WASHINGTON (AP) — Robert S. Mueller III, the FBI director who transformed the nation’s top law enforcement agency into a counterterrorism force after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and later became special counsel in charge of investigating ties between Russia and Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, has died. He was 81 years old.
“It is with deep sadness that we share the news that Bob passed away” on Friday night, his family said in a statement Saturday. “His family asks that their privacy be respected.”
At the FBI, Mueller almost immediately set out to reform the agency’s mission to meet the needs of the 21st century, beginning his 12-year tenure just a week before the 9/11 attacks and serving under presidents of both political parties. He was nominated by Republican President George W. Bush.
The cataclysmic event instantly shifted the agency’s top priority from solving domestic crimes to preventing terrorism, a shift that set an almost impossibly difficult standard for Mueller and the rest of the federal government: Preventing 99 out of every 100 terrorist plots is not enough.
He later served as a special prosecutor in the Justice Department’s investigation into whether the Trump campaign illegally coordinated with Russia to influence the outcome of the 2016 presidential race.
Trump posted on social media about Mueller’s death: “Robert Mueller just died. Well, I’m glad he’s dead.” The Republican president added: “He can no longer hurt innocent people!”
The FBI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
A second act as an investigator for a sitting president
The second-longest serving director in FBI history, behind only J. Edgar Hoover, Mueller served until 2013 after accepting Democratic President Barack Obama’s request to stay on even after his 10-year term expired.
After several years in private practice, Mueller was asked by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein to return to public service as a special counsel in the Trump-Russia investigation.
Mueller’s stern countenance and taciturn character matched the seriousness of the mission, as his team spent nearly two years quietly carrying out one of the most consequential, if divisive, investigations in the history of the Justice Department. He held no press conferences or made public appearances during the investigation, remaining silent despite attacks from Trump and his supporters and creating an aura of mystery around his work.
In total, Mueller brought criminal charges against six of the president’s associates, including his campaign manager and his first national security adviser.
Their 448-page report, released in April 2019, identified substantial contacts between the Trump campaign and Russia but did not allege a criminal conspiracy. He laid out damaging details about Trump’s efforts to seize control of the investigation, and even shut it down, although he declined to decide whether Trump had broken the law, in part because of a department policy that prohibits indicting a sitting president.
But, in perhaps the report’s most memorable language, Mueller pointedly stated: “If we were confident, after a thorough investigation of the facts, that the president clearly did not commit obstruction of justice, we would say so. Based on the facts and the applicable legal standards, we cannot make that judgment.”
The nebulous conclusion did not deal the death blow to the administration that some Trump opponents had hoped for, nor did it spark a sustained push for House Democrats to impeach the president — although he was later tried and acquitted on separate charges related to Ukraine.
The result also left room for Attorney General William Barr to insert his own opinions. He and his team made their own determination that Trump did not obstruct justice, and he and Mueller clashed privately over a four-page summary from Barr that Mueller said did not adequately capture the damaging conclusion of his report.
Mueller deflated Democrats during the congressional hearing on his report when he offered laconic, one-word answers and appeared shaky in his testimony. He often seemed to vacillate on details of his research. It was hardly the dominant performance many had expected from Mueller, who had a commanding reputation in Washington.
In the months that followed, Barr made clear his own disagreements with the substance of the Russia investigation, moving to dismiss a prosecution over false statements Mueller had made against former national security adviser Michael Flynn, although that investigation ended in a guilty plea.
Mueller’s tenure as special counsel was the culmination of a career dedicated to government.
Transformation of the FBI into a counterterrorism agency
His time as FBI director was defined by the 9/11 attacks and their aftermath, as an FBI given sweeping new surveillance and national security powers rushed to confront a rising Al Qaeda and disrupt plots and take terrorists off the streets before they could act.
It was a new model of surveillance for an FBI that had long been accustomed to investigating past crimes.
