For months, Donald Trump’s lawyers have assured the president that there is nothing to fear from Robert Mueller, and offered up a number of arbitrary—and, according to legal experts, delusional—timelines for when he can expect to be cleared of wrongdoing. As the tally of Trump campaign members ensnared in the probe has continued to climb, the legal team’s efforts have appeared preventative—a desperate strategy to keep Trump from flying off the handle. They have also suggested that Trump’s lawyers are acutely aware that the president is his own worst enemy. And though the full extent of Trump’s self-sabotage may never reach the public, a new report from The New York Times details a stinging series of self-inflicted wounds that have served as ammunition in Mueller’s emergent obstruction-of-justice case against the president.

Trump’s efforts to prevent Attorney General Jeff Sessions from recusing himself from the case, in particular, were reportedly far more aggressive than previously known. While outside pressure built on Sessions to step away from the Russia probe, the president ordered White House General Counsel Donald McGahn to put the squeeze on the former Alabama senator to hold his ground, the Times reports, citing two sources familiar with the episode. McGahn obliged, though the effort proved futile. Sessions, according to the Times, had already made the decision to recuse, and in March announced his decision. Trump, who publicly castigated Sessions over the choice, reacted similarly behind the scenes, reportedly demanding to know who would protect him from Mueller and raging, “Where’s my Roy Cohn?”—a reference to his erstwhile personal lawyer and fixer who served as Joseph McCarthy’s top aide during the Red Scare of the 1950s. At least one lawmakers has expressed alarm at McGahn’s role in the proceedings; on Friday, Rep. Jerrold Nadler released a statement calling on the general counsel to make himself available for questioning by the House Judiciary Committee.

The Trump-driven campaign to prevent Sessions’s recusal is reportedly among a string of incidents Mueller is probing as he seeks to determine whether the president obstructed justice when he fired F.B.I. Director James Comey. Mueller, who was appointed by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, has reportedly obtained a series of notes written by former White House chief of staff Reince Priebus; the notes corroborate Comey’s account that Trump repeatedly asked him to announce that he was not personally under F.B.I. investigation. According to the Times, Mueller is also looking into an episode in which the president planned to send Comey a letter characterizing the ongoing D.O.J. inquiry as “fabricated and politically motivated,” as well as the president’s involvement in crafting a false statement in response to a Times report on Donald Trump Jr.’s now infamous Trump Tower meeting with a Russian lawyer. (Ty Cobb, the Trump attorney handling all matters related to the Mueller probe, did not respond to the paper’s request for comment.)

Thursday’s Times report also notes that a Sessions aide asked a congressional staffer whether they had compromising information on Comey as part of a broader effort to discredit the then F.B.I. director and the Trump-Russia investigation. It was unclear whether Mueller’s team is aware of this incident.

The legal debate over obstruction of justice is complicated, made no simpler by the fact that a president has the legal authority to fire an F.B.I. director. As members of Washington’s white-collar defense bar explained to me shortly after Comey’s ouster, to prove obstruction, Mueller must prove corrupt intent. This doesn’t necessarily mean that the special prosecutor must uncover an underlying crime, but rather that Trump or his associates must have been attempting to conceal something. And if Mueller does unearth evidence that the Trump campaign coordinated with the Kremlin to disrupt the 2016 election, making the case that Trump obstructed justice is a much lighter legal lift. “If there is evidence out there that there was collaboration and Mr. Trump knew it, and against that background he was seeking to influence the investigation, he’s got a problem,” William Jeffress, a D.C. trial attorney who worked on the Valerie Plame affair told me in June of last year.

Of course, if it’s up to Trump’s lawyers, all this will prove a moot point—the president’s legal team has already made the argument that there is no crime of collusion and that the president, as “the chief law enforcement officer,” cannot obstruct justice.