A Theory of the Leaks Surrounding Mueller's Questions for Trump
Imagine a bull – or a bull’s handlers – wanting a matador to wave a red muleta in front of the charging beast. That’s one way to look at Monday night’s leak of the questions Special Counsel Robert Mueller reportedly wants to ask President Trump as part of the growing Russia investigation: Team Trump is trying to goad the president into charging at Mueller and his investigators.
These revelations were an obviously orchestrated attempt by the president and/or his allies in and out of the White House to continue to shape the public narrative about the investigation and the special counsel’s agenda. This is an inside baseball, law-politics-and-media story that tells us more about the extent to which the White House fears a presidential interview with Mueller than it does about the substance or progress of the special counsel’s actual work.
We do not know from the Times’ scoop what Mueller really does want to ask Trump, because we have no reason to believe the questions accurately reflect the current state of the investigation. Maybe these questions chronicle where Mueller is on all this today, May 1, or maybe not. Maybe there are new questions generated by the discovery of new evidence. (Remember the Cohen raids?) Is it really breaking news to anyone who has been paying attention to this story – or to Mueller’s long, public history – that the special counsel’s investigation appears to be a comprehensive one?
Would you want to bet your beer money on the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth of anything coming out of the White House these days? Would you want to lay your hand on the Bible and declare that Trump adviser Giuliani is offering up the gospel? I wouldn’t. And I sure wouldn’t want to presume too much about the accuracy and reliability of summaries of questions written by one side in a legal dispute against the other that then evidently were passed on to someone else ... who then passed those summaries along to reporters.
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/features/muellers-questions-for-trump-a-theory-w519706?utm_source=rsnewsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_content=daily&utm_campaign=050118_15