A less strident Speaker Pelosi said...

"A day in which a former Special Counsel affirmed in public what the Mueller Report put forth. It is a crossing of a threshold in terms of the public awareness of what happened and how it conforms to the law or not," declared Speaker Nancy Pelosi. During a livestreamed 27 minute press conference following nearly seven hours of testimony, she sounded more willing to entertain the possibility that the House would eventually proceed with impeachment of Donald Trump.

A brief excerpt (less than a minute) is available in the embedded tweet (click the pic.twitter.com link) where the Speaker sounds much less strident than she has been characterized in media regarding impeachment lately.

Special Counsel Mueller’s testimony raises serious concerns about the national security implications of this President’s actions – or more often inaction – with regards to Russia. pic.twitter.com/SW8g8p6pUz

— Nancy Pelosi (@SpeakerPelosi) July 25, 2019

From Speaker.gov, here's what she said in that excerpt,

So, as we go to questions, I just want to say that I think: I do believe what we saw today was a very strong manifestation and, in fact, some would even say an indictment of this Administration’s cone of silence and their cover-up.

This is only – this is about our – the oath we take to protect and defend the Constitution. But, some of the actions that the Administration may have taken, we’ll see through our investigation, may have jeopardized our national security by strengthening Russia’s hand in interfering in our elections, undermining democracy, not only in our country, but in other countries as well, upsetting our pre-eminence as a democracy in the world.

This is very serious. Today was very important.

Here's the entire conference,



Of course, there are still naysayers who claim Robert Mueller performed poorly. But what did those people expect him of him?

He's a prosecutor, not a politician.

Dan Friedman, writing for Mother Jones did a fine job of distilling the important points.

Robert Mueller, whose reputation reached mythic proportions amid his nearly two years of silence as special counsel, seemed notably human during roughly seven hours of testimony on Wednesday. He struggled to hear lawmakers’ questions, stumbled at times over his words, and repeatedly ducked queries by referring back to his 450-page report. But while Mueller may have disappointed as a performer, Democrats on the House Judiciary and Intelligence Committees were surprisingly disciplined. And with an assist from some epically inept questioning by Republicans, the lawmakers led Mueller through a withering portrayal of President Donald Trump.

Freed of the brain-dead debate over whether or not Trump “colluded” with Russia, Democrats used the hearing to highlight what Mueller had said Trump and his cohorts clearly did do: Seek to benefit from Russia illegal actions, lie extensively about it, and then scramble to block investigations into those actions. Republicans used their questions largely to pursue far-right hobbyhorses—opposition research firm Fusion GPS remains a favorite—and to attack Mueller for writing a report at all. But they barely bothered to challenge the basic outline of events that emerged in the two hearings.

Trump and his presidential campaign “knew that a foreign power was intervening in our election and welcomed it, built Russian meddling into their strategy, and used it,” House Intelligence Committee Chair Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) said in opening remarks during the second hearing held Wednesday, summarizing Mueller’s report. (Mueller’s report says that the Trump campaign “expected it would benefit electorally from information stolen and released through Russian efforts.”) Schiff said this conduct, legal or not, showed “disloyalty to country.” Mueller supported these claims.

Time and again Mueller retreated behind a lawyerly formalism. But time and again Democrats made the most of it, winning terse assent from him as they laid out the damning case he’d built against Trump. Mueller confirmed the report’s description of the famous June 2016 Trump Tower meeting, in which Donald Trump Jr. eagerly sought what he expected was Russian government-furnished dirt on Hillary Clinton. Mueller agreed that the the report says a mysterious Maltese professor, Joseph Mifsud, told George Papadopoulos, a campaign foreign policy aide, that the Russians had obtained a trove of Democratic emails and hoped to release them anonymously to help Trump’s campaign. GOP members on Tuesday echoed a theory pushed by Papadopoulos, who pleaded guilty in 2017 to lying to the FBI, that Mifsud was really a Western agent, working to ensnare the Trump campaign in a phony scheme. None of the questioners explained how Mifsud, if he was not working for Russian intelligence, knew that the Russians had stolen Democratic emails and correctly predicted how they planned to release them.

During the Intelligence Committee hearing Wednesday afternoon, Schiff asked Mueller if the Trump campaigns had built a messaging strategy around the release of hacked Democratic emails by WikiLeaks.

“Generally that’s true,” Mueller said.

“And then they lied to cover it up?” Schiff asked.

“Generally that’s true,” Mueller said again.

Mueller exceeded Democratic hopes when Rep. Mike Quigley (D-Ill.) asked him to weigh in on Trump’s praise of WikiLeaks during the campaign. “Problematic is an understatement, in terms of what it displays, in terms of giving some hope or some boost to what is and should be illegal activity,” Mueller said. In this statement, Mueller offered a personal assessment that went beyond the measured tones of his report. Minutes later, Schiff asked if knowingly accepting foreign assistance during a presidential campaign was an “unethical thing to do.” Mueller agreed, adding, “And a crime.”

Friedman goes on to include several other specific instances where Mueller directly contradicts what Trump has claimed in trying to further con the American electorate.

In my view, the testimony validates what Trump said when he first learned of Mueller's appointment as Special Counsel.