Special counsel Robert Mueller is poised to receive a book deal worth over $1 million, or more than $10 million if he promises significant revelations from his two-year investigation of President Trump, leading literary agents told the Washington Examiner.
Mueller, 74, was a Vietnam War hero, director of the FBI from 2001 to 2013, and briefly had a lucrative private-sector career before taking a government salary of $161,900 to investigate Trump — ultimately finding no collusion with Russia. Famously tight-lipped and shy of the limelight, he has given no signal he wants to write about his life or work.
A book deal could quickly boost Mueller’s fortunes and capitalize on the intense fascination with his labors over the past 22 months.
“He would definitely be looking at a seven-figure advance,” said Keith Urbahn, founder and president of Javelin and the book agent for fired FBI Director James Comey, who signed for a reported $2 million advance before selling more than 1 million copies of his 2018 memoir A Higher Loyalty.
“The question is: What is the book? And what does he want to talk about? He’s a man who’s made a career out of being the quiet professional, and it’s quite possible he will never do a book,” said Urbahn, a former aide to Donald Rumsfeld, President George W. Bush’s Pentagon chief. He added that “the more he’s willing to write about recent history, the higher the advance would be.”
A seven-figure deal, meaning more than $1 million but less than $10 million, would be significant, but not Mueller’s only employment option. He earned $3.5 million in 2016 and the first part of 2017 working for clients including Facebook, Apple, and the NFL at the law firm WilmerHale.
Bridget Wagner Matzie, an agent at Aevitas Creative Management, said Mueller could get a rare eight-figure book deal, something seen for books by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and former President Barack Obama.
“Absolutely seven figures. Far more if he goes into his work during the last two years,” said Matzie, who has brokered deals for Trump-era blockbusters including The Case for Impeachment by Allan Lichtman.
An eight-figure advance, meaning $10 million or more, would be possible “if he promises to reveal something major and can prove to publishers that he has it,” Matzie said.
Agents usually keep about 15 percent of an advance as their fee. If the book advance “earns out,” meaning a sales threshold is crossed, Matzie explained, an author will earn “somewhere in the range of $3 per hardcover book sold” in royalties.
The book agent Ronald Goldfarb, however, was less excited about Mueller’s book deal potential after Attorney General William Barr informed Congress on Sunday that Mueller had found no proof of presidential crimes.
Goldfarb, who had worked on political books including Vermont independent Sen. Bernie Sanders’s Our Revolution, said Mueller could earn “much more” if he could reveal significant information. But he said the lack of Trump-busting bombshells so far could bode poorly.
For now, Goldfarb quipped, “The price just went down.”
[Related: Mueller clears Trump: No Russia collusion, no obstruction of justice]
