Mueller did not want to testify, and was very limited in the opinions he was willing to express, rarely straying at all from the raw text from his report, which he had previously made clear he believed should comprise the entirety of any testimony from himself (as if anyone, even Mueller, could prepare a 446-page document and not expect some reasonable follow-up questions or requests for clarification or elucidation).
As a result, his terse, often one-word responses lacked the pizzazz and sparkle that make for memorable sound-bite moments, but what those terse one-word responses did do is confirm the enormity of Trump’s wrongdoing, on a scale that absolutely would have been prosecuted if not for questionable Nixon-era Department of Justice rules (that Mueller, as a DOJ employee was obligated to comply with), which in a moment of carelessness, Mueller even confirmed, though he later amended his comment, not with a retraction, but to say he would prefer the way it was worded in the report.
Repeatedly, Democrats read damning “testimony” from the report, and Mueller confirmed them with his one-word responses: “Yes”; “True”; “Agreed”; “That is generally true.”
And while those that have read all or significant portions of the report did not learn much that was not already known, those who only had heard from Faux “News” that Mueller completely exonerated Trump got some eye-popping news. When former Republican Justin Amash became the only one of his former party to call for an impeachment inquiry to begin, he explained his reasons, citing material from the Mueller report, and one of his constituents said she was surprised because she had never heard that there was anything negative about Trump in the report.
For THAT audience, the hearing was very informative.
Mueller did not want to testify, and was very limited in the opinions he was willing to express, rarely straying at all from the raw text from his report, which he had previously made clear he believed should comprise the entirety of any testimony from himself (as if anyone, even Mueller, could prepare a 446-page document and not expect some reasonable follow-up questions or requests for clarification or elucidation).
As a result, his terse, often one-word responses lacked the pizzazz and sparkle that make for memorable sound-bite moments, but what those terse one-word responses did do is confirm the enormity of Trump’s wrongdoing, on a scale that absolutely would have been prosecuted if not for questionable Nixon-era Department of Justice rules (that Mueller, as a DOJ employee was obligated to comply with), which in a moment of carelessness, Mueller even confirmed, though he later amended his comment, not with a retraction, but to say he would prefer the way it was worded in the report.
Repeatedly, Democrats read damning “testimony” from the report, and Mueller confirmed them with his one-word responses: “Yes”; “True”; “Agreed”; “That is generally true.”
And while those that have read all or significant portions of the report did not learn much that was not already known, those who only had heard from Faux “News” that Mueller completely exonerated Trump got some eye-popping news. When former Republican Justin Amash became the only one of his former party to call for an impeachment inquiry to begin, he explained his reasons, citing material from the Mueller report, and one of his constituents said she was surprised because she had never heard that there was anything negative about Trump in the report.
For THAT audience, the hearing was very informative.