Predictably and painfully, the public exorcism of the Mueller investigation came to an ashen close this week. Its climax—or perhaps more accurately, bathetic anticlimax?—took the form of a pair of congressional hearings where the Special Counsel along with an assistant testified. These were a peculiar blend of ghostly whispers conjuring evasions and circumlocutions, a surfeit of the usual theatrical bluster and malarkey—thank you, Jim Jordan—and the occasional huffs of exasperation by Mueller himself. The latter were not, though, evinced by any pained splinter of concern at the documented fact of presidential criminality. Rather, the special counsel showed the most energy when his rock-ribbed prosecutorial reputation seemed under interrogation. In contrast, the sedulous documentation in volume 2 of the Mueller report, which persuasively adumbrates almost a dozen discrete instances of presidential obstruction of justice, has vanished into little or nothing. At the hearing, their echo yielded nothing but “euphoria” from the White House.[2] The reason is easy enough to see: no reality-show producer is rushing to book Mueller on the strength of his ethereal performance.[3] But absent of some histrionic moment, like something out of A Few Good Men (1992), it is hard to see how the hearing could have made much impact in the first instance.

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