We told you Robert Mueller never asks a question without already knowing the answer
If you’ve closely watched Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s patterns of investigation and interrogation, you’ve seen that he never asks a witness or target a question without already knowing the answer. This may seem counterintuitive on its face, but there’s a specific legal strategy behind it. Now one of Mueller’s most recent interview subjects is confirming that Mueller really does know the answers to all the questions he’s asking, and it has dark implications for Donald Trump.
Trump’s former campaign adviser Michael Caputo has publicly said some harsh things about the Trump-Russia investigation, but he’s cooperating with it nonetheless. He was interviewed last week by Robert Mueller and his team. Caputo is now doing quite a bit of talking to the media about the interview, in general terms, while declining to give away specifics about his testimony. Here’s how Caputo phrased things while appearing on CNN: “Every question they asked me, they already had the answers to.” This matters on two levels.
First, it officially confirms the pattern we’ve been observing. Mueller waits until he and his team have learned the answer to something before asking potentially uncooperative witnesses about it. That way, they know whether the witness is telling the truth. That way, whenever they catch a witness trying to mislead them about a particular subject, it’s a giveaway that they should dig deeper into that area. It also gives them leverage to push any lying witness into cutting a plea deal, because lying to a federal investigator is a crime.
Second, we recently got a peek at Robert Mueller’s dozens of proposed interview questions for Donald Trump, when Trump’s team leaked them to the media. Those questions cover the ugliest areas of collusion and treason between Trump and his campaign and Russia. This tells us that Mueller already knows precisely what happened between Donald Trump and Russia. That should have Trump hiding under his desk.
Bill Palmer is the publisher of the political news outlet Palmer Report