Judge Napolitano: Trump team leaked Mueller questions to 'sober' the president up

Judge Napolitano weighed in on the leak of the questions that special counsel Robert Mueller planned to put to President Trump, saying that it was likely the president's own team who leaked them.

"To sort of sober him up"

Napolitano spoke Wednesday on Fox News about the leak of the Mueller questions to the New York Times, offering his opinion about who the source was, and what their motivation was in doing so.

"The questions that were leaked, and we don't know who leaked them," Napolitano said, "and in my opinion, they were leaked but someone in the president's team to sort of sober him up if you will, after the Fox and Friends interview last week in which went on and on and on and on for half an hour."

"To remind him that this will not be that kind of interview," he explained. "These are very difficult questions, they may look easy but each one is a trigger point, a starting point to a dozen or so questions beneath it, and there's forty different topics."

"The most challenging a question that I saw was the one that asked about, 'are you aware of any assistance that your campaign sought, particularly through Paul Manafort from the Russians.' Assistance is the key word," Napolitano continued, "that's the legal word, 'collusion' is the media and political word."

Napolitano speculated that Rick Gates, Manafort's business partner who is cooperating with the investigation, could have been the one who supplied Mueller with the factual basis to pursue this line of inquiry.

"Someone has told the special counsel that the campaign reached out to the Russians for assistance through Paul Manafort and Donald Trump knew about it," Napolitano added.

"So the question is to test his honesty," Napolitano concluded, "did he know about it."

Here is the video of Napolitano's comments:

Napolitano offered that it was good that the questions were leaked in order to help Trump understand how serious the investigation is, so that the president might stop from offering information that is damaging to his case.