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Mueller says he is "unable" to answer questions about how the FBI opened its Russia probe or the Steele dossier, because they are the subject of an open DOJ inspector general review. Those matters are presumably one of the GOP's main lines of questioning.
This is the paragraph immediately following the one that Rep. Collins suggested equates collusion to conspiracy in the colloquial sense. 
Mueller tells Rep. Roby that of the 500 or so interviews his office conducted, he attended "very few." Not particularly surprising, but notable to have that on the record now.
Rep. Jordan is now digging into Joseph Mifsud (and a lot of other characters). And if you, understandably because you're a normal human being with a life are like Mif-who?, here ya go. washingtonpost.com/politics/the-e…
Jordan asks Mueller why, if Mifsud lied to the FBI, he wasn't charged. He won't say, however, the report makes clear that because Papadopoulos had earlier lied to the FBI, it made it harder for them to know that Mifsud was lying.
Jordan also raises the question (which Mueller won't answer) if Mifsud is a "Western agent." We found no evidence of that, but that U.S. intelligence had identified Mifsud a potential Russian agent before he met Papadopoulos.
So far, Dem strategy is to get Mueller to read the report, which he's generally not doing but is answering yes/no. Republicans trying to portray Mueller as distant from the report, which itself is contradictory. Both sides getting SOME of what they want, I suspect.
Just to return briefly to Jordan on Mifsud and the origin story, he said, quite gleefully, that the "good news" is Barr is looking into this. Jordan clearly believes the origins are corrupt (he has said so many times), and seems to believe that Barr agrees with him.
Rep. Gaetz digging back into the Steele dossier and questioning whether it's Russian disinformation and some kind of set up to make it look like Russians were interacting with the Trump campaign. "That's beyond my purview," Mueller says again, and says it's up to DOJ to address.
The problem w/ this line of inquiry has always been that multiple investigations (not the Steele dossier) found evidence of interactions between the Trump campaign and Russia. Advocates of the poisoned tree/conspiracy theory tend to neglect that and hinge everything on Steele.
Dems trying to get Mueller to concur with their legal analysis are not only failing to get him to say yes, they're prompting to him to say he doesn't necessarily agree with them. This is risky questioning not always paying off.
Rep. Reschenthaler, a former JAG prosecutor, feeling emboldened to lecture Bob Mueller, a Marine and former US attorney and FBI director, on legal process shows you where we're at in this hearing right now.
In exchange w/ Rep. Armstrong, Mueller strongly defends the integrity of his team, says in 25 years he has never asked about a lawyer's political beliefs. Armstrong makes clear, that's not good enough for him.
Armstrong argues that if the shoe were on the other foot, so to speak, and Clinton were under investigation, it'd be Dems questioning whether an investigation was motivated by politics. That's also where we are right now.
This is also why Mueller hates testifying before Congress. washingtonpost.com/national-secur…
If you were an American who came to this hearing knowing little about Mueller, his investigation, or Russia's attacks, I'm not confident you'd leave much enlightened.
