Robert Mueller: Trump’s Worst Nightmare
When once a Republic is corrupted, there is no possibility of remedying any of the growing evils but by removing the corruption and restoring its lost principles; every other correction is either useless or a new evil.
—THOMAS JEFFERSON
ON MAY 19, 2017, DEPUTY ATTORNEY GENERAL ROD Rosenstein, without consulting with White House lawyers or President Donald Trump, named former FBI director Robert Mueller as the special counsel to take over the investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election.
Mueller’s appointment changed everything. The former FBI head was a no-nonsense prosecutor with a stellar reputation for going after the bad guys regardless of politics or favor. As House Democrats would later find out in July of 2019, Mueller was not a telegenic personality for nationally televised hearings, but for the special counsel’s job that shouldn’t matter. Mueller was a thorough and impartial prosecutor.
Rosenstein needed to salvage his reputation. When James Comey was fired as FBI director, Rosenstein wrote a letter in which he covered for Trump by saying that Comey should be fired over his poor handling of Hillary Clinton’s emails, even though Rosenstein knew that the Russia investigation was the real reason Trump was firing Comey. That was wrong, but Rosenstein did the right thing by appointing Robert Mueller. Rosenstein continued to do the right thing by refusing to fire, or to curtail, Robert Mueller throughout the investigation. If we were to add a third “tragic figure” to our discussion in the previous chapter, Rod Rosenstein would be it.
According to Rosenstein’s order naming Mueller to the job, Mueller was authorized to investigate “any links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of Donald J. Trump” as well as other matters that “may arise directly from the investigation.” Those matters included Trump’s finances, associates, and family members, insofar as they were connected with the Russians.
Said Pat Buchanan, a former Republican presidential candidate, “A debilitating and potentially dangerous time for President Trump has now begun, courtesy of his deputy attorney general.”
Trump, in an interview with Fox News, suggested that the investigation now headed by Mueller was political, that the Democrats were behind it. That Mueller had been a lifelong Republican didn’t seem to enter into Trump’s thinking. Trump said he was upset about the appointment because “well, he’s very, very good friends with Comey, which is very bothersome. I can say that the people that have been hired are all Hillary Clinton supporters, some of them working for Hillary Clinton.
“I mean, the whole thing is ridiculous if you want to know the truth.”
Trump later warned that if Mueller’s investigation looked into the personal finances of the Trump family, “it will cross a line.”
He added, “I think that’s a violation. Look, this is about Russia.”
Trump also got in a few licks against Rosenstein, who had been a federal prosecutor in Baltimore.
“There are very few Republicans in Baltimore, if any,” said Trump, who then went after Comey, accusing him of lying about him in front of Congress. Trump was alluding to the meeting he and Comey had during which Comey showed him the Steele dossier. Comey said he had showed it to Trump before the press saw it, as a way of preventing embarrassment to Trump. Trump, paranoid and defensive, accused Comey of using the document as leverage against him.
“When he brought it to me,” said Trump, “I said this is really made-up junk. I didn’t think about any of it. I just thought about, man, this is such a phony deal.”
It was only the second time the Justice Department named a special prosecutor using the rule Rosenstein invoked in his order. A law, the Special Counsel Act of 1999, had amended the federal code to replace provisions of the post-Watergate independent counsel statute (which had been allowed to expire) with provisions authorizing the attorney general to appoint a special counsel. That year Attorney General Janet Reno appointed John Danforth, a former Republican senator from Missouri, to investigate the federal raid on the compound in Waco, Texas, that killed seventy-six members of the Branch Davidian cult. Robert Mueller in 2017 was the next special counsel appointment.
Sadly, the Special Counsel Act of 1999 was much inferior to the post-Watergate independent counsel law that had preceded it because that earlier law prevented the president, or the attorney general, from firing the special prosecutor. Congress had not wanted this to happen again after President Nixon had fired Archibald Cox in the Saturday Night Massacre of 1973, so Congress created the office of special counsel and put the special prosecutor under the direction of a three-judge panel of the US Court of Appeals.
But, as we related earlier, special prosecutor and former federal judge Ken Starr, “supervised” by his former judicial colleagues on the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, was widely believed to have abused his authority in investigating President Clinton, ultimately investigating White House sex instead of the Whitewater land deal. Congress in 1999 ditched the post-Watergate law and put the special counsel back under the authority of the attorney general. This meant Robert Mueller in 2017 would be in exactly the same place that his predecessor Archibald Cox had been forty-four years earlier. What happened to Archibald Cox in October 1973 could at any moment happen to Robert Mueller.
