After 10 long months of delay and recalcitrance, President Donald Trump has finally submitted his answers to some of special counsel Robert Mueller’s questions on Russian interference with the 2016 election, according to the president’s personal lawyers.

We don’t know whether these answers will be forthright, or whether the president will try to dodge the questions asked, since the format doesn’t allow for immediate follow-ups. (Last week, Trump told Fox News’s Chris Wallace that he “probably” wouldn’t voluntarily agree to answer further questions from Mueller or do an in-person interview with the special counsel’s team.)

And the answers aren’t public, at least for now.

But Trump submitting his answers is still a significant moment for the probe. Unlike his many public statements, these statements to the special counsel are submitted at risk of legal penalties for making false statements. And after investigators judged President Bill Clinton to have made false statements in a deposition and grand jury interview, congressional Republicans made those statements the basis for articles of impeachment against him.

Trump has spent hours meeting with his lawyers about the questions over several sessions, per the Washington Post. The morning after one meeting last week, he sent a series of tweets calling the Mueller investigation “a disgrace to our Nation” that was trying to “destroy people” and “ruin” lives — perhaps a sign he was having trouble with his answers.

It is possible that Trump has nothing serious to hide. Maybe his many months of refusing to agree to answer these questions are solely because he’s being cautious — because he fears a “perjury trap” or a “witch hunt” will ensnare him even though he’s done nothing wrong. Maybe the fact that he’s only answering these now that he’s installed a new acting attorney general he views as more loyal is also just a coincidence.

But if there is more to the story of what happened in 2016 than Trump has so far admitted, then the president has likely been struggling with some difficult choices behind the scenes.

Such as: Does he fess up to politically damaging and perhaps legally perilous conduct? Or does he continue to try to conceal, or lie about, what happened — even in statements made under penalty of perjury?

“Will Mueller interview Trump” has become “Will Trump deign to answer a very limited set of Mueller’s questions”

All the way back in January, Mueller’s team first requested to question Trump as part of their investigation.

The stakes were high. Trump’s statements about many topics have often been ... factually challenged. But they are generally made to the press and the public, and not to federal law enforcement officers. Should Trump make false statements to Mueller’s team, there could be legal consequences for him (potential impeachment while he’s in office, or even criminal charges after he leaves it).

In March, Mueller’s team told Trump’s lawyers about various topics they hoped to ask Trump about in person. Trump’s lawyers used this information to assemble a list of more than 40 likely questions, which the New York Times obtained earlier this year. Many of these questions related to obstruction of justice (connected to Trump’s firing of FBI Director James Comey and pressure on Attorney General Jeff Sessions), but many others related directly to Russian interference.

Trump’s team decided they did not want to have him answer these questions. They offered various shifting excuses for not agreeing to do the interview (while dubiously claiming Trump himself still wanted to do it). The most common justifications for refusal were that they feared a “perjury trap,” that Trump had a tendency to make off-the-cuff misstatements, and that they had constitutional executive power concerns about the obstruction of justice questions.

All this time, the threat of Mueller subpoenaing Trump was hanging over everything. (Mueller himself explicitly mentioned that possibility to Trump’s team, per the Post.) This is one likely reason Trump didn’t just refuse to answer questions outright. Many legal experts believed that Trump would likely lose a battle over a subpoena in court, were one to occur. But that battle would take some time and hold up the investigation.

Eventually, a compromise was struck. For at least an initial set of questions, Mueller’s team agreed that Trump could answer in written form, rather than orally — minimizing the chances for an off-the-cuff misstatement. And he scaled back these initial questions to focus on the topic of collusion with Russia, not obstruction.

Mueller sent Trump those questions by mid-October. According to the Washington Post, there are about two dozen questions that focus on five topics. More than a month has passed since then. And finally, Trump sat down with his lawyers over several lengthy meetings last week to craft his answers.

Bill Clinton thought he could get away with lying about Monica Lewinsky

About 20 years ago, President Bill Clinton was in a similar position. In a January 1998 deposition for Paula Jones’s sexual harassment lawsuit against him, Clinton was quizzed about his interactions with several women, including former White House intern and then employee Monica Lewinsky.

At the time, Clinton’s affair with Lewinsky wasn’t publicly known. If Clinton admitted to it, he’d cause a major scandal and suffer political embarrassment. But if he lied about it, he might get away with it. What evidence could there be, anyway?

So Clinton proceeded to lie repeatedly, ludicrously claiming that he didn’t think he and Lewinsky had ever been alone in the Oval Office together, that if they had been together, “nothing remarkable” would have happened, and that he had “never had sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky.”

News of the affair broke days after the deposition. Clinton continued to deny it publicly, but independent counsel Ken Starr’s prosecutors amassed evidence including Lewinsky’s taped conversations, a blue dress stained with Clinton’s semen, and (eventually) Lewinsky’s cooperation.

So when Clinton agreed to testify to Starr’s grand jury, he finally admitted that when he was “alone with Ms. Lewinsky on certain occasions,” he had “inappropriate, intimate contact” with her. Still, Starr argued that Clinton lied three more times in the grand jury testimony, about the details and timeline of the affair. (In the end, Clinton did “get away with it” in a sense after all, since he was impeached but not convicted, and he remained in office.)

