Why Mueller’s Testimony Matters

Jonathan Bernstein: “Mueller’s testimony is important because he’ll be explaining exactly what his investigation found, and that’s newsworthy in itself. The president has been saying that the probe exonerated him; we’ll find out now whether that’s correct, or whether – as most people who’ve read Mueller’s report have concluded – it was actually devastating for Trump. It’s up to committee Democrats to make that story compelling enough that the media will portray it accurately.”

“There’s one other thing I worry about here. It’s a post-Watergate habit – in the press and in the wider political world – of treating presidential misbehavior as either worthy of impeachment or not. It leads to an irrational situation where stories that uncover considerable malfeasance aren’t treated as a big deal unless they’re likely to end in the president’s ouster. I think that happened with Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush, and it’s happening on multiple levels with Trump – whether it’s Russia, emoluments, abuses of power, or obstruction of justice. That is, the paradigmatic story of a Washington scandal is one that ends with the president getting into the helicopter and leaving the White House, and without that ending the political world doesn’t know quite how to tell the story. That’s an advantage for presidents that we shouldn’t be giving them – and one that Trump, deliberately or not, is exploiting.”