But this is a foolish confidence on Trump’s part. Even more-deft talkers have realized the peril of such situations. Bill Clinton, a master of distinctions so subtle that sometimes only he understood them, resisted a subpoena in the Paula Jones case all the way to the Supreme Court, and for good reason.

Perjury would probably be the closest Mueller could get—absent some unforeseen smoking gun—to a real unambiguous crime. So far, besides Paul Manafort and 13 Russians who will never see the inside of a courtroom, his operation has been about catching people in lies to the FBI.

And with notable aggressiveness. The agents who talked to Michael Flynn didn’t think he was being deliberately misleading. Mueller’s team disagreed and pinned Flynn to the wall.