On Tuesday, the Times published a major story describing the various ways that Donald Trump has tried to undermine or end the investigations surrounding his Presidency. Late last year, the Times reported, Trump called the acting Attorney General, Matthew Whitaker (who was just replaced by William Barr), to ask whether Geoffrey Berman, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, could be put in charge of his office’s investigation into Michael Cohen. This would have required Berman—who worked on Trump’s transition, was appointed by Trump, and recused himself from the Cohen investigation—to un-recuse himself from the inquiry. (Trump, of course, wanted his previous Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, to do the same with the Russia investigation.)

The Times piece was written by Mark Mazzetti, Maggie Haberman, Nicholas Fandos, and Michael S. Schmidt. I spoke by phone with Schmidt soon after the story went online. During our conversation, which has been edited and condensed for clarity, we discussed Whitaker’s tenure as the Attorney General, whether Trump’s mind-set about these investigations has and hasn’t changed over time, and why un-recusing yourself is easier said than done.

Was the idea for this story some discovery that you wanted to base it around, or was it meant to be a long-view take on how Trump has dealt with this investigation?

I think there were a few things. One of them is that the President has engaged in a lengthy effort to control the narrative and the investigations around him. And, if you are the average person, and you are not following every single whiff and blow of what is going on, it can be a difficult story to follow. And sometimes we are really at our best and really helping the reader as much as possible when we are able to take them and to hold their hand a bit and tell them the larger story that may get lost in the day-to-day shuffle.

The central event in your story is Trump calling Whitaker and asking if Geoffrey Berman can un-recuse himself. The President often speaks off the cuff. Was this an order? Was this a question?

Our understanding is that it was an idea that the President had broached, saying, Is this something that we could do? Sometimes the President’s confidantes and advisors, when they push back on us, say, That’s just how he talks; that’s just how he speaks. And, while I can understand why some people would understand where they are coming from, for us, he is the President of the United States, he is in charge of the executive branch. There are these investigations involving him. And because of that, I don’t think that he should be given the benefit of the doubt that that’s just how he speaks.

I suppose his defenders would say that he didn’t fire Matt Whitaker.

If that’s how you want to view it, that’s fine. But, if the President had his way—he asked Jim Comey in February of 2017 to end the investigation into Michael Flynn, and Jim Comey decided not to do that. So, the President’s words, if followed by others, would be a means to his end.

If Comey had followed the President’s words, the Flynn investigation would have been over. And here we are, two years later, and Michael Flynn has pleaded guilty to a felony of lying to the F.B.I. If the President had his way, that case would never have been made. And that’s based on something he told his F.B.I. director at the time.

How do people at the Department of Justice view Matthew Whitaker’s term? The worst fears were not borne out, but how do you understand his time there?

I think there was great fear within the Justice Department about what Whitaker would do when he came in. There were a lot of people who didn’t see him as legitimate, who thought he wasn’t qualified for the job, who thought he was there to do the President’s bidding to end these investigations. I think that, when we get a fuller picture of this, we will continue to see that Whitaker ran into forces that were far greater and stronger than he thought he would face and ultimately was not that successful in helping the President.

What are those forces?

I think it is harder to—well, we don’t know the full picture yet. But I do think it is harder to influence investigations once they are so far along the way that the Mueller one is and the way that the Southern District of New York one on Cohen is. And, because of that, I think even if you are the Attorney General, in charge of the department, you are constrained in some ways about what you can and cannot do.

Is that because of laws and regulations or people in the Justice Department standing in the way?

I think people at the Justice Department. I think it’s because of a structure of how the Justice Department operates, how cases are run by U.S. Attorneys’ offices across the country, and the fact that so many people are paying attention to this issue, whether it’s Capitol Hill or the media.

This piece goes back a long way. Do you see any changes in how Trump behaved and his mind-set altered with regard to these investigations, or is Trump always Trump, never changing?

One of the more remarkable things about the arc of the story of how Trump has dealt with the investigations around him is that it does not appear that he has learned a lot from his earlier mistakes. It was in the first two months of his Presidency that he found out that Jeff Sessions had recused himself from the Russia investigation. The President threw a fit and then spent the next several months trying to get Sessions to un-recuse himself. That failed and ultimately became an avenue that the special counsel’s office has looked at when they considered the question of obstruction. If you live through that as the President and are unable to get Sessions back in charge of the investigation, and then find yourself being examined for that exact question, you would think you might shy away from it going forward. But that appears not to be the case.

Do you understand the process of un-recusal and why it’s so difficult?

I think it’s something that is possible but is a decision made by ethics officials in Washington, who determine whether that’s kosher or not. The issue on recusing, which is interesting, is that the reason you often recuse yourself is perception of bias. But at the heart of un-recusal is the question of perception. So, if you are un-recusing yourself to take back over control of an investigation, then you are inherently, in that, creating a perception issue. It seems to lack, in taking that as an idea, an understanding of what that is all about.

What do people at the Department of Justice think about the new Attorney General?

It remains to be seen on Barr. He testified that he is going to be true to the Justice Department and the rule of law and do what’s right. He said he is at the end of his career and is prepared to walk away from the job if he believes he has to do something that isn’t right. He is just a few days in, and we haven’t seen him doing anything publicly yet.