In a year of the nonstop bizarre, President Donald Trump’s enduring affection for Michael Flynn has stood out. Trump, according to James Comey, cleared the Oval Office to ask the then-F.B.I. director to go easy on Flynn. Even after firing his national security adviser for lying to his vice president, Trump went out of his way to publicly declare Flynn a “wonderful man.” Even after Flynn pleaded guilty to a felony and began cooperating with special counsel Robert Mueller, Trump wailed that he felt “very badly” for Flynn, whose life was being unfairly “destroyed.”

So the news that Trump’s defense lawyers are preparing to turn on Flynn and attack the former lieutenant general’s credibility seemed like a big deal. Unless you are a defense lawyer.

“Imagine that—a defense attorney is going to attack the prosecution’s witness, if Flynn has anything bad to say about Trump,” says Sol Wisenberg, a Washington white-collar defense attorney who was deputy independent counsel in the Whitewater and Lewinsky investigations. “Wow—the next thing you’re going to tell me is Dewey took Manila. If Flynn has some real dirt on Trump, then, yeah, they’ll have to destroy him.”

But those are very large ifs. Preparing to go after Flynn could merely be due diligence and not confirmation that Trump’s lawyers believe Flynn’s testimony will be truly damaging. Indeed, as former assistant U.S. attorney Andrew McCarthy has argued most persuasively, in the National Review, prosecutors typically strike plea agreements only around the highest provable charge—and for all of Flynn’s apparent legal exposures, he pleaded guilty to the fairly pedestrian count of lying to the F.B.I. Maybe that’s the best that Mueller’s got against Flynn.

And maybe Trump’s attachment to Flynn isn’t driven by nervousness that the former Army lieutenant general can connect the dots between the 2016 campaign and the Russian government. It isn’t difficult to believe there’s an actual human bond between the two men. They share a bitterness about how they were treated by Barack Obama—Trump because he was ridiculed by the former president; Flynn because he was fired by the former president’s lieutenants—as well as a visceral hatred of Hillary Clinton. And Flynn took Trump seriously early on, advising the campaign beginning in October 2015. Trump is pathologically in need of outside approval, and he craves it in particular from men in uniform, going back all the way to his teenage days as a student at the New York Military Academy, and more recently as salve against the criticism that he dodged service in Vietnam. It’s why Trump is always blustering about “my generals.” Flynn was the first.

Trump’s attorneys, however, don’t care about sentiment—it’s their job not to. Yet yesterday's leak is equally interesting as political strategy. It signals to Trump’s conservative media allies—who have already tried to paint Flynn as an Obama plant—that they are free to turn up the attacks on Flynn, to trash him as one more enemy of the president, which in turn embellishes Trump’s outsider image with his hard-core voters. Perhaps more significantly, the leak signals to Flynn that if he follows through on his plea deal and testifies damningly against Trump, the general can forget about a presidential pardon. On the other hand, if Flynn were to buck Mueller—to re-flip, so to speak—a pardon would still be possible.

Mueller, however, seems to have wisely anticipated such a chess move: by crafting a plea deal that basically guarantees Flynn won’t serve any time in jail, the special counsel reduced the temptation to not cooperate and be rewarded by a pardon.

All of which might help explain the recent weird tweet by Flynn’s brother, who told Trump it is “about time you pardoned General Flynn.” It was understandable as sibling sympathy—but it also came across as strangely anxious. “Flynn has a great deal—I know he’s going to be a felon, but he’s going to get probation, and all he has to do is testify about something that’s not so important,” Wisenberg says. “So why is his brother worried?”

Perhaps, Wisenberg speculates, there is a second, secret plea agreement between Flynn and Mueller, one that contains more explosive evidence of a conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia. A separate, hidden plea would be highly unusual, but it would explain the apparent thinness of the public plea agreement.

“Mueller would have thoroughly de-briefed Flynn before making the plea deal, and this was a sweetheart deal,” says Peter Zeidenberg, who was part of the prosecution team in the Scooter Libby leak case and is now a defense attorney. “They know what Flynn is going to be saying.” Maybe it will be underwhelming. Trump’s team doesn't seem willing to count on that.

This article has been updated.