We begin today’s roundup with Dana Milbank’s analysis of former White House counsel John Dean’s testimony before the House Judiciary Committee:
The current situation is worse than Watergate — not necessarily in the illegality (history will judge that), but in the way the political system handles the investigation.
During Dean’s first go-round, serious legislators put country before party and launched honest and sober investigations of Nixon’s misbehavior. But now, Republican lawmakers reflexively defend Trump’s impropriety and support his refusal to allow aides to testify before congressional inquiries.
Meanwhile, many Democrats, rather than following the Watergate model of lengthy investigation before impeachment, are clamoring for immediate impeachment proceedings. And then there’s Trump. Nixon, for all his faults, never declared that John Dean was a “sleazebag,” “loser” and a “rat.”
At The Atlantic, Russell Berman explains why the hearing didn’t have the effect Democrats thought it would:
If [the] hearing was a first step toward impeachment, it was a most tentative tiptoe. It was less a prelude to a constitutional confrontation than a law-school seminar, and an opportunity for Democrats to get a panel of expert witnesses to say what Mueller would not: that Trump’s conduct as described in the special counsel’s 448-page opus constituted obstruction of justice, and amounted to a crime. [...]
For Democrats, the best news of the day came not while Dean was testifying but hours earlier, when Nadler announced that he had secured an agreement with the Justice Department to obtain “important files” from Mueller’s investigation, fulfilling at least part of his request for the underlying evidence that the special counsel used to formulate his conclusions. As part of the deal, Nadler said he would put on hold future action to enforce a contempt citation against Attorney General William Barr for withholding the unredacted report.
That cache of files could prove useful for the increasing number of House Democrats who are looking to build an impeachment case against Trump—more useful, certainly, than today’s Judiciary Committee hearing.