I wrote at Politico today about the Mueller testimony:

A lot of attention has been paid to Mueller’s underwhelming performance, which was panned even by Trump critics who had high hopes he could kick-start impeachment with boffo testimony.

This was a distorted way to look at Mueller’s role to begin with. It’s not the job of a special counsel, who under the regulations is supposed to act like a typical U.S. attorney, to give a dramatic, passionate, ratings-grabbing TV rendition of his work, so one side in a politically fraught controversy can regain momentum.

Rather than knocking anyone’s socks off, Mueller’s testimony raised the question whether the special counsel who had been puffed up by so many had really only been presiding over and lending his name to the investigation rather than actively running it.