Caroline Polisi is a federal and white collar criminal defense attorney in New York and is Of Counsel at Pierce Bainbridge. She frequently appears on CNN as a legal analyst and is an anchor at the Law & Crime Network, providing live legal analysis on high profile court cases. Follow her on Twitter: @CarolinePolisi. The views expressed in this commentary are her own.

(CNN) Monday morning, President Trump tweeted, "I have the absolute right to PARDON myself, but why would I do that when I have done nothing wrong?" Among other tweets, this latest outburst spurs talk of pardons at a time when the New York Times has published a 20-page letter to special counsel Robert Mueller from Trump's lawyer Jay Sekulow and former lawyer John Dowd.

With this stunning missive now a part of the public record, we can add Trump's misleading, "dictated" statement about his son's now infamous June 9, 2016 Trump Tower meeting with admitted Russian "informant" Natalia Veselnitskaya to the dizzying list of obstructionist behavior he's displayed while in office. This obstructionist behavior includes, but is not limited to, his asking then-FBI Director James Comey for a loyalty pledge, urging him to drop his investigation into former national security adviser Michael Flynn, and his subsequent firing of Comey, citing a controversial memorandum written by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, which we now know was merely a pretext. The reasoning stated in the memorandum -- Comey's handling of the Hillary Clinton email scandal -- was quickly belied by Trump's bald-faced assertion on national television that the actual reason he fired Comey was, quite simply, "this Russia thing."

We've known for a while that Trump likely had some involvement in drafting the July 8, 2017 press statement that said that that the participants in the meeting had "primarily discussed a program about the adoption of Russian children," when -- in fact -- it was later revealed by Trump Jr. in his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee that he went forward with the meeting because he was told that "someone had official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary Clinton and her dealings with Russia and that the information would be very useful to the campaign." When asked if he knew if President Trump had provided any "edits" to or "input" on the statement, Donald Jr. said "(h)e may have commented through Hope Hicks."

This latest revelation, admitted to by Trump's own legal team in their letter to Mueller, proves that the President lied to the press. There is no criminal statute prohibiting such behavior (just as there is no crime associated with lying on Twitter). But those lies do inform Robert Mueller's investigation insofar as they are evidence of state of mind, which is a key element in any criminal prosecution.

And this is where the leaked letter sheds important insight into Trump's legal team's strategy when dealing with the special counsel -- it isn't a legal strategy at all, but actually a PR strategy, with an eye toward the possible end result of impeachment proceedings.

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