“It was genius. They had a time advantage that no one else was going to have, and they capitalized on it,” one Democratic strategist told me, who like others interviewed for this story, spoke on the condition of anonymity in order to speak freely. “Mueller is not going to change anything.”

That prediction was echoed by the half-dozen Democratic officials and strategists I spoke with yesterday. The sources pointed to two days this spring as the most trenchant obstacles to shifting public opinion on Mueller’s findings. On March 24, Barr issued his four-page summary that there was insufficient evidence to charge Trump or his staff for colluding with the Russian government or obstructing justice. And on April 18, he held a televised press conference to reiterate that summary hours before the release of the report. “It doesn’t matter how many times it’s been refuted,” a Democratic-presidential-campaign official told me. “What matters is that first interpretation of ‘No collusion, no obstruction,’ and people have kind of tuned out since.”

Indeed, it was not so much what Barr said those days as it was that he was the first to say it. In the Trump era, most stories have a day- or even an hour-long shelf life, meaning the immediate spin on the most crucial of events is often the one most likely to stick. Mueller wrote that he could not establish evidence of conspiracy or collusion, and could not reach a decision on the matter of obstruction, instead laying out instances in which Trump and his staff appeared to try to hamper the investigation. (Some have interpreted this to mean Mueller was punting the matter to Congress.) But as the Democratic-campaign official told me, it was futile to expect people to parse Mueller’s actual findings once the frenzy around Barr’s interpretation had passed. Ultimately, the source said, it was “a press conference” with a tidy conclusion “versus a 400-plus-page legal document that required much more explanation.”

“It was a great piece of communications work on Barr’s part,” a former White House official told me. “Even if a lot of the coverage was critical, what mattered was that it was ad nauseam, and that Barr’s message and sound bites got out.”

Read: The dirty secret of Mueller’s testimony? Voters might not care.

“In terms of playing into the conservative echo chamber, it immediately gave them a lot of content to work with,” the former official said, pointing to outlets such as Fox News, Breitbart News, and the Daily Caller. “A lot of the job in Trumpworld is just giving our allies content to work with.”

On Monday, Representative Ro Khanna of California put it bluntly when he told Axios that the “success” of Mueller’s testimony “will be in the TV ratings.”

“The more Americans that watch,” he said, “the more successful it is.” It was an admission that Democrats don’t necessarily expect Mueller to make news, that the metric of a good hearing will not be whether the committee members themselves learn something new. Rather, they expect Mueller to say what he’s always said. The hope is that this time, more people will hear him.