Former Mueller aide thinks the leaked list of Mueller's questions actually came from the White House

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published 1 May 2018

Special Counsel Robert Mueller has about four dozen questions he'd like to ask President Trump, The New York Times reported Monday, sharing a leaked list of queries. On Tuesday morning, Trump called the leak "disgraceful" in an angry tweet, labeling collusion "a made up, phony crime ... that never existed." But what if the White House is responsible for the leak?

That's the theory of Michael Zeldin, a former Mueller aide who is now a CNN legal analyst. He thinks the questions may have been publicized by White House counsel in an effort to shape the president's thinking about whether to grant Mueller an interview. Zeldin's case rests on the way the questions are phrased.

"Because of the way these questions are written — lawyers wouldn't write questions this way, in my estimation. Some of the grammar is not even proper," he said on CNN on Tuesday. "So, I don't see this as a list of written questions that Mueller's office gave to the president. I think these are more notes that the White House has taken and then they have expanded upon the conversation to write out these as questions."

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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.

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