We begin today’s roundup with Barbara McQuade at USA Today on the critical facts highlighted during the Robert Mueller’s testimony:
Some people expressed disappointment that the former special counsel did not deliver more impassioned testimony when he appeared before the House Judiciary and Intelligence committees on Wednesday. Perhaps we have all seen too many movies and television shows in which the star lawyer gives a riveting closing argument that spurs everyone to stand and cheer.
Instead, we saw a prosecutor behaving the way prosecutors should behave — cautiously, carefully and with restraint. Unlike politicians, who use rhetorical flourishes to rile up an audience, prosecutors generally let the power of their argument come from the facts themselves.
And even though the facts came out at the hearing in halting fashion, they were devastating. Among them:
►Mueller’s investigation did not exonerate President Donald Trump
►Russian interference was not a hoax and the investigation was not a witch hunt
►Russia interfered in our election in sweeping and systematic fashion
►Russia worked to benefit Trump as a candidate in the 2016 presidential election
►Trump developed messaging strategies around the release of stolen emails
►Trump lied and directed others to lie to hide those facts
Meanwhile:
The Senate Intelligence Committee concluded Thursday that election systems in all 50 states were targeted by Russia in 2016, an effort more far-reaching than previously acknowledged and one largely undetected by the states and federal officials at the time.
But while the bipartisan report’s warning that the United States remains vulnerable in the next election is clear, its findings were so heavily redacted at the insistence of American intelligence agencies that even some key recommendations for 2020 were blacked out.
At The Atlantic, Todd Purdum decries the tyranny of “optics”:
Again and again, Mueller passed up the chance to utter anything that might approach a riveting sound bite, much less a bold headline. None of this is to say that Mueller’s testimony lacked moral authority or intellectual force. On the contrary, if his answers had only been read on paper—and not seen and heard on live television in an age of instant gratification and minuscule attention spans—the most important replies were crisp and clear enough: Yes, a president can be charged with obstruction after leaving office. No, his investigation was not a witch hunt. No, Russian interference wasn’t a hoax. Over and over, Mueller affirmed findings that many Americans would find deeply troubling.
And don’t miss interesting analysis from Laurence Tribe at Newsweek:
The Constitution's framers were far from perfect, but they foresaw a scenario much like the one we face with Trump when they designed the impeachment power as a backstop to deal with "high Crimes and Misdemeanors," rejecting the argument that waiting for the next election to remove a dangerously illegitimate president would always suffice and insistent that we need a workable alternative to anarchy and bloodshed. [...]
The argument that the otherwise politically astute House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the otherwise legally sage Schiff are making to avoid invoking that power and using the leverage it would provide in the courts as they and Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler pursue the truth and hope to move public opinion—the argument that only a public already crying out for impeachment can make that device worth deploying and that the electorate will in effect "impeach" Trump by voting him out of office in 2020—is not just wishful thinking but smacks of the very logic that the framers wisely rejected when they provided Congress with this surgical tool for protecting constitutional democracy and the rule of law between elections and not just every four years.