After Mueller’s testimony before Congress, I was pretty despondent. I turned it off, to be honest. Marty was similarly unimpressed.
This morning, the New York Times’ Michelle Goldberg arrived at a very different conclusion.
Last Wednesday, after Robert Mueller’s terse and sometimes halting congressional testimony, conventional wisdom quickly congealed: Mueller’s performance had made Donald Trump’s impeachment far less likely. “Robert S. Mueller III’s disastrous testimony has taken the wind out of the sails of the Democratic impeachment drive,” wrote Marc Thiessen in The Washington Post. CNN’s Chris Cillizza declared Mueller’s testimony “a bust — at least when it came to generating momentum for impeachment.”
Less than a week later, it’s clear that these hot takes were wrong. At no point in Trump’s wretched rule has impeachment appeared more probable. Indeed, Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee, which would oversee impeachment hearings, argue that an inquiry into impeachment has already begun. An inexorable confrontation between the House and the president has been set in motion.
I need to get the words “Chris Cillizza is always wrong” tattooed somewhere on my body. Maybe somewhere really sensitive, so I don’t forget. He is always wrong. I remember reading the original article (no, I am not going to link to Cillizza), and should have taken heart then.
Goldberg continues.
Perhaps even more significant than the growing number of calls for impeachment is a lawsuit filed by the Judiciary Committee on Friday. The filing, demanding access to grand jury material from the Mueller investigation, says that the committee “is conducting an investigation to determine whether to recommend articles of impeachment.” In other words, the Judiciary Committee, which would oversee any potential impeachment, announced, with surprisingly little fanfare, that an impeachment inquiry is already underway.
That seems to be quite different from “a bust.” Now if only someone could tell Nancy to get out of the way.