A list of questions that Special Counsel Robert Mueller reportedly wants to ask President Trump leaked out in less than a day, provided to The New York Times by “a person outside Mr. Trump’s legal team,” the Times says.
The questions are run of the mill and vague, or as the Times breathlessly puts it, the “open-ended queries appear to be an attempt to penetrate the president’s thinking.”
“They deal chiefly with the president’s high-profile firings of the F.B.I. director and his first national security adviser, his treatment of Attorney General Jeff Sessions and a 2016 Trump Tower meeting between campaign officials and Russians offering dirt on Hillary Clinton,” writes the Times.
But they also touch on the president’s businesses; any discussions with his longtime personal lawyer, Michael D. Cohen, about a Moscow real estate deal; whether the president knew of any attempt by Mr. Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, to set up a back channel to Russia during the transition; any contacts he had with Roger J. Stone Jr., a longtime adviser who claimed to have inside information about Democratic email hackings; and what happened during Mr. Trump’s 2013 trip to Moscow for the Miss Universe pageant.
But notice something missing? Trump sure did: No mention of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia before the 2016 presidential election — the very subject the special counsel was appointed to investigate.
“So disgraceful that the questions concerning the Russian Witch Hunt were ‘leaked’ to the media. No questions on Collusion. Oh, I see…you have a made up, phony crime, Collusion, that never existed, and an investigation begun with illegally leaked classified information. Nice!” Trump said in a post on Twitter.
Trump dropped another zinger a short time later.