(Trump’s comments about redactions are confusing. He has attacked former FBI Director James Comey for releasing memos he claims are classified, and briefly blocked a Democratic memo from the House Intelligence Committee over its inclusion of classified information, yet he grandstands against redactions insisted upon by his own Justice Department.)

The president hasn’t made explicit what he intends to do when he steps in, but the most obvious guesses are that he would fire either Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein or else Mueller himself. On Tuesday, Rosenstein said, “There are people who have been making threats, privately and publicly, against me for quite some time. I think they should understand by now the Department of Justice is not going to be extorted. We’re going to do what’s required by the rule of law.”

As for Mueller, Trump not only called his apparent obstruction-of-justice investigation a trap, but also tweeted a quote from Joe DiGenova, a lawyer who nearly joined Trump’s legal team and who views the special counsel as a deep-state conspiracy.

Trump has run hot and cold about the Mueller investigation, often calling it a “witch hunt,” in several typographical variations, but also expressing a strong desire to sit for an interview with Mueller. (Mueller does not comment publicly.) Yet events over the last week, in addition to these threatening quotes, suggest the White House is moving from a strategy of cooperating with the probe in an effort to put it in the past as quickly as possible, to take a far more aggressive stance toward the special counsel.

Begin with a bombshell New York Times report Monday, which revealed a set of questions, compiled by Trump’s lawyers, that Mueller wanted to ask Trump. The list appears to have come from an ally or aide to the president: “That document was provided to the Times by a person outside Mr. Trump’s legal team,” the paper explained. Several other outlets also acquired it. But subsequent reporting from The Washington Post says the document actually represented “a list of 49 questions that the team believed the president would be asked,” prepared by Trump attorney Jay Sekulow.

Why would the Trump team leak the list of questions it merely “believed” the president would be asked—which, as my colleague Adam Serwer reports, gestures at major dangers for the president—to the press? Only the sources themselves can speak definitively to their motivation, but the disclosure invigorated Trump’s defenders on cable news and elsewhere. That produced a feedback loop: The leak of questions from the White House inspired angry reactions from the likes of Jesse Watters and Joe DiGenova; Trump then amplified DiGenova’s attacks on Mueller; and the press rushed to cover the controversy. With Trump’s media protectors taking to the barricades, he gained more cover to refuse to cooperate with Mueller.