The New York Times’ list of questions that the special counsel wishes to put to the president is a farrago of psychometric inquiries into mood, motive, and opinion that has almost nothing to do with the original canard about Trump-campaign collusion with Russia. Unlike the cases of the Watergate, Iran-Contra, and Whitewater special prosecutors, there was no prior fact of a crime here.

Nor has any emerged in the year since Robert Mueller was nominated as special counsel in an already long-going investigation, except the very probable untruthfulness under oath of former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe, former directors James Comey (FBI), James Clapper (NIA), and John Brennan (CIA), and probably Hillary Clinton and others. Mr. Mueller gives no hint of pursuing anyone but Trump and his collaborators, and right to the last week has packed his investigative team with rabid anti-Trump partisans.

The press’s febrile animosity to the President has caused them to try to whip up public anger over an astonishing sequence of nothing-burgers. The latest to be debunked are that nasty comments about Kim Jong-un would lead to war and that threatened tariff increases would generate a general trade war.