The ongoing Trump-Russia saga took a small but notable turn Friday when CNN reported that White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders has been interviewed by Robert Mueller’s team, raising questions about whether Donald Trump may have directed her to lie. According to NBC News, the interview took place in the fall of 2018, around the time former Chief of Staff John Kelly was interviewed. “The president urged me, like he has everyone in the administration, to fully cooperate with the special counsel. I was happy to voluntarily sit down with them,” Sanders told CNN in a statement.

Presumably at issue is a 2017 statement by Donald Trump Jr. denying reports that he met with Russian officials in Trump Tower during the 2016 campaign, with the intention of obtaining damaging information about Hillary Clinton. Though Donny initially claimed to have crafted the statement without the input of the president, later reports—complete with e-mails—suggested Trump Senior played a major role. At the time, Sanders defended the president, saying, “The statement that Don Jr. issued is true,” and that the president “weighed in as any father would, based on the limited information that he had.”

Legal experts scrying the news coming out of the Mueller probe suggested that Sanders may have been interviewed to establish a pattern of Trump directing subordinates to lie on his behalf. “If Trump directed Sanders to lie to the public, that would show consciousness of guilt even though lying to the public in and of itself is usually not a crime,” suggested CNN legal analyst Renato Mariotti. Since 2017, it has been reported that Mueller is investigating possible obstruction of justice by the president. Sanders, who has been serving in the White House since the beginning of the Trump administration, and who has been present at several critical junctures of the presidency, could be a critical witness.

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