Former special counsel Robert Mueller, is sworn in before he testifies before the House Judiciary Committee hearing on his report on Russian election interference, on Capitol Hill, in Washington, Wednesday, July 24, 2019. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)

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Robert Mueller’s testimony is over and the verdict seems to be that so is any serious talk of impeachment.

I don’t know what Mueller expected…or even if he’s capable of expecting anything…but he faced a fired up and prepared Republican caucus that flayed him alive. He was obviously unfamiliar with his own report, he was evasive, he was non-responsive, he was detached…not in the aloof kind of way but in the senile kind of way. He claimed to not know about things that were not only covered in the report but which had been center of public discussion for months, such as the role of Fusion GPS and the nature of the contact between Joseph Mifsud and George Papadopoulos.

This is the consensus from the people who saw Mueller’s testimony as the way of jump-starting an investigation that had died.

Much as I hate to say it, this morning’s hearing was a disaster. Far from breathing life into his damning report, the tired Robert Mueller sucked the life out of it. The effort to save democracy and the rule of law from this lawless president has been set back, not advanced. — Laurence Tribe (@tribelaw) July 24, 2019

MSNBC’s Jeremy Bash complains Mueller “sucked the life out” of report, “set back” efforts to impeachhttps://t.co/q6DWuqvSf1 pic.twitter.com/xxVBG5PKXt — RNC Research (@RNCResearch) July 24, 2019

"Impeachment's over," @TerryMoran says amid Robert Mueller's long-awaited congressional testimony. Democrats "needed more fuel for any kind of impeachment effort." https://t.co/CXfCvYspNV #MuellerHearings pic.twitter.com/txO9YDjIa8 — ABC News (@ABC) July 24, 2019

There are still true believers out there who were quoting Ted Lieu

Ted Lieu exists to undermine the pernicious stereotype that Asian people are really smart. — CamperWatcher27 (@CamperWatcher27) July 24, 2019

but Lieu is an idiot and everyone knows that.

Democrats who are concerned about 2020, that that would be the nearly all the Democrats who created Nancy Pelosi’s majority in 2018, aren’t going to want to vote to start impeachment proceedings based on the mutterings of a man who seems one step away from sitting in a corner and drooling.

Ironically, the upside to this farcical performance is also its downside. On some level it was always hard to shake the notion that President Trump was trying to goad the Democrats into beginning impeachment and having that in the background as the nation was making its choice for president and for who would represent them in Congress.

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