Special counsel’s experience
Robert Mueller was U.S. attorney in S.F. and top law enforcement official under several presidents.
Veteran prosecutor Robert Mueller, the former U.S. attorney in San Francisco and now the government’s chief investigator of Russian interference in the November election, was appointed FBI director by President George W. Bush in September 2001. A week after he took office came the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
“His job was changed dramatically. He suddenly had to become an expert in terrorism and international information interception,” said Rory Little, a law professor at UC Hastings in San Francisco and a former federal prosecutor.
Little said Mueller proved to be a quick learner, a trait that should serve him well in his new position at the center of the incendiary debate over Russia’s role in the 2016 presidential election. On Wednesday, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein appointed Mueller special counsel with broad authority to investigate Russia’s actions and its relationships with President Trump and members of his campaign.
Mueller’s Washington experience runs deep. Before his selection to head the FBI, he had led the Justice Department’s Criminal Division under Republican President George H.W. Bush and served as the department’s No. 2 official under the second President Bush. Despite his Republican credentials, he has bipartisan support and a reputation for independence, which he demonstrated in March 2004 at the bedside of hospitalized Attorney General John Ashcroft.
President George W. Bush was seeking Justice Department approval to extend a clandestine program of warrantless surveillance of Americans’ phone calls and messages abroad, part of his “war on terror.” As White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales and Chief of Staff Andrew Card headed for the hospital to seek Ashcroft’s signature, Mueller rushed to the scene, where he joined Ashcroft’s chief deputy, James Comey. Both Mueller and Comey threatened to resign if Ashcroft approved the extension. Ashcroft didn’t sign it.
Bush later renewed the program on his own before suspending it in 2007. Comey succeeded Mueller as FBI director in 2013. His May 9 firing by Trump, who later said he wanted to end the FBI’s Russian investigation, will be a subject of Mueller’s inquiry.
“I don’t think he has any agenda,” said Stanford law Professor Robert Weisberg, who has hosted Mueller as a guest instructor in some of his white-collar-crime classes. “My guess is he will go where things point him.”
Sen. Dianne Feinstein, DCalif., said Mueller’s appointment was “a good first step to get to the bottom of the many questions we have about Russian interference in our election and possible ties to the president.”
Mueller was a Marine Corps officer who was awarded a Bronze Star for his service in Vietnam. He began his legal career as a prosecutor in San Francisco in 1975, and in 1990 was appointed assistant attorney general in charge of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division.
Among the cases he oversaw were the conviction of former Panamanian leader Manuel Noriega on drug charges and the investigation of the 1988 bombing of a U.S. airliner over Lockerbie, Scotland, which killed 270 people and resulted in a murder conviction.
Mueller left the department after President Bill Clinton took office in 1993 and joined a Boston law firm, but returned to Washington a few years later to take a job as an everyday prosecutor — accepting a dramatic cut in pay because he preferred the work, said Little, who was then in the Justice Department.
Mueller had risen to become head of homicide prosecutions when Clinton tapped him in 1998 to become U.S. attorney in San Francisco. He took over an office in which prosecutions had been declining and doubled its output in two years, adding initiatives to go after white-collar crime, securities fraud, and environmental and gun cases.
“He was the first guy there in the morning and the last guy to turn off the lights at the end of the day,” Little said. Another trait, he noted, was Mueller’s shutdown of public statements by his office — “the strongest version of ‘no comment’ you’ve ever met” — which is likely to recur in his new job.
Appointed by Bush to a 10-year term as FBI director, Mueller was given a two-year extension by President Barack Obama and Congress. When he left the agency after 12 years, he had become the second-longest-serving director — after J. Edgar Hoover — in the bureau’s history.
He returned to a private law firm, where he was still working Wednesday when he accepted his latest appointment.
“I don’t think he has any agenda. My guess is he will go where things point him.” Robert Weisberg, Stanford law professor