When he became FBI director, “I had hoped to focus on areas that were familiar to me as a prosecutor: drug cases, white-collar crime cases and violent crimes,” Mueller told a group of lawyers in October 2012.
Instead, “we had to focus on long-term strategic change. We had to improve our intelligence capabilities and modernize our technology. We had to rely on strong alliances and forge new friendships, both here at home and abroad.”
In response, the FBI moved 2,000 of the 5,000 total agents in the agency’s criminal programs to homeland security.
In retrospect, the transformation was a success. At that time, there were problems, and Mueller said so. In a speech near the end of his term, Mueller recalled “those days when we were under attack from the media and taking hits from Congress; when the attorney general was not happy with me at all.”
Among the problems: The Justice Department’s inspector general determined that the FBI skirted the law to obtain thousands of phone records for terrorism investigations.
Mueller decided that the FBI would not engage in abusive interrogation techniques of suspected terrorists, but the policy was not effectively communicated up the chain of command for nearly two years. In an effort to move the FBI to a paperless environment, the agency spent more than $600 million on two computer systems: one that was two and a half years behind schedule and a predecessor that was only partially completed and had to be scrapped after consultants declared it obsolete and plagued with problems.
For the nation’s top public safety agency, it was a bumpy ride over rough terrain.
But there were also many successes, including foiled terrorist plots and headline-grabbing criminal cases like the one against fraudster Bernie Madoff. The Republican also cultivated an apolitical reputation in office, nearly resigning in a clash with the Bush administration over a surveillance program that he and his successor, James Comey, considered illegal.
He famously stood by Comey, then deputy attorney general, during a dramatic 2004 hospital confrontation over federal wiretapping rules. The two men stood at the bedside of ailing Attorney General John Ashcroft to prevent Bush administration officials from finding an alternative way to obtain Ashcroft’s permission to reauthorize a secret warrantless wiretapping program.
In an extraordinary vote of confidence, Congress, at the request of the Obama administration, approved a two-year extension for Mueller to remain in his position.
A Marine who served in Vietnam before becoming a prosecutor
Mueller was born in New York City and grew up in an affluent suburb of Philadelphia.
He earned a bachelor’s degree from Princeton University and a master’s degree in international relations from New York University. He then joined the Marines, serving for three years as an officer during the Vietnam War. He led a rifle platoon and received a Bronze Star, a Purple Heart and two Navy Commendation Medals. Following his military service, Mueller earned a law degree from the University of Virginia.
Mueller became a federal prosecutor and enjoyed the work of prosecuting criminal cases. He rose quickly through federal prosecutors’ offices in San Francisco and Boston from 1976 to 1988. Later, as head of the Justice Department’s criminal division in Washington, he oversaw a series of high-profile prosecutions that resulted in victories against targets as varied as Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega and mobster John Gotti.
In a mid-career move that surprised his colleagues, Mueller left a job at a prestigious Boston law firm to join the homicide division of the U.S. attorney’s office in the nation’s capital. There, he immersed himself as lead litigator in a bulging case of unsolved drug-related murders in a city plagued by violence.
Mueller was driven by a professional passion for the painstaking work of building criminal cases. Even as head of the FBI, he got into the details of investigations, some of them important but others not so much, sometimes surprising agents who suddenly found themselves on the phone with the director.
“Management manuals will tell you that as the head of an organization you should focus on the vision,” Mueller once said. But “for me there were and are today those areas in which one needs to be substantially personally involved,” especially with regard to “the terrorist threat and the need to know and understand that threat to its roots.”
Two terrorist attacks occurred toward the end of Mueller’s term: the Boston Marathon and Fort Hood in Texas. Both weighed heavily on him, he acknowledged in an interview two weeks before his departure.
“You sit with the families of the victims, you see the pain they go through and you always wonder if there isn’t something more” that could have been done, he said.
This story was translated from English by an AP editor using a generative artificial intelligence tool.
