Kennedy, also a member of the Judiciary Committee, said on Fox News Sunday that the special counsel should not be fired before finishing his work. “I want him to report to the American people, give them the facts. The American people are smart enough to figure it out,” he said. Kennedy’s earlier statements had signaled greater impatience, as in May when he opined that it was “time to wrap things up.”

Beyond Graham and Kennedy, two legal heavyweights weighed in Sunday on the Mueller probe. Ken Starr, the special counsel whose legnthy investigation led to Bill Clinton’s impeachment, assessed the significance of Paul Manafort’s decision to cooperate with Mueller as part of a plea deal regarding the remaining charges against him. “It is very likely that Paul Manafort has indicated through his counsel and directly that he can provide very useful information to get to the bottom of what Bob Mueller and his team have been charged to do,” Starr said on ABC’s This Week. “So it is a very significant breakthrough.”

Starr, Bill Clinton’s unyielding prosecutor, defended the special counsel looking into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. He called Mueller “highly ethical” and “among the most rigorous.” He said a divided nation should want to get the facts out, “and I think Mueller is in a situation now to help us do that.”

Harvard law professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz, the civil libertarian turned Trump defender, said on NBC’s Meet the Press that Manafort’s cooperation agreement represented “a very bad day for the Trump administration. It's bad because he doesn't know what Manafort is saying. And he can’t count on Manafort saying only things that the special counsel already knows. And when you don't know what a cooperator is saying, then it’s a bad day for you because you're vulnerable and exposed.”

The plea agreement is unlikely to leave any topic off-limits, Dershowitz said, and the Trump Tower meeting with Donald Trump Jr. and a Russian promising dirt on Hillary Clinton might be “one of the first questions they’re going to ask him … in order to put pressure on Trump Jr., in order to put pressure on President Trump.”

Chris Christie—a federal prosecutor before he was New Jersey’s GOP governor or Trump’s spurned supporter—said the public doesn’t know whether Manafort might have information that brings investigators closer to the president: “Is Paul Manafort cooperating against lobbyists who were engaged in the Ukraine situation with him? Possibly. Is he cooperating against other people in the Trump campaign and what went on there? It could be both. We don’t know.”

Christie also described the special counsel as untouchable, despite the president’s obsession with the collusion investigation. “The Mueller investigation is kind of a red line for a lot of Republicans, not only in the House but, much more importantly, in the United States Senate.” (Ironically, or perhaps in response to one of the talk shows he watches religiously, Trump issued a mid-morning tweet blasting the “illegal Mueller Witch Hunt.”)