“We want to be productive and responsible, and show the American people what they should have learned two years ago: how responsible people investigate an attack on their country,” Democratic Representative Eric Swalwell of California, who sits on the House Intelligence Committee, told me. “If there are gaps that exist in the investigation, then we should fill them in. We don’t want to focus on the politics of it, but this isn’t going to be a dancing-in-the-end-zone investigation.”

Democratic Representative Jim Himes of Connecticut largely echoed Swalwell. Democrats will have to determine whether there were any holes that Mueller didn’t cover because they were outside his purview, he told me, and take it from there. “If Mueller’s probe didn’t examine areas where there could have been significant areas of Russian meddling, then of course we will do that,” Himes said. But he also called for a return to good-faith collaboration. “Nunes issued subpoena after subpoena without consulting the ranking member,” Himes said. “We will need to be the adult in the room,” he added. “We want to imbue the committee with a culture of cooperation.”

Representative Chris Stewart, a Republican from Utah who serves on the committee, remained a skeptic. “We were a bipartisan committee until President Trump was elected,” he said. “At that point it became political, with the Democrats reacting to Trump. Based on what I’ve seen, I’m not very optimistic that they will change as long as he is our president.”

Indeed, some Democrats don’t find bipartisanship an appealing strategy. Fighting dirty and breaking with norms as the Republicans have, they claim, is the only way to create a lasting political realignment. “We must be a party that fights fire with fire,” the attorney Michael Avenatti, who is weighing a potential presidential run in 2020, told an excited crowd in Iowa over the summer. “When they go low, I say hit back harder.” That impulse isn’t limited to political outsiders: Former Attorney General Eric Holder, a leading Democratic voice, explicitly rejected Michelle Obama’s “When they go low, we go high” mantra in a speech last week. “When they go low, we kick ’em,” Holder said. “That’s what this new Democratic Party is about.”

For now, however, Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee are banking on the idea that voters don’t want a prolonged investigation that could provoke more partisan infighting either on their committee or in Congress more broadly. “I do worry that people are chomping at the bit for the investigations, but we’re a little out of practice on the legislation side of things,” Himes said. “If we screw this up, theres a chance in 2020 that voters say, ‘These guys are as bad as Trump.’’’

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