After so much waiting—a hundred and twenty-four days, to be precise, since Robert Mueller’s report was delivered—perhaps it was bound to be a disappointment. Still, three hours after the former special counsel took the witness stand on Wednesday to testify about his investigation of President Trump and Russian interference in the 2016 election, the MSNBC anchor Brian Williams described it as a “disaster,” the White House press secretary, Stephanie Grisham, called the hearing an “epic embarrassment” for the Democrats, and the pro-Trump Drudge Report ripped the septuagenarian former F.B.I. director as “dazed and confused.” The President, who had said he wouldn’t watch Mueller’s testimony but clearly could not restrain himself, seemed gleeful. “I would like to thank the Democrats for holding this morning’s hearing,” he tweeted after a few hours. Finally, there was something that Trump-era Washington could agree on: Mueller had bombed.

Whatever their seemingly shared views about Mueller’s performance, Democrats and Republicans started the day with competing, non-intersecting versions of the Mueller investigation, and they ended the day in exactly the same place. The politics surrounding that investigation are toxic, divisive, and still divorced from a reality that should be awful for Trump: the President not only has been implicated in obstructing justice but has been brazenly lying about the conclusions of the investigation.

Trump has claimed “complete and total EXONERATION” by Mueller, and triumphantly went on even more in this vein after the hearing was over. There was no such vindication, of course. Wednesday’s hearing reinforced, and powerfully so, the Mueller report’s conclusions that Russia had, in fact, interfered in the U.S. election on Trump’s behalf, that the Trump team welcomed this intervention, and that Trump subsequently acted to impede the investigation of it. If the Democrats’ goal was to put on the record the facts that were already in the public record, they accomplished that. The chairman of the Judiciary Committee, Jerry Nadler, who ran the morning’s hearing, and the chairman of the Intelligence Committee, Adam Schiff, who ran the afternoon session, both gave lucid, powerful, and damning opening statements.

If only the hearing had ended there. But it didn’t. For hours, Mueller refused, more than a hundred times during the morning alone, to reply to even basic questions. He appeared unfamiliar with the material in a report that bears his name; at times, he seemed unable even to construct statements of any legal or investigative clarity at all. His comments were invariably grudging, cautious, defensive, and opaque. “It is not a witch hunt,” Mueller said of his investigation, responding to the dozens of times the President has declared his probe a “WITCH HUNT.” This was hardly a rousing defense of his office’s work—or, really, any defense at all. “The President was not exculpated for the acts he allegedly committed,” Mueller replied, when Nadler asked whether he had totally exonerated Trump, as the President has claimed. Even when invited by Representative Jackie Speier to tell the American people clearly and plainly what they should glean from the report, Mueller managed only a word salad. He merely defended the “integrity” of its findings and suggested that it should be a “flag to those of us who have some responsibility” not to “let this problem continue to linger,” an apparent reference to Russian election interference. Mueller seemed sharper and more alert in the afternoon, largely because the questioning centered more on what he plainly considers the outrage of Russian interference and less on the awkward questions surrounding the problematic behavior of the President of the United States with regard to that interference.

Watching this performance, Republicans chose to pile on against Mueller, a lifelong Republican they once hailed as a model of integrity but now treated as a hostile witness. They challenged Mueller’s legal interpretations, his writing of the report, his staff, and, in one case, the evidence regarding Russian intervention. They obsessed over the murky origins of the probe. One congressman even called Mueller’s report “un-American.” But they did not dispute the alleged examples of Trump’s obstruction; they studiously avoided them, except to point out that Mueller was never fired, even though Trump talked about it.

On Tuesday night, Laurence Tribe, the Harvard law professor who had been one of the President’s toughest critics and an outspoken proponent of impeachment, tweeted that he expected Mueller’s testimony to “shatter” the “mirage” of no collusion, no obstruction that has been Trump’s mantra since the report was released. By early Wednesday afternoon, Tribe recognized that it hadn’t happened. “Much as I hate to say it, this morning’s hearing was a disaster,” he wrote. “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.” Tribe felt better by the late afternoon, arguing that Mueller was issuing a “loud wakeup call” on Russian interference. But the damage was done.

The concerns about Mueller’s halting performance were not mere theatre criticism. He was unable to defend his report and its findings beyond simply referring lawmakers to the text, over and over again. In his effort not to be trapped by Democrats into suggesting that Trump should be impeached, Mueller did a disservice to his own work. He did not need to make new assertions of law or fact but merely explain in clear terms the conclusions he reached and why. There was not one moment when he did so.

For days before the hearing, the members of Congress who brought us Mueller’s testimony suggested that, because the American public (and many of its representatives) had largely failed to read the report, it would now be dramatized and dumbed down in video form. “We want Bob Mueller to bring it to life,” Schiff told “Face the Nation,” on Sunday. To say that didn’t happen would be an understatement of major proportions. “This was supposed to be the movie” that went along with the book, Williams said on MSNBC, during a break in the testimony. “Well, they’re not even left with that today.” It’s all a reminder of something I’ve long believed: the book is almost always better than the movie. History will very likely judge that to be the case with the Mueller report.