Robert Mueller, Former Special Prosecutor Who Led Trump-Russia Probe, Dies at 81
Former special prosecutor Robert Mueller has died of complications associated with Parkinson’s, MS NOW reported Saturday. He was 81.
The network’s Carol Leonnig and Clarissa-Jan Lim first reported the news.
“Bob was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in the summer of 2021,” Mueller’s family told The New York Times in August. “He retired from the practice of law at the end of that year. He taught at his law school alma mater during the fall of both 2021 and 2022, and he retired at the end of 2022. His family asks that his privacy be respected.”
Mueller led the FBI for 12 years. His tenure was marked by indictments brought against Donald Trump in relation to Russia’s attack on the 2016 presidential election. The investigation – and its conclusion, known colloquially as the Mueller Report – ultimately concluded Trump could not be absolved nor accused of a crime.
He was appointed to the role one week before the World Trade Center attacks on September 11, 2001 and counterrorism was central to this time at the agency. Mueller systematically changed the FBI from the bottom up and top down, and his agents were the first to reveal the CIA had begun detaining and torturing people suspected of committing terrorism.
Mueller reflected on his 10+ years at the agency in a video shared the night before his departure in 2013.
“Day in and day out, agents put their lives on the line. There is a certain closeness that comes from being … associated with agents who do put their lives on the line day in and day out brings a closeness that you do not find in many other institutions and a tremendous level of support,” he said. “If you lose an agent, you can lose it to cancer, you can lose it in the line of duty, we respond as a family. We have lost a piece of our body so to speak.”
“And also, we have unique mission. We have a unique legacy that has been passed down to us. And I think that people in the FBI know and understand and are tremendously proud to be a part of that legacy. And so because of the legacy, because of the fact that agents put their lives on the line, it’s somewhat different than being in just about any other organization.”
Mueller was named special counsel in May 2017, days after Trump dismissed Mueller’s successor James Comey, who had launched his own investigations into what was shared between Russia’s leadership and the 2016 Trump campaign.
Mueller’s investigation was thorough. His assembled team included people who worked on the Watergate investigations into Richard Nixon. Paul Manafort, Trump’s first campaign manager, was sent to prison for fraud; Trump’s first national security adviser Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn pleaded guilty to making false statements to the FBI; a charge former Trump adviser Roger Stone also admitted to.
The news prompted an inappropriate response from Trump, who wrote on Truth Social, “Robert Mueller just died. Good, I’m glad he’s dead. He can no longer hurt innocent people! President DONALD J. TRUMP.”
Trump followed up with a second post in which he accused “the radical left Democrats” of having “hurt so many people with their vicious and uncaring ways.”
Robert Swan Mueller III was the child of Alice and Robert Swan Mueller Jr., a Navy officer who served in World War II. It’s unsurprising the younger Mueller also enlisted after graduating from Princeton in 1966 and NYU in 1967. His decision to join the Marine Corps. came after the death of a friend from Princeton, and he looked back on his wartime experience in an interview with then-MSNBC (now MS NOW) in 2020.
While recalling being shot by a North Vietnamese Army soldier, Mueller said, “Your first thought, thanks to the Marine Corps, is your men.” He admitted he didn’t realized he had been wounded until a fellow Marine pointed it out. Mueller added that he hoped that meant he could a bit of reprieve on board the hospital ship.
“And so, I’m sitting there thinking this and then we land at Dong Ha. And I come to find out in the next day or so that it wasn’t that bad, it had been a through-and-through, and I’m not going to any hospital ship. As it happened, I heal. And within three weeks, I was back in the bush.”
Per the New York Times, his wife advised him to pursue a career in law instead of the military following the injury. He enrolled in law school at the University of Virginia, and graduated just as it became clear the Watergate scandal was a full-blown constitutional crisis.
His career included spans of time in which he was working as a federal prosecutor in San Francisco and as the chief of the criminal division for the Northern District of California. Mueller and his family moved to Boston in the 1980s, where he led prosecutions into cases of fraud, corruption, money-laundering and terrorism. He joined the Justice Department in 1989, and became chief of the criminal division the following year.
“I’ve come to believe that it really does not matter which way you choose to serve. And the only thing that we ask is that you work for your country, for your community,” Mueller said in the same MSNBC interview from 2020. “Each person must determine in what way they can best serve others in a way that will leave them believing that their time has been time well spent.”
He oversaw several international conflicts, including the prosecution of Manuel Noriega and the attack on Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. Following the inauguration of Bill Clinton in 1993 Mueller joined Hale & Dorr, now WilmerHale, before he called Eric H. Holder Jr. and asked if the Justice Department needed a homicide prosecutor.
He was nominated to head the FBI in September 2001 by George W. Bush. Mueller was considered the best FBI director in the agency’s history, and was asked to stay in his post for an additional two years by Barack Obama.
In 2017 Mueller was called upon by the Justice Department to serve as special counsel in an investigation into the actions of Trump and his 2016 campaign. Trump had recently dismissed Comey as director of the FBI.
Mueller attempted to interview Trump under oath, which was rejected by the latter’s legal team. He opted against a grand-jury subpoena and sent Trump’s legal team written questions instead; the then-president ultimately refused to respond to nearly every query raised.
Mueller’s final 448-page report concluded Russia worked to help Trump and his campaign with the election, which he won over Hillary Clinton. The report also offered 10 instances in which an exchange between the parties transpired, and Mueller and his team wrote, “While this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.” The report was not publicly shared for 25 years, during which Trump insisted he was “totally exonerated.”
Mueller refused to publicly speak on the case until 2020, when the president commuted Roger Stone’s 40-month sentence on seven felony counts.
“We made every decision in Stone’s case, as in all our cases, based solely on the facts and the law and in accordance with the rule of law,” Mueller wrote in the Washington Post. “The women and men who conducted these investigations and prosecutions acted with the highest integrity. Claims to the contrary are false.”
Trump later pardoned Flynn, Manafort, and Stone, decisions that were perceived as slights against Mueller and his investigation.
Robert Swan Mueller III was born August 7, 1944. He grew up on Park Avenue and in Philadelphia’s Main Line and attended school at St. Paul’s in New Hampshire, where he was captain of the lacrosse, soccer, and hockey teams and played alongside presidential candidate John Kerry. He married Ann Cabell Standish in September 1966 after the pair first met as teenagers; they went on to welcome daughters Cynthia and Melissa.
His family announced his diagnosis of Parkinson’s in 2021 after the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee threatened to subpoena him as part of an investigation into the FBI’s handling of the investigation into Jeffrey Epstein. Mueller last spoke publicly in 2019 while delivering a report to Congress on the Trump campaign’s relationship with Russia.
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