Here's the most interesting theory about why Manafort thought he could get away with lying to Mueller

Why did former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort think he could get away with lying to special counsel Robert Mueller?

That's a question that's been asked repeatedly on cable news over the past two days, and national security and intelligence journalist Marcy Wheeler has posited a new theory that tries to add some reason to Manafort's seeming madness.

Writing on Twitter, Wheeler speculates that Manafort chose to lie to Mueller about an unspecified crime implicating President Donald Trump that only he and the president would be able to substantiate.

To back up this theory, Wheeler notes that Trump reportedly said earlier this year that Manafort could potentially implicate him in criminal wrongdoing. She then muses that whatever that crime might be could be worse than the crimes that Manafort has already pleaded guilty to committing.

"Let's say... [that] the stuff that Manafort could incriminate Trump about was stuff that was worse than [the] ten years he faced in the DC trial," she writes. "But boy it'd have to be bad to sign up for losing $46 million that you need to pay defense attorneys for any follow-on trial. IF Manafort believed that only he and Trump could substantiate those crimes, then wouldn't it make sense to accept the plea, lie while Rudy was monitoring, in [an] attempt to keep both himself and Trump safe from that crime?"

Read the whole thread below.