Mueller's War

A MONTH BEFORE the 2016 presidential election, Robert Mueller traveled to West Point, the site of the U.S. Military Academy, to collect one of the armed forces’ most storied awards. The Thayer Award, named after the so-called Father of the Military Academy, Sylvanus Thayer, is given each year to an American who demonstrates utmost devotion to the country and who has lived the academy’s principles of duty, honor, country. Its honor roll reads like a Who’s Who of the American Century: Dwight Eisenhower, Douglas MacArthur, Neil Armstrong, Walter Cronkite, Billy Graham, Bob Hope, and Edward Teller, the inventor of the atomic bomb, along with various presidents, generals, cabinet secretaries, and Supreme Court justices. 

At West Point, Mueller and the academy superintendent, Lieutenant General Robert L. Caslen Jr., stood shoulder to shoulder in the superintendent’s olive drab Humvee, its status clearly denoted by the three white stars on the license plate. As the golden evening sun poured down on the plain at West Point, they watched the academy’s corps of cadets troop by, resplendent in their gray dress uniforms. Mueller wore his own version of a uniform—white shirt, conservative blue tie, navy blue suit—familiar to anyone who had seen him as FBI director. He rarely varied much, fashionwise, sometimes in his wilder moments opting for a red tie. 

That night, Mueller accepted the Thayer Award during a ceremony in Washington Hall and reminisced about the role those three principles—duty, honor, country—had played in his own life. I often tell people I have been blessed with three families, he told the cadets. My family—my wife and children—my Marine Corps family, and, for twelve years, my FBI family. From all three families, I have learned one or two lessons. Mueller proceeded to tell stories of each family that illustrated the four key virtues he saw as central to a life well lived: service, integrity, patience, and humility.

For Mueller, the Thayer Award was a capstone to a life of public service, work that had begun fifty years earlier in the jungles of Vietnam and ended in the seventh-floor director’s suite at FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C. 

In the years since he’d left office, in 2013, as the longest-serving FBI director since J. Edgar Hoover himself—his original ten-year term extended by two years through special congressional legislation that passed the Senate by a unanimous vote of 100–0—Mueller had settled into that unique role bestowed upon the small number of distinguished, wise old owls in the twilight of their career whose personal integrity stands beyond reproach: inquisitor for hire. He was the person companies in crisis called to examine and clean up an internal scandal, a person whose very hiring would instantly calm shareholders, board members, and regulators. 

His first major role had been investigating the NFL’s handling of the 2014 Ray Rice domestic violence incident, in which the Baltimore Ravens running back knocked his girlfriend unconscious in a casino elevator. Mueller authored a definitive account of the league’s culpability that was quickly dubbed the Mueller report by the media. More recently, Volkswagen had appointed him the settlement master to oversee the more than five hundred lawsuits stemming from its diesel emissions scandal. 

These forays into the private sector had been marked by unhappiness, a frustration that he wasn’t in service to the country, wasn’t waking each morning, making his bed—as the Marines had taught him to do—and then heading off to fight the good fight for justice. The last time Mueller tried private practice was in the early 1990s, when his tenure as assistant attorney general for the Criminal Division ended with the George H. W. Bush administration. He’d lasted barely a year before calling Eric Holder, then the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, and asking to return as a junior prosecutor, the equivalent of a three-star general retiring only to reenlist as a second lieutenant. 

Yet by the time he stood on that autumn Thursday to accept an honorary saber from First Captain Hugh McConnell at West Point, Mueller seemed to be at peace with his quieter life. At seventy-two, he’d just celebrated his fiftieth wedding anniversary the month before. His wife, Ann, and their two adult daughters were present in the West Point audience; his older daughter, Cynthia, had been born while he was overseas, fighting in Vietnam. He and Ann had now lived in the same house for almost fifteen years, a delightful respite from what, by Ann’s count, had been seventeen moves as she followed Bob’s career back and forth across the country. 

All of that would soon change. 

The very next day—Friday, October 7—Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson issued a joint statement saying that the upcoming election was under attack by Russia. The U.S. Intelligence Community is confident that the Russian Government directed the recent compromises of e-mails from U.S. persons and institutions, including from U.S. political organizations, read the unprecedented statement. The recent disclosures of alleged hacked e-mails on sites like DCLeaks.com and WikiLeaks and by the Guccifer 2.0 online persona are consistent with the methods and motivations of Russian-directed efforts. These thefts and disclosures are intended to interfere with the U.S. election process.

The country wasn’t quite done with Bob Mueller, as it turned out.

Fast-forward seven months to May 2017, when Deputy