Robert Mueller remembered for his nonpartisan leadership in transforming the FBI
Experts are remembering Robert Mueller for his nonpartisan leadership in transforming the FBI into a terrorism-fighting force after the 9/11 attacks.
The former FBI director died Friday at the age of 81, according to a statement from his family. He was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 2021.
Mueller was also the special counsel in charge of the Department of Justice’s investigation into the ties between Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and Russia.
“They remember him as a straight shooter, they remember him as an honest man, and they remember him as somebody who worked hard,” WTOP’s National Security Correspondent J.J. Green said about Mueller in an interview.
Mueller became the FBI director after his nomination by then-President George W. Bush, just a week before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. He was the head of the agency for 12 years, the longest-serving FBI director besides J. Edgar Hoover. Mueller worked under Bush and former President Barack Obama.
Green said that Mueller’s “career highlights are anchored in both crisis leadership and institutional transformation.”
During his FBI tenure, Mueller oversaw the agency’s transition “into a national security-focused agency, and expanded their counterterrorism and intelligence operations,” Green said, adding that investigating Trump’s ties to Russia placed him “again, in the center of a politically charged national moment.”
President Trump blasted Mueller on social media after hearing about his death, claiming he was glad the former special prosecutor who had investigated Trump had died, sparking outrage in U.S. media circles.
Mueller’s report on Trump’s Russian ties during his 2016 Presidential campaign was released in 2019, and didn’t conclude the president had committed a crime, but didn’t exonerate him either.
“I’m sure there are other people who Robert Mueller may have been instrumental in putting behind bars … who may feel the same way,” Green said. “But I think the American public is going to know that right after 911 it was largely due to Robert Mueller’s expertise and capabilities and leadership that protected the nation and built this massive system that, by and large works very well, that we call DHS (Department of Homeland Security) right now.”
Despite Trump’s disparagement, Mueller was highly regarded by people as a man of honor and integrity, according to Green.
During the latter part of his tenure as the FBI director, two terrorist attacks — the Boston Marathon bombing in April 2013 and the Fort Hood shootings in Texas — deeply affected Mueller because of his experience serving in Vietnam as a Marine officer from 1968 to 1971. According to Green, Mueller’s vulnerability revealed that he was human.
“Doing what he did in the way he served with the group that he served with, that kind of put a different approach in his mind about how to serve the nation after going through something like that and surviving it,” Green said.
Green said that he spent the entire 12 years of Mueller’s career trying to score an interview “and he never did one.” When Green ran into the FBI chief at the Aspen Security Forum in Colorado, “I told him that I had been trying to book him for an interview and I could never get through. And he said, ‘Well, you got me now.'”
“It kind of speaks to Bob Mueller, you know, he really was just a straightforward kind of guy who believed in service.”