Alt. Facts of the Week

The big news in presidential prevarication wasn’t Giuliani’s admission about the Daniels payment, it was the lies about the Mueller investigation

Our view:

This week has brought a flurry of revelations about Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s efforts to secure an interview with President Donald Trump as part of his investigation into whether the Trump campaign worked with Russia to interfere in the 2016 election — including a list of questions prosecutors likely want to ask and Mr. Mueller’s suggestion that he could resort to a subpoena if the president refuses to meet. But it has produced a blizzard of obfuscation, misdirection and misleading arguments from the president and his defenders.

The “disgraceful” leak

President Trump’s first tweet after The New York Times reported on a list of 49 questions Mr. Mueller wants to ask intimated that the special counsel’s office had been the source. The Times hasn’t identified a particular person as having provided the information, but it’s fairly clear that it wasn’t Mr. Mueller’s staff. The list wasn’t actually produced by the investigators but was written by Mr. Trump’s legal team based on conversations with them. The Times obtained them from yet another person. It would take a fevered conspiracy theorist to imagine that Mr. Mueller’s investigators described their questions to the Trump team, then obtained the list his lawyers compiled and leaked that to The Times.

“No questions on collusion”

Mr. Trump tweeted on that there were “no questions on collusion,” which he referred to as a “made up, phony crime.” He’s at least right about that last bit: Collusion, as the mainstream media has pointed out repeatedly, is not a crime. Conspiracy is, and many of Mr. Mueller’s questions are directly related to the question of whether the Trump campaign conspired with Russia to influence the election.

For example, the Mueller questions include inquiries about the 2016 meeting at Trump Tower between top campaign officials (including Donald Trump Jr.) and a Kremlinconnected Russian lawyer; President Trump’s 2013 trip to Moscow; his conversations during the campaign about prospective business deals in Russia; any efforts during the campaign to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin; and his knowledge of any Russian hacking efforts during the campaign or of any outreach from his campaign — and specifically, now-indicted, former campaign chairman Paul Manafort — to Russian officials in an attempt to secure their assistance.

What additional information Mr. Mueller might have about any of those topics, we don’t know. But they do show that the inquiry into whether the Trump campaign was in any way a co-conspirator in the Russian hacking scheme is very much alive.