Mueller’s prosecutors informed a judge that Manafort had breached his plea agreement by lying to investigators during twelve interviews and two sessions in front of Mueller’s grand jury.
November 29, 2018: Michael Cohen, a former personal attorney to Trump, pleaded guilty to lying to Congress about the extent of efforts to build a Trump Tower in Moscow during the campaign, including his contacts with the Kremlin about the project. He agreed to cooperate with Mueller. He had previously pleaded guilty in a separate investigation to campaign finance violations he said were directed by Trump.
December 7, 2018: President Trump confirmed he would nominate William P. Barr as the attorney general of the United States to take the spot vacated by Jeff Sessions. Barr, who had served as attorney general in the George H. W. Bush administration, won Senate confirmation on February 14, 2019, by a 54-45 vote and took over supervision of the special counsel investigation as it approached its conclusion.
December 12, 2018: Cohen was sentenced to three years in prison and said at an emotional hearing that he had “been living in a personal and mental incarceration” since going to work for Trump.
December 18, 2018: Flynn asked the court to hold off sentencing him for lying to the FBI after Judge Emmet G. Sullivan told the retired lieutenant general that he had sold out his country and suggested he was likely to sentence the former national security adviser to prison time, over a recommendation from Mueller’s team.
January 24, 2019: Roger Stone, longtime Republican campaign operative and friend of Trump who briefly worked for the Trump campaign, was charged with trying to obstruct a Congressional inquiry into the hacking of emails from the Democratic National Committee and John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman. Stone, who vowed to fight the charges, was accused of lying to Congress about his efforts to obtain information about WikiLeaks’ releases of the material.
March 22, 2019: Attorney General William P. Barr informed Congress that Mueller had completed his investigation and submitted a final confidential report. A Justice Department official said there would be no more indictments as a result of the investigation.
March 24, 2019: Barr submitted to Congress a four-page summary of Mueller’s principal conclusions. Barr indicated that Mueller found that the evidence did not establish that Trump or anyone associated with his campaign conspired with Russia to interfere in the election. Barr said that Mueller conducted a thorough finding of facts related to the issue of whether Trump had committed obstruction of justice but ultimately did not make a traditional recommendation as to whether to prosecute the president. In his report, Barr indicated that Mueller wrote, “while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.” Barr told Congress that he and Rosenstein did not believe there was sufficient evidence to accuse Trump of obstruction.