THE TERROR OF KNOWING WHAT THIS WORLD IS ABOUT:

[H]alf a dozen people in contact with the White House and other Trump officials say a deep anxiety has started to set in that Mueller is about to pounce after his self-imposed quiet period, and that any number of Trump's allies and family members may soon be staring down the barrel of an indictment.

Then there are the president's own tweets, which have turned back to attacking Mueller after a near two-month break. Thursday morning, Trump launched an oddly detailed condemnation of the special counsel and his team: "They are screaming and shouting at people, horribly threatening them to come up with the answers they want," adding that the investigators "don't ... care how many lives the[sic] ruin." [...]

"You can see it in Trump's body language all week long. There's something troubling him. It's not just a couple staff screw-ups with Melania," said a senior Republican official in touch with the White House. "It led me to believe the walls are closing in and they've been notified by counsel of some actions about to happen. Folks are preparing for the worst."

Adding to the unease is a spate of anonymously sourced media reports suggesting Mueller's self-imposed quiet period that started about two months before 2018 Election Day is about to transition into a Category 5 hurricane.

Mueller, as has been his custom throughout the investigation, hasn't said a word about what's next for his probe into the Trump 2016 campaign and whether it conspired with Russian hackers to win the White House. Instead, the special counsel has let his legal filings do the talking. On Wednesday, Mueller stirred the speculation pot yet again, delivering a one-page motion to a federal judge in Washington, D.C., confirming that former Trump campaign deputy Rick Gates "continues to cooperate with respect to several ongoing investigations" and still isn't ready to be sentenced. Gates pleaded guilty in February to conspiracy against the U.S. and making a false statement in a federal investigation.

Late Thursday, Mueller and attorneys for Paul Manafort confirmed in a joint motion that they've been meeting since the former Trump campaign chairman's mid-September guilty plea and requested a 10-day extension until Nov. 26 to file a status report that will help set the stage for the longtime GOP operative's sentencing.

In and around Trump world, the pressure is tangible.

In an interview, Representative Adam Schiff, of California, described to me his evolving plan to act as Mueller's congressional backstop, insuring that, even if Trump and Whitaker attempt to shut down the investigation, Mueller's investigatory work and conclusions will not be covered up. Schiff, who is widely expected to be elected the incoming chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, also made it clear that he will revive and expand the committee's investigation of the Russia allegations that Republicans on the panel abruptly shut down earlier this year, telling me he would like to recall Steve Bannon, Trump's former strategist, and Michael Cohen, the President's estranged former lawyer and fixer, among others, to get answers that the G.O.P. majority wouldn't or couldn't extract.

Most urgent is the crisis Trump has provoked in firing Sessions and installing Whitaker. Before our interview, Schiff had published a Washington Post op-ed, on Monday, promising, "Matthew Whitaker, we're watching you." In our conversation Schiff expanded on that, saying he was determined to "discover and expose any kind of wrongdoing" regarding the Mueller investigation. "If he takes any action adverse to the investigation or communicates any facts of the investigation to the President or his legal counsel, we're going to find out about it," Schiff told me. "There was a strong norm established after Watergate that the White House doesn't intervene in specific cases. Now this is a specific case that involves the President, and this would go well beyond intervening. This would be affirmatively appointing someone to hinder the investigation."

Schiff, a former federal prosecutor in California, said that he believes the Justice Department under Trump has set a precedent by turning over internal documents to the House Republicans in the Mueller probe and the investigation of Hillary Clinton's e-mails that it would have to follow if Schiff demanded information regarding Whitaker's actions involving Mueller. "They established a precedent, and I told them, 'You are going to have to live with this,' " Schiff said. " 'Someone is going to be briefed at the end of the Mueller investigation, and how are you going to say that the Democratic majority is not entitled to the same access to the materials that you have provided in the Clinton investigation or even in the Mueller investigation?' "

As for resurrecting the Intelligence Committee's own Russia investigation, Schiff said the first step involves pushing to immediately release the transcripts from the panel's interviews with key figures in the Mueller investigation; the committee has already voted to do so but never followed through. Schiff suggested that some of those who testified--he named the rogue Republican consultant and sometime Trump friend Roger Stone as one example--may have lied under oath in ways that would be relevant to Mueller and could subject them to possible perjury charges. "Our first order of business is to make sure that Mueller has the benefit of the work that we've done," Schiff said, "so that he can view that evidence in the context of what he knows, which is far more than we do. But also so that he can determine whether people committed perjury before our committee." Schiff said he wanted to recall Bannon because he simply refused to answer key questions when Republicans controlled the panel, not even bothering to cite a valid legal reason for his refusal beyond the White House's request. And Trump's former attorney Michael Cohen could have valuable additional information, given that his first testimony to the Hill panel occurred before he broke with the President and agreed to coöperate with Mueller. "We'd be very interested in talking to him again," Schiff said.

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