This is a post to cover the important hearings of the US Congressional hearings of the Judiciary and Intelligence Committees of the US House of Representatives on 24 July, 2019. While the hearings might or might not put a final stake through the heart of the Mueller-Report-as-Trump-Death-Knell, the day was still a major turning point and this post is only a brief look at that aspect of the integrity of the Mueller investigation. More, much more, is to come on this.

Nonetheless, on 24 July, 2019, according to anyone of the left, including many lawmakers, it was all going to come together to finally sink Donald Trump. Robert Mueller the Special Counsel who was handpicked to investigate Trump on “Russian Collusion” in the 2016 election campaign was going to put the final nail in Trump’s political coffin. While his report, released in March, cleared Trump of actual collusion with Russia, a whole second volume was devoted to Obstruction of Justice and, we were told, that would be what finally got Trump.

There had been a lot of toing and froing about whether or not a sitting President could  be indicted whilst still in office and even a finding of fact that an indictment after Trump left office was recommended would be a victory of sorts for Democrats and the left. Even if only as a blackening of his name, it would be electoral cannon fodder for the pending 2020 election campaign where the presidency itself would be at stake. The big prize they wanted, though, was to get Trump out of office now, something they had been trying to do ever since November 8, 2016 when despite all their efforts to deny him the presidency, their worst fears had been realised.

The release of the report in March hadn’t been enough, apparently. Not enough people had read it, there were doubts about a possible impeachment hearing. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was said not to be in favour of an impeachment which failed -fearful of it having an effect similar to the failed Clinton impeachment of the 1990’s which saw Bill Clinton returned to office. The Mueller report itself was just a part of the argument against Trump and with conflicting legal argument about its findings and their effect on impeachment, that very process wasn’t going anywhere it seemed.

Whether the Pelosi opposition was the reason or not, the Democrats on the Judiciary Committee under its aggressively anti-Trump chair Jerry Nadler decided to get Mueller there to give evidence to them (later including the Intelligence Committee in a separate hearing). This was the day when everything would change,

The Hearing

It seems as if much opinion on the outcome is united: Mueller is the one most damaged. Personally and professionally. Leaving aside the Twitterverse, which can be very vicious in its criticism, how about the major media, particularly the US political media.

Confused performance by Mueller in the Washington Examiner or Mueller’s Doddering, Stumbling Performance in The Federalist. Or a CNN panel: Shaky Performance.

Now this next is from a conservative website. No mistake about that, a very conservative web site, but there is no suggestion that any fact or quote in it is wrong:

Mueller’s testimony before Congress was painted as the Super Bowl of scandal hearings. NBC’s Savannah Guthrie gushed 36 hours before the event that “We are drawing closer tonight to what may be the most anticipated testimony on Capitol Hill in a decade.”

And then the testimony happened.

All the networks cancelled their regularly scheduled programming so every American could be riveted by Mueller. By the lunch break, even MSNBC was crestfallen. Analyst Jeremy Bash complained Mueller “seemed lost at times” and “sucked the life out of the report.” Brian Williams ruefully admitted “A lot of Democrats in particular used the D-word and branded this a disaster early on.” ABC’s Terry Moran bluntly said “Impeachment’s over.”’

Some journalists didn’t see it that way, though.

There were literally hundreds of Tweets from every part of the political spectrum, but the one I copy here was from a famous Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe. Search for him on Google or whatever and his enormous professional history pre-Trump is worth looking at. His Tweets and views post-Trump must be given whatever merit that the reader gives them according to your own research. However, Tribe posted this assessment of the Mueller evidence:

 

There is a lot more to come on Mueller and his report, the ramifications of it and the future of Donald Trump.There can be no doubt, however, that a major milestone was reached today.

I will close with the view of a great thinker and historian Victor Davis Hanson. In an interview with Laura Ingraham of the Fox network, he summed up the hearing this way.

‘Mueller wasn’t just confused, he was oblivious. So he knew nothing and it just sort of confirmed the narrative that he was the figurehead used by a partisan group that had hijacked his conservative name. And what we were left with was that Donald Trump railed occasionally, he rants, maybe even swears to his aides but he didn’t ever order or succeed in impeding an investigation, he didn’t not produce documents, he didn’t ever fire anybody. So what are we left with in the end, Democrats on the Committee were talking about Thought Crime.

‘It’s not against the law to think things. That’s a Soviet ..er..Orwellian tradition, that’s not an American jurisprudence tradition. We don’t convict people for thinking things…There’s no evidence that he did anything, but he had bad thoughts. That’s not going to fly…with new prosecutors…Durham, Horowitz , coming up and more importantly, they are going to have a real topic to discuss, there’s real collusion there. After all…what created Robert Mueller was the effort of Hillary Clinton through three firewalls to (start) it, the DNC (Democrat National Committee), (the law firm) Perkins Coie and (Fusion) GPS to hire a foreign national, Christopher Steele to hire other foreign nationals to warp a US election. That’s what it’s all about…..There never was anything else.’

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