Robert Mueller’s Testimony and the Garbled Language of Politics

The words the Democrats and the Republicans used may have been the same, but their meanings were not.

There are questions worth exploring about the Steele dossier, having to do with, say, the transparency of campaign spending. But they are not the questions congressional Republicans are asking. As in their prolonged hearings into the attack on an American diplomatic compound in Benghazi, they are likely to twist any useful threads into an unedifying tangle. This time, though, the Republicans are engaging in an even more dangerous delusion. The pretense is that, as long as they keep talking about mysterious professors and British spies, they aren’t ignoring the threat that Russia and other foreign powers continue to pose to the integrity of American elections. Hillary Clinton is, once again, their excuse for inaction.

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