Government ethics commentators, including—ironically—former Nixon White House counsel John Dean, made weekly, and sometimes daily, appearances on cable news every time there was a threat—of which there were many—by Donald Trump to fire Robert Mueller.
It’s worth noting that Robert Mueller and Donald Trump, born two years apart, had somewhat similar upbringings. Mueller was born in Manhattan in 1944, but his family moved to Princeton, New Jersey, where his father, Robert Mueller II, worked for DuPont after serving as a navy officer captaining a submarine chaser during World War II. Mueller’s father insisted that Robert and his five younger sisters live by a strict moral code.
“A lie was the worst sin,” said Mueller. “The one thing you didn’t do was to give anything less than the truth to my mother and father.” Mueller was enrolled in the Princeton Country Day School, until his family moved to Philadelphia. He then attended St. Paul’s School in Concord, New Hampshire (former Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox had also attended St. Paul’s in the 1930s), during much of the same time that Trump attended the decidedly less academic New York Military Academy. Mueller was the captain of St. Paul’s soccer, lacrosse, and hockey teams, and in hockey he played on the same team with future secretary of state John Kerry.
One of Mueller’s St. Paul’s classmates, Maxwell King, who would go on to become an editor at the Philadelphia Enquirer, spoke about the respect the other boys had for Mueller. One day Mueller was at the Tuck, a snack shop at the school, and another student made a snide comment about a boy who wasn’t there to defend himself.
“I don’t want to hear that,” Mueller told him.
“I mean,” said King, “we all said disparaging things about each other face-to-face. But saying something about someone who wasn’t there was something that Bob was uncomfortable with, and he let it be known and just walked out.”
Trump went to the University of Pennsylvania, while Mueller followed in his father’s footsteps and attended Princeton University, graduating in 1966. At Princeton, Mueller became close friends with David Hackett, who was a year ahead of him. Hackett had joined the Marines version of ROTC, training during the summertime. Mueller and Hackett played together on the lacrosse team, and Hackett became a role model to Mueller. When Hackett graduated in 1965, he joined the Marines, excelled at officer candidates’ school, and went to Vietnam. Mueller vowed to join him when he graduated the coming year, but in April 1967, Hackett was killed by a sniper after an ambush by North Vietnamese troops.
Hackett’s death steeled Mueller’s resolve to join the Marines after graduation, but a knee injury from his years playing lacrosse and hockey at St. Paul’s made him ineligible. He was told he would have to heal before he could enlist. Robert Mueller went to a doctor to get healed so he could serve his country, not to get diagnosed with an ailment so he could avoid the draft. Waiting to be healed, he married Ann Standish and enrolled at New York University to earn a master’s degree in international relations.
When his knee finally healed, and military doctors gave him a clean bill of health, Mueller signed up for Officer Candidate School in Quantico, Virginia. This was about the same time Donald Trump was seeing his foot doctor (also a tenant of Fred Trump), who would diagnose his infamous “bone spurs” and help him avoid the draft.
Mueller shone at Officer Candidate School. When Mueller graduated OCS and went on to US Army Ranger School, Trump graduated from Penn and began working for his father’s real estate company.
While Mueller was at Ranger School, he went on maneuvers for two days, with only two hours sleep and one meal a day. He then went to Airborne School, known as Jump School, where he learned to parachute out of a plane.
After landing in Okinawa in the fall of 1968, Mueller flew to the Dong Ha Combat Base near the DMZ. Mueller was assigned to H Company, referred to as Hotel Company, a famed Second Battalion infantry unit that had been fighting nonstop since the start of the war. Mueller was twenty-four years old when as a lieutenant he took over as one of ten new officers assigned to the forty-man unit.
His men, mostly from rural America with little education past high school, were wary of a platoon leader who had gone to an elite boarding school and Ivy League college. Quickly the men saw that Mueller was no snot-nosed elite. He was relentlessly curious about his job, asking questions of the veterans under him about soldiering on patrol in Vietnam’s dense jungle.
It didn’t take long for Mueller to earn his men’s trust and respect.
In early December 1968, he and his company were ordered to retake a hill called Mutter’s Ridge. When Fox Company was attacked by machine-gun fire, Mueller and his Hotel Company were on a neighboring hill. Mueller called for his men to go to Fox Company’s rescue. It took them hours to go down a hill and up a ridge as they advanced through vegetation so thick the men needed machetes to cut through it. Once the company reached the top of the ridge, Mueller ordered everyone into battle.
