The House Judiciary Committee hearing on Monday exploring the obstruction portion of Robert Mueller's Russia report attempted to keep the public's focus on Donald Trump's abuse of power, but it may have proven there's simply no substitute for fact witnesses and more documentary evidence.
Former Nixon White House counsel John Dean made that very point during his opening statement at the hearing, saying that former Trump White House counsel Don McGahn owes it to the American people to testify. "His client is the Office of the President, and I think he owes that office his testimony before this committee," Dean told the committee.
Former U.S. Attorney Joyce Vance told the panel that the facts in Mueller's report would be "sufficient to prove all of the elements necessary" to charge Trump with multiple counts of obstruction of justice if he were not a sitting president. "The evidence is not equivocal nor is the charging decision a close call," she said, adding, "I would be willing to personally indict the case and try the case."
Former U.S. Attorney and University of Michigan professor of law Barbara McQuade used her opening to statement to emphasize that Trump's obstruction had put the nation at risk. "By seeking to curtail the investigation, Trump committed an act that threatened the national security of this country," she said.
But the bigger news of the day could prove to be the fact that the Justice Department has agreed to start turning over to the Judiciary Committee at least some of the materials the panel subpoenaed from the redacted Mueller report. Even if that information doesn't include any bombshells in it, what's clear is that new evidence has the ability to retrain the public's attention on Mueller's findings.
The recorded voice mail from Trump attorney John Dowd to Michael Flynn's lawyer, for example, was mostly excerpted in the Mueller report. Yet release of the unedited transcript followed by the actual voice mail itself put a new round of scrutiny on the interaction. Reading the excerpt in the report was simply no substitute for hearing Dowd's halting delivery as he wondered if there was information that "implicates" Trump and then dangled a pardon if Flynn stopped short of implicating Trump.
It's difficult to know exactly what revelations the redacted portions of the report might bring, but simply by virtue of the fact that they're new, they will command coverage. That alone could help move the needle.
The big problem for House Democrats remains the dearth of fact witness on tap to testify before Congress. Judiciary's deal on the Mueller materials included no such concession on McGahn testifying, a first-hand account that could break the Mueller report wide open for people who haven't fully absorbed the magnitude of Trump's abuse of power.
Listen to some of the testimony below.