For much of the time that the special counsel, Robert Mueller, was at work, a battle played out, mostly in secret, between his office and Donald Trump’s legal team over what the President himself would have to answer to as part of the investigation, and in what setting. It’s long been known that Trump refused to sit down for an in-person interview with Mueller, and that he opted to answer some written questions from the special counsel instead.

The newly released Mueller report reveals what those questions and answers were, and what Mueller made of them. The short version is: the questions pertained to a pretty narrow set of topics, and Mueller was pretty unsatisfied with Trump’s answers. “During the course of our discussions, the President did agree to answer written questions on certain Russia-related topics, and he provided us with answers,” the second volume of the report, which concerns the obstruction-of-justice side of the special counsel’s work, states. “He did not similarly agree to provide written answers to questions on obstruction topics or questions on events during the transition. Ultimately, while we believed that we had the authority and legal justification to issue a grand jury subpoena to obtain the President's testimony, we chose not to do so.”

The report goes into more detail about these issues in an appendix, which includes the full set of questions that Mueller sent to the President, and also the President’s answers, plus an explanation of the whole back-and-forth between the special counsel and the Trump legal team. “Beginning in December 2017, this Office sought for more than a year to interview the President on topics relevant to both Russian-election interference and obstruction-of-justice,” the report states. Mueller’s team told the President’s lawyers that an interview would be “vital” to the investigation and “in the interest of the Presidency and the public.” But, in the end, after discussions with officials in the Justice Department, Mueller agreed to send written questions instead. The topics they cover include Russian hacking, WikiLeaks, Paul Manafort, Michael Flynn, Russian sanctions, the Trump Tower Moscow project, and the June, 2016, meeting at Trump Tower between Donald Trump, Jr., and Russians claiming to have “dirt” on Hillary Clinton.

This past November, Mueller received Trump’s answers. The next month, the report says, Mueller told Trump’s team that the answers weren’t enough. “We noted, among other things, that the President stated on more than 30 occasions that he ‘does not “recall” or “remember” or have an “independent recollection” ’ of information called for by the questions. Other answers were ‘incomplete or imprecise.’ ” Mueller’s team again asked for an in-person interview with the President. Trump said no.

At this point, Mueller’s team debated whether to issue a subpoena for Trump’s testimony. It was a few weeks away from completing its work, which, as the report states, did not find clear evidence that Trump hadn’t committed obstruction of justice. Trump had yet to answer any questions on the actions he’d taken that had been investigated as part of Mueller’s obstruction probe. But a subpoena, Mueller’s team knew, would take time and effort to fight out. “We thus weighed the costs of potentially lengthy constitutional litigation, with resulting delay in finishing our investigation, against the anticipated benefits for our investigation and report,” the report states. “As explained in Volume II, Section Il.B., we determined that the substantial quantity of information we had obtained from other sources allowed us to draw relevant factual conclusions on intent and credibility, which are often inferred from circumstantial evidence and assessed without direct testimony from the subject of the investigation.” And that’s the last thing Mueller had to say about that.