The North Vietnamese sprayed them with machine-gun fire. Mueller stayed calm, positioning his fighters and calling in air cover. The battle went on for hours. Deaths mounted. At one point, Mueller dropped back to try to stem the bleeding of one of his men who had been shot. Eventually the North Vietnamese withdrew.
Mueller would be awarded a Bronze Star. His commendation read: “Second Lieutenant Mueller’s courage, aggressive initiative and unwavering devotion to duty at great personal risk were instrumental in the defeat of the enemy force and were in keeping with the highest traditions of the Marine Corps and the United States Naval Service.”
All told, thirteen of his men died and thirty-one were wounded in the battle of Mutter’s Ridge. Mueller said his experience at Mutter’s Ridge made everything that came afterward seem less stressful and dangerous.
Mueller always kept his composure.
Men continued to die. On April 10, 1969, soldiers from the Third Platoon were attacked while on patrol. There was an intense firefight, and when Mueller was hit, he was so focused that he didn’t realize a bullet from an AK-47 had passed through his thigh.
He received a Navy Commendation medal as a result. His combat days ended when he was airlifted to a field hospital near Dong Ha. After three weeks of recovery, Mueller was sent to serve at command headquarters. He was appointed aide-de-camp to Major General William K. Jones, the head of the Third Marine Division.
From there, he worked at the Marine barracks near the Pentagon. He was admitted to the University of Virginia Law School.
Said Mueller years later, “I consider myself exceptionally lucky to have made it out of Vietnam. There were many—many—who did not. And perhaps because I did survive Vietnam, I have always felt compelled to contribute.”
Mueller earned his JD in 1973. His first job was as a litigator at the law firm of Pillsbury, Madison & Sutro in San Francisco. He then became an assistant US attorney for the District of Northern California. He was promoted to chief of the criminal division in 1981. The next year he moved to Boston to work as an assistant US attorney for the District of Massachusetts. He worked on cases concerned with international money laundering, corruption, financial fraud, narcotics, and terrorism. In 1986 he was the district’s acting US attorney, and after a year he joined the private law firm of Hill & Barlow.
In 1989 he returned to government work, joining the US Department of Justice as assistant to Attorney General Dick Thornburgh in the George H. W. Bush administration. He was also the acting deputy attorney general. He led the prosecution of Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega; was the lead in the criminal case against the man accused of blowing up an airplane over Lockerbie, Scotland; and in his role as acting deputy attorney general, he formed a unit dedicated to cybersecurity.
Mueller returned to private practice in 1993, joining Hale and Dorr (later WilmerHale), a firm specializing in white-collar crime. In 1995 he went back to the public sector and joined the US attorney’s office for the District of Columbia, where he soon rose to the post of senior litigator of the homicide division. From 1998 to 2001 he was the US attorney for the Northern District of California.
On July 5, 2001, President George W. Bush nominated Mueller to be the director of the FBI, replacing outgoing director Louis Freeh.
Mueller became the sixth director of the FBI on September 4, 2001, just a week before the terrorist attacks that would shape his FBI tenure.
Mueller was critical of the work done by the FBI prior to the attacks. Tips to field offices had not been communicated to the top brass, and Mueller made it his mission to reorganize the bureau, changing it into a high-tech global organization designed to head off terror threats, including cyberattacks. Some FBI veterans chafed at the change, but Mueller persisted in his view that cybersecurity would become the most important area of protection for this country.
For the next five years, Mueller’s FBI was relatively incident free, but then in 2004, the Bush administration tried to make an end run around acting attorney general James Comey to extend a program that allowed for domestic spying without warrants. This Patriot Act program had been determined to be illegal by Justice Department lawyers.
White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales and President Bush’s chief of staff, Andrew Card Jr., drove to the hospital where John Ashcroft, the attorney general, was lying in a bed, weak and unable to carry out his duties, with the intent of getting Ashcroft to sign an order approving the program.
With Comey looking on, Ashcroft refused to sign. Gonzales and Card left in a huff.
“I was angry,” said Comey. “I thought I had just witnessed an effort to take advantage of a very sick man, who did not have the powers of the attorney general because they had been transferred to me.”
The Bush administration decided to continue the warrantless wiretapping program anyway, which led to Comey, Mueller, and a half dozen other Justice Department officials threatening to resign unless the program was stopped. President Bush agreed to make changes.
