Editorials of The Times

The back-to-back appearances before congressional committees on Wednesday by Robert Mueller, the former special counsel, are being hyped like the Super Bowl. Many critics of President Donald Trump are hoping the event — nationally televised and slated to run roughly five hours — will be a turning point that will not only reveal Trump to be unfit for office but also guarantee his political downfall, if not via impeachment then by a crushing defeat in 2020.

They shouldn’t hold their breath. Mueller’s appearance is unlikely to produce any shocking revelations, no matter how clever or aggressive lawmakers’ questioning.

This does not mean the hearings are without merit. Far from it. Despite all the political heat surrounding the Russia investigation, most Americans will never read the Mueller report. Many have only a vague sense of what it says — or, worse still, their perception of it is inaccurate, thanks to the efforts of Trump and his defenders to distract from and distort the findings.

Even if Mueller refuses to say anything beyond the contents of his report — as is expected — his televised testimony can serve as a valuable explainer and a much-needed corrective. As goes the analogy making its way around political circles: People aren’t reading the book, but they will watch the movie.

Aware of the political risks of overpromising, House Democrats have stressed that they are not looking for any new bombshells from Mueller. Rather, they want him to illuminate some of the most damning bits of his report.

“It’s a pretty dry, prosecutorial work product,” Rep. Adam Schiff of California, the head of the House Intelligence Committee, said of the Mueller report in a Sunday interview. “We want Bob Mueller to bring it to life.”

This calls for considerable finesse. Democrats must press Mueller to be clear and forthcoming, without looking as if they are badgering him, piling on or pressing him to draw conclusions not supported by the evidence.

To maximize efficiency, Democrats on the two committees have divvied up the lines of inquiry. The Judiciary Committee, which has three hours to question Mueller, will focus on possible obstruction of justice by the president and those in his circle, while the Intelligence Committee, which has two hours, will dig into Trump associates’ interactions with Russia.

Among the bigger-picture questions Democrats will pursue are why Mueller did not insist on an interview with the president as part of his investigation and whether Trump’s actions would merit indictment if he were not president of the United States.

More specifically, Judiciary Committee members will press Mueller to expand on a handful of the dozen or so episodes of potential obstruction cited in his report — including Trump ordering Don McGahn, the White House counsel at the time, to fire Mueller, then later instructing McGahn to deny any such effort. The Trump administration has blocked McGahn himself, along with many others named in the report, from testifying before Congress.

Complicating matters, Mueller is seen as, if not a hostile witness, at least a grudging one. In his brief public statement on his report in May, he all but begged Congress not to force him to testify and warned that, if called, he would provide no information beyond the scope of his report. “The report is my testimony,” he asserted.

Lawmakers have held mock sessions, running through practice questions and fine-tuning them to be as pointed — and un-duckable — as possible. On “Fox News Sunday” this weekend, Jerrold Nadler, the Judiciary Committee chairman, offered an example of how this could go: “‘Look at Page 344, Paragraph 2. Please read it. Does that describe obstruction of justice? Did you find that the president did that?’”

That said, Democrats acknowledge that it will be a challenge to get anything new out of Mueller. As Schiff recently joked, “We have a far better chance of the love affair in North Korea working out” than of getting Mueller to say whether Trump should be indicted after leaving office.

With this in mind, Schiff noted that he and his fellow Democrats “have to decide how much of our time we want to spend fighting with him to discuss things outside the report.”

The House Democratic leadership has warned members against grandstanding.

Republicans also will be aiming to keep their team from overreaching and appearing too partisan in their attacks on Mueller, who is widely respected. It bears recalling that Rep. Devin Nunes of California, the top Republican on the Intelligence Committee, has been among Congress’ most fervent crusaders in trying to discredit the Mueller investigation. Rep. Louie Gohmert, R-Texas, who sits on the Judiciary Committee, put out a report titled “Mueller Unmasked” that claimed to expose “the disreputable, twisted history” of the special counsel.

Looking to stir up trouble, Trump has waded into the drama. On Monday, he tweeted out fresh insults of Mueller and warned that the hearings would end badly for Democrats. He even found a way to work in Hillary Clinton, claiming, bizarrely, that all of her people had been “given immunity.”

This is just the kind of nonsense that Trump has long used to try to undermine the special counsel’s work — and it’s why Mueller’s testimony, even if it reveals little new, could be so important to public understanding of these issues.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.