After more than 24 hours of conspicuous silence on the matter of Michael Flynn, President Donald Trump entered a self-destructive spiral on Saturday, beginning with a stunning, potentially self-incriminating tweet: “I had to fire General Flynn because he lied to the Vice President and the FBI. He has pled guilty to those lies. It is a shame because his actions during the transition were lawful. There was nothing to hide!” The implication was that Trump had known Flynn had misled agents about his conversations with the Russian ambassador—a federal crime—before dismissing his national security adviser. That new information, which was not previously reported, would add new significance to his subsequent decision to fire F.B.I. director James Comey, who was investigating Flynn. According to multiple legal experts, the apparent admission could bolster an obstruction of justice case against the president. (One of Trump’s lawyers, John Dowd, later claimed that he, not Trump, had drafted the tweet—a distinction that would limit the president’s legal risk, if true.)

Facing a wave of news stories questioning whether the president had just handed Mueller another smoking gun, Trump went back on the offensive early Sunday morning in an aggressive campaign to discredit Mueller, Comey, and the F.B.I. “After years of Comey, with the phony and dishonest Clinton investigation (and more), running the FBI, its reputation is in Tatters,” he wrote. “Worst in History!” He claimed that he “never asked Comey to stop investigating Flynn,” as Comey testified under oath, effectively accusing the former F.B.I. director of perjury.

In tweet after tweet, he raged against the agency for Comey’s decision not to recommend charges against Hillary Clinton for her use of a private e-mail server as secretary of state, suggesting that the entire Justice Department was aligned against him. “So General Flynn lies to the FBI and his life is destroyed, while Crooked Hillary Clinton, on that now famous FBI holiday ‘interrogation’ with no swearing in and no recording, lies many times...and nothing happens to her? Rigged system, or just a double standard?” he wrote in one. “Many people in our Country are asking what the “Justice” Department is going to do about the fact that totally Crooked Hillary, AFTER receiving a subpoena from the United States Congress, deleted and “acid washed” 33,000 Emails? No justice!” he wrote in another.

He seized on news that Mueller’s team had dismissed one of its top agents, Peter Strzok, after learning that he had written text messages critical of Trump and supportive of Clinton, whose investigation he was involved in. “Tainted (no, very dishonest?) FBI ‘agent’s role in Clinton probe under review.’ Led Clinton Email probe,” he fumed. “‘ANTI-TRUMP FBI AGENT LED CLINTON EMAIL PROBE’ Now it all starts to make sense!” And he laid into the “fake news” after ABC News suspended reporter Brian Ross for a misleading story about Flynn.

Trump’s latest burst of online agitation seems to parallel the growing anticipation in some corners of Washington that Mueller is closing in on an obstruction of justice case against the president. “The Judiciary Committee has an investigation going as well and it involves obstruction of justice and I think what we're beginning to see is the putting together of a case of obstruction of justice,” Senator Dianne Feinstein, the committee’s ranking Democrat, said on Meet the Press Sunday. “I see it in the hyper-frenetic attitude of the White House, the comments every day, the continual tweets. And I see it most importantly in what happened with the firing of Director Comey, and it is my belief that that is directly because he did not agree to ‘lift the cloud’ of the Russia investigation. That’s obstruction of justice.”

As former prosecutors have told the Hive, it is easier to make an obstruction case if you can point to an underlying crime, which is perhaps why Trump’s own lawyers have been publicly laying the groundwork to argue that there is no such crime as collusion. And indeed, the vast web of unseemly connections between the Trump campaign and Russia may not be illegal. Still, there doesn’t need to be crime for there to have been a cover-up.