Gonzales was called in front of the House Judiciary Committee, and he told the committee that Ashcroft “talked about the legal issues in a lucid form, as I’ve heard him talk about legal issues in the White House.”
Mueller, who had taken notes about the Ashcroft incident from his conversations with Comey, told the committee otherwise. Mueller said that according to Comey, Ashcroft was recovering from gallbladder surgery and was disoriented and “pretty bad off,” though he did speak with Gonzales and Card.
When the House Judiciary Committee asked to see Mueller’s notes about the visit to Ashcroft, Mueller left portions of his unredacted notes about the events before and after the hospital visit.
What Mueller made clear was that Vice President Dick Cheney was very much involved in the warrantless wiretapping program. Mueller’s notes showed Cheney’s presence at the various meetings discussing the program with Gonzales and Card. The final meeting on March 23, 2004, was also attended by Vice President Cheney.
Where others wanted to play cover-up, Mueller went back to what he had learned as a child—no matter what, don’t tell a lie. Mueller isn’t a dramatic witness in a congressional hearing (he certainly was a very undramatic—in some ways even boring—witness years later in his July 2019 testimony before the House Judiciary Committee). But Mueller sees his role, whether as a witness or as a prosecutor, to be sticking to the facts and telling the truth. He is not there to play politics.
When President Barack Obama took office in 2009, he praised Mueller for the fine job reorganizing the FBI and offered to extend his ten-year term by another two years. Mueller accepted. With only four months to go before leaving office, he was awakened at one thirty in the morning of April 15, 2013, with the news that one of the suspects in the Boston Marathon bombing was dying and the other was on the run. The bombers had killed five people and injured more than 260 along the route of the marathon.
The bombers were the Tsarnaev brothers, natives of Chechnya, and Mueller was told that two years earlier, the FBI had interviewed the older brother, wrongly determined he wasn’t a terrorist threat, and released him. Mueller made the information public even though he knew it would unleash a hail of criticism. Mueller could not tell a lie.
After serving longer as FBI director than anyone other than J. Edgar Hoover, Mueller rejoined his former firm of Hale and Dorr, now Wilmer-Hale. He handled some of the firm’s most important cases, including a review of the NFL’s punishment of Baltimore Ravens running back Ray Rice, who was caught on camera in a casino dragging his fiancée out of the elevator by her hair.
Roger Goodell, the commissioner of the NFL, had initially suspended Rice for two games, unleashing an outcry from women’s groups. When a second video appeared on TMZ showing Rice punching his fiancée, the Ravens immediately released Rice. Goodell then suspended Rice permanently.
Rice sued the NFL, and on appeal he was reinstated.
Mueller spent four months investigating the case, and in his report backed Goodell, saying the commissioner hadn’t seen the video before the public saw it. But Mueller did conclude that the NFL did not sufficiently address the problem of domestic abuse.
Lawrence J. Leigh, who worked with Bob Mueller years earlier when he was a US attorney in San Francisco, was not surprised when in 2017 Rod Rosenstein selected Mueller to be the special counsel in charge of the Russian investigation.
Leigh said that at first they weren’t close, that Mueller’s bona fides were in question when he came to work in the San Francisco area, the most liberal district in the country, because he was a Republican. But quickly Leigh became impressed by how Mueller ran things. He was thorough. He had high expectations of those working under him. He demanded excellence. He wanted his assistants to be the best.
Leigh was constantly impressed by the way his boss would scrutinize entire investigative case files before approving grand jury indictments. Leigh had written a sloppy appellate brief, and Mueller, a perfectionist, sent him for a writing refresher course.
Before Mueller came in, the office had experienced leaks to the press. Mueller quickly stopped assistants from talking to reporters. He ordered all press contacts to go through his press chief. The leaks stopped. Most importantly, Mueller was nonpartisan about everything, including hiring, prosecutions, and culture.
“I knew my close friends’ party affiliations, but I could not tell you which party most assistants favored—although we were all on a first-name basis,” wrote Leigh. “Although a Republican, he’d hire a talented Democrat over a mediocre Republican every time.”
When asked his opinion of Mueller, Leigh responded, “The best, simply the best.”
On October 31, 2017, someone used a congressional computer to alter the Wikipedia page of Special Counsel Robert Mueller. The page had read, “Mueller is of German, English, and Scottish descent.”
The anonymous gremlin changed it to “Mueller is Donald Trump’s worst nightmare.”