Early leaked excerpts from Bob Woodward’s new book, Fear: Trump in the White House, are overflowing with the sort of new details that ought to trigger the 25th Amendment. “He’s an idiot. It’s pointless to try to convince him of anything,” Chief of Staff John Kelly reportedly groused, while Defense Secretary James Mattis complained that when it came to international affairs, Trump “acted like—and had the understanding of—‘a fifth- or sixth-grader.’ ” Many of these anecdotes largely confirm the reporting of the less scrupulous Michael Wolff, whose own account of Trump’s deteriorating mental state, Fire and Fury, set off a similar media frenzy back in January. Woodward’s book, however, is likely to resonate in more profound, and longer-lasting ways. For one, it has the imprimatur of a renowned journalist whose legacy of reporting on the Watergate scandal lends the book’s conclusions a greater degree of legitimacy. Perhaps more important, Woodward covers a period running into the summer of 2018, while Wolff’s book chronicles the first several months of the administration. As such, Woodward is able to document a development that was still only a glint in Trump’s eye at the time Wolff lost his access to the White House: the Mueller probe.

Most of Woodward’s reporting here is as disturbing as expected, which is another way of saying it is shocking but not surprising—the four-word epithet that has come to define Trump’s presidency. According to CNN’s report on the 448-page book, Trump’s then-personal attorney John Dowd became convinced that Trump could not be allowed to speak to Robert Mueller because the president would inevitably perjure himself. Trump, as has been previously reported, rebelled, insisting that he could exonerate himself if only he could testify with the special counsel. Dowd, Woodward reports, decided to conduct a mock interview on January 27 to prove his point.

Trump failed, according to Dowd, but the President still insisted he should testify.

Woodward writes that Dowd saw the “full nightmare” of a potential Mueller interview, and felt Trump acted like an “aggrieved Shakespearean king.”

More surprising is what reportedly happened next: Dowd and Trump’s personal attorney, Jay Sekulow, “went to Mueller's office and re-enacted the mock interview” with the hope of convincing Mueller that Trump couldn’t testify because he is a pathological liar. “He just made something up. That’s his nature,” Dowd reportedly told Mueller. (In an interview with the Daily Caller shortly after parts of Fear were leaked, Trump attacked Woodward in a manner characteristic with Dowd’s alleged statement, accusing the Watergate reporter of having ”lot of credibility problems.”)

The details revealed in The Washington Post’s own story are, if possible, even more damaging. The Post’s Philip Rucker and Robert Costa make note of the same meeting between Dowd, Sekulow, and Mueller (as well as Mueller’s deputy, James Quarles), but they add a critical exchange after Dowd and Sekulow re-enact the disastrous mock interview session: