Robert Mueller, the FBI director who transformed the nation's premier law enforcement agency into a terrorism-fighting force after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and who later became special counsel investigating ties between Russia and Donald Trump's presidential campaign, has died. He was 81. Mueller's family announced Saturday that he had died Friday night, the AP reports. He ran the FBI for 12 years but might be best remembered for his work examining Russia's interference in the 2016 presidential election, the New York Times points out. In the end, Mueller decided he couldn't accuse Trump of any crime in the case, but he couldn't absolve him, either.
Mueller, a Republican who was nominated for the FBI post by George W. Bush, served under presidents of both parties. He had been director for a week before the 9/11 attacks. He set about almost immediately overhauling the bureau's mission to meet the law enforcement needs of the 21st century. The attacks instantly switched the FBI's top priority from solving domestic crime to preventing terrorism, which imposed an almost impossibly difficult standard, per the AP: preventing 99 out of 100 terrorist plots wouldn't be good enough. He established a reputation for nonpartisanship, per the Washington Post, while regularly taking "I" out of remarks prepared for him to deliver. Mueller told aides it wasn't about him, "It's about the organization."
As special counsel, Mueller brought criminal charges against six of President Trump's associates, including his campaign chairman and first national security adviser. In his final report in 2019, Mueller laid out damaging details about Trump's efforts to seize control of the investigation and even shut it down, though he declined to decide whether Trump had broken the law, in part because of department policy barring the indictment of a sitting president. The nebulous conclusion did not deliver a knockout punch to the administration, per the AP, nor did it trigger a sustained push by House Democrats to impeach the president in the election case.
And Mueller's highly anticipated congressional hearing on his report was a disappointment to Trump's opponents, with the special counsel providing terse, one-word answers and appeared uncertain in his testimony. The outcome also left room for Trump's attorney general, William Barr, to insert his own views. He and his team made their own determination that Trump did not obstruct justice, and he and Mueller privately tangled over a four-page summary letter from Barr that Mueller felt did not accurately capture his report's damaging conclusion. Mueller became a target for Trump and his supporters, who have claimed repeatedly in the years since that the investigation was intended to bring down the president, per the Post.
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