From One World Trade Center in Manhattan, this is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of the New Yorker and WNYC Studios.

Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. It's not much of an exaggeration to say that all of America is waiting with bated breath for the Mueller report to be handed in to the Justice Department,

and then, in some form, it'll go out to the world, and everybody seems to expect it soon.

Now, what that will mean for the presidency and the nation,

we're going to try to tease out those questions in just a little bit.

But before we do that, you might want to refresh your course on the basic facts of the Russia investigation, the broad strokes of what we've learned so far.

Because with all the headlines of the past two years, this one brought in for questioning, that one indicted, this one cooperating, it's hard to keep track of all that's really come about.

So we gave reporter Adam Davidson this challenge.

Give us a summary of what we know so far about the Mueller investigation and do it in three

minutes or less. Spoiler alert, he failed.

As I see it, the case can be broken up into four phases, four more or less discrete periods of time from late 2015, right on through

2017.

Phase one, the hustle.

Felix Sater, a longtime associate of Trump's, heard from a friend in Moscow that some land was

available and that it could maybe become a Trump tower.

This was in late 2015. Trump was running for president, but was still considered a long-shot

joke of a candidate.

I will get along, I think, with Putin, and I will get along with others.

And we will have a much more stable, stable world.

It seems fairly clear that most around Trump saw a little chance that he'd win, but maybe

just maybe this presidential campaign could lead to a payday.

With Trump's blessing, Sater, along with his longtime friend and Trump's lawyer Michael Cohen, pursued the deal.

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