I predicted that the Democrats hoped-for Mueller hearing bombshell would be a wet firecracker, and boy, was I right. But I never imagined that even a wet firecracker could somehow blow up in their faces.

The Dems on the Committees hoped that Mueller would help breathe new life into their groundless demands to impeach the President that went on life support after the Mueller Report came out. Instead, Wednesday’s hearings in effect pulled the plug and signed a “Do not resuscitate” order.

In fact, it was so sad, one could almost feel sorry for Mueller, looking at times as lost and bewildered as your grandpa at Comic Con – until you remember what his investigation put this nation through for over two years, and how his failure to declare it over when he knew it was groundless and letting it drag out past the 2018 election helped give us AOC and her ilk. There have been numerous comparisons to The Wizard of Oz, where the curtain is finally pulled back and the great and powerful Oz is revealed to be a befuddled old man, frantically pulling levers that generate smoke and illusions.

Did Mueller Even Read the Report?

Committee Republicans bore down on the report’s bias and questionable findings and sources. In between Mueller’s countless attempts to dodge questions, they managed to reveal that Mueller apparently exerted little control over his band of rabid anti-Trump partisans.  It’s now even more likely that notoriously unethical Hillary supporter Andrew Weissmann was really in charge. That he wasn’t even present for most of the interviews. That he claims not to know what Fusion GPS is (the political oppo research firm behind the “Russian dossier” that started his own investigation) or a number of other things that are in his own report. The GOP also got Mueller to acknowledge he was never obstructed in any way.

Speaking of “obstruction” — the last thin reed to which Democrats are clinging — Arizona Rep. Debbie Lesko pointed out that the second volume of the report, which concentrates on potential obstruction, cited as “sources” over 200 media stories, mostly by biased left-wing outlets such as the New York Times. She said there was nothing in it she couldn’t have gleaned from a $50-a-month cable subscription, but it cost the taxpayers $25 million.

Another great comment came from Texas Rep. Dan Crenshaw. He said the House was holding hearings about a report that’s already out and that everyone already read about a crime that never existed.

Mueller Corrects Democrats

For a brief moment, the Democrats thought they’d managed to score a point when Mueller contradicted his previous statements and said the reason he hadn’t indicted Trump was the Office of Legal Counsel’s longstanding precedent that a sitting President can’t be indicted. But at the start of the second half of his testimony, Mueller corrected himself, saying, “That is not the correct way to say it. As we say in the report and as I said at the opening, we did not reach a determination as to whether the President committed a crime.”

And that brings us to possibly the most important moment of the hearings. Texas Rep. John Ratcliffe, a former US Attorney, made the point that there is nothing in the law about an investigator being required to “exonerate” the subject of an investigation. Every American has the presumption of innocence, and if there’s not enough (or any) evidence of a crime, then that person remains “presumed innocent.”

Ratcliffe asked Mueller if he could name anyone else who had been held to the same standard as Trump, with a special counsel creating a cloud of suspicion of possible criminality just because he didn’t determine Trump’s innocence and “exonerate” him. In one of the most chilling, but revealing, comments of the day, Mueller replied, “I cannot but this is a unique situation.”

No, under the law, there are no “unique situations” that allow a prosecutor to deny a US citizen the basic right of presumption of innocence, or that allow prosecutors to suggest someone is guilty with no evidence just because they didn’t “prove him innocent.” As Ratcliffe put it so well, nobody is saying Trump should be above the law, but “he d*** sure should not be below the law.”

Beneath the Nation’s Dignity

This entire fiasco is below the law, and beneath the dignity of a great nation. For over two years, important issues have been ignored, friendships have been torn asunder, public discourse has been poisoned, suspicion of our elections has run riot, and $30 million of taxpayer money has been wasted on a biased, pointless, apparently rudderless, often lawless investigation into a crime that never happened, based on a hoax ginned up by sleaze merchants who were ignored by the prosecutors while they pursued the victims.

And all because Hillary Clinton and her supporters just couldn’t accept that the voters refused to ratify her lifelong belief that she had a divine right to be our ruler.

Mike Huckabee is the former governor of Arkansas and longtime conservative commentator on issues in culture and current events. A New York Times best-selling author, he hosts the weekly talk show Huckabee on TBN.

Originally published at MikeHuckabee.com. Reprinted with permission.