ANALYSIS/OPINION:

Robert Mueller is a very impressive man. Until he opens his mouth.

Or, perhaps, he is just a calcified, barnacle-crusted swamp creature long past his prime.

If that’s the case and Democrats forced him out of his retirement home to just play along with their silly partisan fantasies, then they should all be rounded up and arrested for elder abuse.

Either way, it’s no wonder why Mr. Mueller fought so hard against testifying publicly before Congress.

But there he was: in the bright lights on national television sputtering, bumbling and doddering about some report these people kept talking about. Again and again, Mr. Mueller would wander off topic and his mouth would wander off from the microphone. The lights flickered in his eyes as if there was a faulty connection.

Democrats, desperate for Mr. Mueller to be the blockbuster star they need to keep their partisan fantasies alive, ran after him like orderlies in an old folks home. They kept bringing him back to the microphone, propping him up and prompting him to repeat lines from the Mueller Report.

How confusing it must have been for Mr. Mueller to keep hearing these people go on and on and on about a report that somebody named after him.

Democrats and political journalists in Washington — not to repeat myself — for weeks have been yelling at stupid American voters that they are not reading enough of the Mueller Report. It is their Holy Bible and they have become a party of traveling preachers screaming and haranguing that everybody’s going to Hell because they’re not reading enough of the Good Word every day.

So I guess it was kind of a shock to realize that everybody in the congressional committee room had read the Mueller Report — except for Bob Mueller.

“Eh, do you have the citation, ma’am?” Mr. Mueller asked, flipping hopelessly through the report bearing his name. “And, eh, what portion of the page?”

Other times, the poor old man got fooled by words that were not in his report.

“Where are you reading from on that?” he inquired, bewildered, searching.

“I’m reading from my question,” Rep. F. James Sensenbrenner Jr., Wisconsin Republican, replied gently.

If this was supposed to be the movie version of the Mueller Report, it is a box office disaster. If anything, the movie is an even bigger flop than the book was.

Lucky for Mr. Mueller and his family, he had come to the one place in America where he was not the biggest buffoon in the room. In that department, Congress can give anybody a run for their money.

Disheveled Rep. Steve Cohen, Tennessee Democrat, struggled to prove that President Trump was angry at former Attorney General Jeff Sessions. This, of course, would prove, well, nothing.

But in Mr. Cohen’s weak mind, it would prove that Mr. Trump stole the 2016 election. After all, this is the same hack who told disgraced former FBI agent Peter Strzok that he deserved a Purple Heart for his efforts to steal the 2016 election away from Mr. Trump.

Anyway, he kept grilling poor Mr. Mueller to provide evidence that Mr. Trump was angry at Mr. Sessions. Mr. Mueller only doddered around painfully and failed to satisfy Mr. Cohen.

Just don’t anybody tell Mr. Cohen there is this thing called the internet and it has something called Twitter and if he wants to prove how mad Mr. Trump was at Mr. Sessions, it is all right there on Twitter. In Mr. Trump’s very own words.

Yet, still, it proves nothing.

At one point, Rep. Hank Johnson, Georgia Democrat, tried to steer Mr. Mueller back to the subject at hand. This is the same intellectual titan who once — and I am not making this up — once asked an admiral in the United States Navy if he was concerned that the weight of the naval base on Guam might cause the Pacific island to tip over and “capsize.”

“Uh,” the admiral replied, with a perfectly straight face. “We don’t anticipate that.”

Sure, it was a rough day for Mr. Mueller. But lucky for him, he was only up against members of Congress.

• Contact Charles Hurt at [email protected] or on Twitter @charleshurt.

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