Direct, demanding and imperfect
Though widely praised, Mueller proved capable of error at FBI
WASHINGTON — When he was named special counsel in May, Robert Mueller was hailed as the ideal lawman — deeply experienced, strait-laced and nonpartisan — to investigate whether President Donald Trump’s campaign had helped with Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election.
The accolades squared with Mueller’s valor as a Marine rifle platoon commander in Vietnam and his integrity as a federal prosecutor, a senior Justice Department official and FBI director from 2001 to 2013, the longest tenure since J. Edgar Hoover. He was praised by former courtroom allies and opponents, and by Democrats and Republicans in Congress.
But at 73, Mueller’s record also shows a man of fallible judgment who can be slow to alter his chosen course. At times, he has intimidated or provoked resentment among subordinates. And his tenacious yet linear approach to evaluating evidence led him to fumble the biggest U.S. terrorism investigation since 9/11.
Now, as he leads a sprawling investigation aimed at the White House, Mueller’s prosecutorial discretion looms over the Trump presidency. On Friday, Mueller’s probe touched the president’s inner circle for the first time as Trump’s former national security adviser, Michael Flynn, pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his contacts with a Russian ambassador and agreed to help investigators as they focus on other presidential aides. began life on an elite footing.
Raised in affluent suburbs west of Philadelphia, he attended the St. Paul’s School in New Hampshire (classmates included future Secretary of State John Kerry), before majoring in politics at Princeton. He joined the Marines after graduation and was awarded Navy and Marine Corps medals in Vietnam, where he was shot in the thigh. He graduated from the University of Virginia School of Law in 1973.
Bored by a stint at a white-shoe San Francisco law firm, the jut-jawed Mueller switched to the U.S. attorney’s office there in 1976.
Mueller also is remembered for a headline-grabbing case that ended in failure.
In 1979, the government lodged then-novel racketeering charges against 33 members of the Hells Angels motorcycle club. The indictments alleged bombings and murders as well as the manufacture and sale of illegal drugs.
The first trial, of 18 defendants, ended with only five convictions. All were overturned on appeal.
Mueller, who led the U.S. attorney’s special prosecutions unit, then took over the case. He dropped many of the charges, including against Ralph “Sonny” Barger, leader of the club’s Oakland chapter.
Mueller led a team of four prosecutors in court when the second trial, with 11 defendants, began in October 1980. But after four months, the jury said it was deadlocked, and the judge declared a mistrial. Mueller decided not to ask for a retrial.
Richard Mazer, a defense lawyer at both trials, said the government was unable to prove the Hells Angels was a racketeering enterprise. Key prosecution witnesses, he said, seemed unreliable — especially those granted immunity to testify despite having committed violent crimes themselves.
“They made a mess of it,” Mazer recalled. “It was an entirely snitch case.”
About a year after the case collapsed, a new U.S. attorney in San Francisco chose a prosecutor with more trial experience to head the office’s criminal division, a post that Mueller had held for a year.
Mueller transferred to the U.S. attorney’s office in Boston. He prosecuted financial fraud, terrorism and public corruption cases for six years and served as acting U.S. attorney from 1986 to 1987.
One case, involving a Soviet-bloc spy, gave Mueller an early window into U.S.Russia intrigues.
At the direction of the Justice Department’s internal security division, Mueller negotiated a plea agreement with an East German physicist named Alfred Zehle and his lawyer. In February 1985, Zehle admitted in court that he had conspired to deliver U.S. defense information to East German intelligence authorities.
Under the agreement, the judge sentenced Zehle only to the time he had served in jail after he was arrested at a scientific conference in Boston. Zehle, in turn, became a bargaining chip for a major spy swap.
“We ultimately got 25 of our people out, including their families,” in a trade for Zehle and several other Soviet-bloc spies, recalled a U.S. official who was involved with the negotiations.
As the Cold War ended, Mueller moved to “main Justice” in Washington. He easily won his first Senate confirmation after President George H.W. Bush appointed him assistant U.S. attorney general, responsible for the criminal division.
Mueller oversaw investigations of Panamanian leader Manuel Noriega, the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, and Gambino crime family boss John Gotti, among other highprofile cases. But his tendency to command, rather than inspire, again came into sharp relief.
“He doesn’t invite disagreement,” said a former prosecutor who served under Mueller. “He’s an order-giver.”
He could be harsh on subordinates — sparking resentment when he referred privately to reassigning career lawyers as “moving the furniture.” Mueller decided to try private practice again, joining Hale and Dorr as a partner in Washington, representing corporate clients.
After two years, he returned to government service — signing on as a homicide prosecutor in the District of Columbia. It was a time of mayhem in the nation’s capital, made worse by the scourge of crack cocaine.
Mueller began working with a “cold case” squad, composed of Metropolitan Police detectives and FBI agents, that sought to bring murderers to justice.
The squad sent applications for search warrants and subpoenas for Mueller’s review before seeking a judge’s approval. Unlike some prosecutors, Mueller “wouldn’t automatically give a signature,” recalled one of the investigators.
Building cases often entailed forging trust with victims, witnesses and suspects. Relating to both the sympathetic and the unsavory did not play to Mueller’s strengths.
“He was a gruff guy, and a lot of times, there wasn’t much warmth or ability to really build a bond or connect with a victim-witness,” said the same investigator. “There’s times when you’ve got to bond with the suspect to get what you need. His personality wasn’t necessarily the best for that.”
