Editorials of The Times

If you were searching for a metaphor for the withering ideal of American public service — the one that puts country before party, truth before “narrative” or “brand” — it’d be hard to do better than the painful spectacle of Robert Mueller trying, in his halting voice, to sound the alarm Wednesday about Russian subversion of American democracy.

It’s the same alarm that virtually every member of America’s intelligence and law enforcement communities has been ringing for the past three years: Russia attacked our elections in 2016 and is intensifying its efforts today. “It wasn’t a single attempt,” Mueller said. “They’re doing it as we sit here.”

Appearing before two congressional committees rife with politicians intent on using him to fill out their own versions of reality, Mueller seemed frail and at times even confused. But he successfully rebuffed nearly all efforts to draw him beyond the boundaries of evidence established in the report he delivered about Russian interference in the 2016 elections. The exceptions came when representatives actually showed an interest in Russian meddling and Donald Trump’s embrace of it. “I hope this is not the new normal,” Mueller said at one point, in response to a question about whether American candidates might now feel free to welcome foreign influence, “but I fear it is.”

The “sweeping and systemic” nature of that interference was the most unequivocal finding of Mueller’s 448-page report, although just as disturbing was the report’s meticulous recounting of the ways the Trump campaign accepted and even encouraged it.

A few of the more egregious examples: Throughout 2016, the report found, Paul Manafort, Trump’s campaign chairman, gave private polling information to Russian agents and shared campaign strategy with them; in June 2016, Donald Trump Jr., the president’s son, arranged a meeting with Russians at Trump Tower in the expectation of getting “dirt” on the Hillary Clinton campaign; on July 27 of that year, candidate Trump publicly called on the Russians to hack Clinton’s emails, five hours before they attempted to do just that; the campaign then devised its strategy and created its messages around WikiLeaks’s releases of stolen files from the Democratic National Committee.

Nearly all Republicans on both committees failed even to acknowledge the threat posed by Russia and other countries. With significant exceptions like Will Hurd, representative of Texas, Republican lawmakers seemed much more focused on protecting Trump and deflecting any concerns about electoral security by impugning Mueller’s integrity, attacking the origins of an investigation that he did not initiate, and — in one particularly disgraceful jab by Guy Reschenthaler of Pennsylvania — accusing his investigative process of being “un-American.”

In another era — the time Mueller seemed to hail from — an attack by a foreign government to divide Americans and upend their elections might have produced a different response. It might have drawn legislators together to develop a bipartisan initiative to make clear, as Adam Schiff, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, put it, “that we, the people — not some foreign power that wishes us ill — we decide who shall govern us.”

Yet for all the bluster and misdirection — about Fusion GPS, the Steele dossier, the texts of Peter Strzok and Lisa Page — the Republicans offered little pushback against Mueller’s key revelations.

Of course Trump and his senior campaign staffers and associates didn’t worry that what they were doing was wrong. The 2016 campaign was providing too many opportunities to pad their bank accounts. From Manafort’s efforts to leverage his position to extract himself from a multimillion-dollar debt to Trump’s own attempts to build a giant hotel in Moscow, self-dealing permeated the Trump campaign. Remember, as late as weeks before the election, Trump and most of his top advisers thought he had no chance of winning. The real purpose of the campaign was to build up the Trump brand and be the “greatest infomercial in political history,” as Michael Cohen, Trump’s personal lawyer, phrased it.

Narrow self-interest explains Trump’s attitude toward the WikiLeaks releases, which he should have decried but instead praised as a “treasure trove.” When Mueller was asked to comment on Trump’s reaction, he again ventured a bit beyond his report and said, “Problematic is an understatement.”

Trump has pretty much had one rejoinder to the report’s revelations: “No collusion.” But as Mueller’s testimony made clear, that’s misleading. For one thing, collusion is a legally meaningless term in this context. The special counsel’s office was looking for evidence of criminal conspiracy, and its failure to find a sufficient amount to bring charges may have been due in part to the efforts of Trump campaign members and associates to cover their tracks or otherwise obstruct the investigation.

With regard to obstruction, Mueller found himself in an impossible position. A prosecutor’s job is to find the facts and decide whether to bring criminal charges. But while Mueller was obligated to do the first by the terms of his appointment, he was prohibited from doing the second by prevailing Justice Department policy, which says a sitting president may not be indicted. As a result, the report he produced exists in an unsettling limbo — documenting evidence that Trump may have committed federal crimes yet studiously refusing to take a position on whether he in fact did so.

Republican lawmakers expressed understandable frustration that Mueller had cast suspicion on Trump without formally charging him with anything. Particularly after all the talk of locking Clinton up during and after the 2016 campaign, it was good to hear them defend the presumption of innocence as a core American principle. Mueller’s unsatisfying response was, essentially: My hands are tied.

At least twice Mueller called for legislation to improve information-sharing and other coordination among intelligence agencies — an objective that was supposed to have been met with reforms after the Sept. 11 attacks.

But that kind of concerted legislative action seems unlikely. To this day, Trump refuses to acknowledge the seriousness of Russian intervention, and the Republican-controlled Senate is unwilling to consider legislation for enhanced election security — maybe because doing either could be seen as an admission that the election was tainted.

Conceding the obvious might seem like a small price to pay. But the president appears more concerned with nursing his ego than safeguarding American democracy — and that puts us all, Republicans, Democrats and independents, at risk.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.