Mueller Was Listening To This Guy?

Sam Patten’s wildlife as a cooperating witness.

- Olivia Nuzzi

Looking back, Sam Patten knew he was fucked the moment the men in suits came looking for him. He returned from vacation to a report from his son, who said strange men who looked like the Feds had knocked on the door but wouldn’t reveal their identification or why they were after his father. “I started to get a real bad sense then,” Patten told me. He’d seen enough movies.

The second visit came late one morning just after Easter 2018. His Siberian husky, Pepper, began to go “berserk.” Patten, a 48-year-old Republican political operative who was about to be dragged right into the center of the Robert Mueller investigation, could hear a commotion from the basement of his Capitol Hill townhouse, where he was working in the cluttered office he calls “my little dungeon.” Pepper is sweet and easily subdued by any affection, so when her barking continued— loud, urgent, insistent—it was enough to draw Patten back upstairs.

By the time he made it to the living room, the FBI agents were already there, arguing with his wife, Laura Patten. The intruders were no strangers to her; she says she spent the last handful of years in her two-decade career in national security detailed to the agency. “When you’ve devoted the bulk of your adult life to protecting U.S. national security and interests, it is a very surreal experience to have the FBI show up at your house,” she told me.

“They were going back and forth about what they were here for,” Sam said. “And I came up holding my cell phone and they were like, ‘That!’ ”

The agents informed Sam that they’d be taking it. “And I said, ‘You’re not taking it until we call the lawyer,’ ” Laura remembered. But the agents produced a warrant, leaving the Pattens with few civil options.