So hypothetically, if someone is trying to get away with lying under oath rather than make damaging admissions, they are likely thinking about several questions. What do prosecutors suspect? What do they know for sure? What are they likely to find out eventually? What will they have witnesses willing to testify about? What can they prove with evidence? Depending on the answers of these questions, it may be possible to get away with lies — or to get busted.

Did Trump have an easy time answering the questions? Accounts differ.

The Washington Post reported that Trump and his lawyers had a four-hour meeting about the questions last Monday, and a 90-minute meeting Wednesday. The morning after that second meeting, Trump sent a series of angry tweets about the Mueller investigation. We don’t know what’s been going on behind the scenes, but he certainly seemed agitated about the probe:

The inner workings of the Mueller investigation are a total mess. They have found no collusion and have gone absolutely nuts. They are screaming and shouting at people, horribly threatening them to come up with the answers they want. They are a disgrace to our Nation and don’t... — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 15, 2018

....care how many lives the ruin. These are Angry People, including the highly conflicted Bob Mueller, who worked for Obama for 8 years. They won’t even look at all of the bad acts and crimes on the other side. A TOTAL WITCH HUNT LIKE NO OTHER IN AMERICAN HISTORY! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 15, 2018

Universities will someday study what highly conflicted (and NOT Senate approved) Bob Mueller and his gang of Democrat thugs have done to destroy people. Why is he protecting Crooked Hillary, Comey, McCabe, Lisa Page & her lover, Peter S, and all of his friends on the other side? — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 15, 2018

Naturally, Trump then insisted to Chris Wallace that answering the questions wasn’t “a big deal” and was “very simple,” because “I did nothing wrong.” He did not explain why it’s taken him so long to send the answers.

His lawyer Rudy Giuliani didn’t make it sound so simple. Around the same time, he told the Post that there were some of Mueller’s questions that “create more issues for us legally than others,” that some were “unnecessary,” that some were “possible traps,” and that he might “consider some as irrelevant.”

Meanwhile, an update on Paul Manafort is coming by Monday

In the midst of all this, Mueller’s team submitted an interesting joint court filing with lawyers for Paul Manafort.

The former Trump campaign chair agreed to cooperate with Mueller’s investigation as part of a plea deal in September. Since then, he’s left jail to travel to the special counsel’s office at least nine times, per CNN. However, ABC News had a recent report claiming that the cooperation isn’t going well — that there is “frustration over whether Manafort is fully providing the information he agreed to offer.”

Now, the new Manafort filing asks for just a 10-day extension in submitting an update about his case. “The parties believe a brief extension of the status report date, until November 26, 2018, will allow them to provide the Court with a report that will be of greater assistance in the Court’s management of this matter,” they write.

This is an unusually short extension for an update like this. It suggests that something will happen quite soon — by Monday — that will clarify Manafort’s case. (Don’t expect big new details, necessarily, but we may get a clearer sense of how his cooperation has gone and whether he’s ready for sentencing.)

Marcy Wheeler suggests several possible reasons for the short extension, with one of them being that Trump was expected to submit his answers to Mueller by then. Perhaps Manafort’s cooperation relates to those answers, and Mueller is waiting to have the answers in hand before revealing how cooperative or uncooperative Manafort is being.

“Probably this is the end”

Trump also told Wallace that he “probably” won’t agree to any further questioning from Mueller’s team — meaning that he likely wouldn’t answer questions about whether he obstructed justice while in office, and likely wouldn’t agree to be interviewed in person.

While many have long believed that Trump would never end up agreeing to an in-person interview with Mueller, his public admission of this is significant — and notably comes right after he’s ousted Jeff Sessions and gone around DOJ’s line of succession to install a loyalist, Matt Whitaker, as acting attorney general.

Whitaker now oversees the special counsel investigation. Whether he yet knows the inner workings of the probe, and if so, whether he’s told Trump anything about them or interfered in any way, remains mysterious. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) recently met with Whitaker, and claimed that Whitaker said he’s following “regular order” with regards to the investigation.

But Trump may believe Whitaker’s appointment removes or lessens the threat of a Mueller subpoena that’s been hanging over him all these months. “White House aides and other people close to Mr. Trump anticipate that Mr. Whitaker will rein in any report summarizing Mr. Mueller’s investigation and will not allow the president to be subpoenaed,” the New York Times reported shortly after Whitaker’s appointment. Around the same time, “two people close to Whitaker” told the Washington Post that “he is deeply skeptical of any effort to force the president’s testimony through a subpoena.”

And now, Trump seems to believe he’s solved his problem. Asked about answering more Mueller questions, he told Wallace, “I think we’ve wasted enough time on this witch hunt and the answer is probably, we’re finished.”

“We gave very, very complete answers to a lot of questions that I shouldn’t have even been asked and I think that should solve the problem,” he continued. ”I hope it solves the problem, if it doesn’t, you know, I’ll be told and we’ll make a decision at that time. But probably this is the end.”