Mueller, a registered Republican, moved back to San Francisco in 1998 after President Bill Clinton appointed him U.S. attorney for the Northern District of California. In July 2001, President George W. Bush nominated him as FBI director, and he won unanimous Senate confirmation. Mueller asked the White House for a delay, however, so he could undergo treatment for prostate cancer.
His first day on the job was Sept. 4, 2001 — a week before hijacked airliners slammed into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania in the worst terrorist attack in U.S. history.
At 7 a.m. Sept. 12, Mueller, then-Attorney General John Ashcroft and other officials arrived for an emergency briefing at the FBI’s operations center. The senior agent had been given an hour to prepare while investigators were still combing airline manifests and scouring crash sites.
When Mueller asked a rapid-fire series of questions, the agent replied that accurate information was not yet “established.”
“‘I want answers, goddamn it!’ ” Mueller exploded, recalled an official who was present.
Mueller already was coming under siege from critics who questioned why the FBI had not prevented the attacks.
Mueller countered by announcing plans to reshape the FBI. Its first priority would be to prevent another terrorist attack — not conventional law enforcement.
The enormity of the FBI’s challenge emerged within weeks.
A handful of letters, laced with powdered anthrax, killed five people and sickened 17 others. The government closed congressional office buildings, the Supreme Court and postal facilities as the country braced for further biological terrorism.
But Mueller’s FBI struggled for nearly seven years to determine who was responsible — even as he personally managed the case from headquarters.
“The director was always the leader of the anthrax investigation, period,” said Michael Mason, former head of the FBI’s Washington Field Office.
The FBI focused on Steven Hatfill, a virologist at the U.S. Army’s laboratories at Fort Detrick, Md. In January 2003, Mueller assured congressional leaders in a closed-door briefing that bloodhounds had traced anthrax from the attacks to Hatfill.
But Hatfill had no experience handling anthrax. Nor did he have access to anthrax stored at Fort Detrick or elsewhere. Years later, the FBI would reject the bloodhound evidence as unreliable.
After media leaks fingered Hatfill, he sued the FBI and the Justice Department on privacy grounds. In June 2008, the government agreed to pay Hatfill about $5.8 million.
Two months later, on Aug. 6, Mueller summoned senior investigators and prosecutors on the anthrax case to his seventh-floor office. The FBI would hold a news conference that afternoon, and he wanted to recap the case’s stunning denouement.
Bruce Ivins, an Army microbiologist at Fort Detrick who specialized in handling anthrax, had committed suicide after his lawyers informed him he was about to be charged with murder for the letter attacks.
Evidence showed Ivins had created and held custody of a batch of anthrax traced by DNA to each of the killings.
Mueller let others hold the news conference. Some aides who met Mueller that day think he was reluctant to publicly address the missteps with Hatfill, the bloodhounds and the long delay in focusing on Ivins.
“I think he was personally embarrassed,” said one. “I would assess him as someone that can’t accept the fact that he screwed up.”
protecting the director from embarrassment was ingrained.
A case in point unfolded in 2011 — just as the Senate was considering President Barack Obama’s request to extend Mueller’s expiring term as FBI director by two years.
The FBI’s Inspection Division, a unit that scrutinizes bureau operations, conducted a three-week examination of the Directorate of Intelligence, a unit that Mueller created to carry out the shift in preventing terrorism.
“They inspected it, and they wrote the inspection report and it said the whole thing’s broken — set it on fire and start from scratch,” said a former official familiar with the report. Another ex-official confirmed the account.
Mueller’s top aides saw peril in following normal procedure — forwarding the report to the Justice Department’s inspector general for possible follow-up action.
“It was, ‘The director will get skewered. We’ve got to protect him, and we can’t issue this,’ ” the former official recalled.
The aides kept the report in-house, the former official said, by tweaking its language.
“Anywhere it said, ‘inspection,’ they changed it to ‘review.’ And said this was a review, not an inspection, and therefore they didn’t have to issue it to ... the inspector general.”
Two years later, Mueller — without citing the inspection — informed Congress that he had restructured the Directorate of Intelligence “to maximize organizational collaboration, identify and address emerging threats and more effectively integrate intelligence and operations within the FBI.”
During his final months as FBI director, Mueller was again enlisted to help with a thorny matter in U.S.-Russia relations.
In the summer of 2013, the White House asked Mueller to negotiate the release from Russia of Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor who stole volumes of classified material on U.S. surveillance operations at home and abroad. Snowden had fled to Moscow after leaking the data to journalists.
The Obama administration wanted Moscow to return Snowden as part of a diplomatic “reset,” an ultimately unsuccessful effort to improve relations with Russia.
Lisa Monaco, the White House’s Homeland Security adviser, tasked Mueller to talk to Alexander Bortnikov, head of Russia’s internal security and counter-intelligence service, the FSB.
For at least a week, Mueller called Bortnikov’s office, starting at 3 a.m. in Washington. Each time, the FBI director was rebuffed.
“Mueller just kept calling over there, like begging to talk to the guy,” said a former official. Instead, Snowden was granted asylum in Russia.
The unsuccessful outreach offered Mueller insight into Russian intelligence, who U.S. officials say helped hack and leak Democratic National Committee emails last year in an effort to undermine U.S. democracy and to help Trump’s campaign.
Investigators and lawyers who have worked with Mueller say that his legacy as special counsel will depend, ultimately, on his resolve, his integrity and especially his judgment.
“If he believes somebody has committed a crime, he’s going to do whatever he can to hold them accountable,” said a former FBI colleague. “Trump’s name or brand is not going to back down Mueller.”