Washington greeted the news that the Justice Department had named Robert Mueller special counsel to oversee the FBI’s investigation of Russian meddling in the 2016 election with a collective sigh of relief. The speed and intensity of events and developments about this interference—and the possibility that Trump associates were involved or had knowledge of it—had only increased over the first four months of Donald Trump’s presidency.
It was particularly virulent in the nine days preceding Mueller’s appointment. In quick succession, the FBI director was fired, the White House lied about the reasons, the president reportedly disclosed classified intelligence to the Russian foreign minister, and the White House declined to comment on whether Trump had recordings of his conversations with Comey or others. Then on the evening of May 16, the New York Times reported that Comey had drafted a detailed memo following a February meeting with Trump in which the director claimed the president had pushed him to “let go” of the FBI’s investigation into former national security adviser Mike Flynn, the epicenter of scrutiny about Russian meddling.
Much of professional Washington, the brotherhood of the political news media, and the White House staff itself were exhausted, dizzy, and caught off guard when Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein announced Mueller’s appointment at 6 p.m. on May 17. You could hear a pin drop on both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue as everyone absorbed the news. Then, the reactions started rolling in.
“As I have stated many times, a thorough investigation will confirm what we already know—there was no collusion between my campaign and any foreign entity,” said President Trump in a surprisingly conciliatory statement that evening. “I look forward to this matter concluding quickly.”
“My priority has been to ensure thorough and independent investigations are allowed to follow the facts wherever they may lead,” said House speaker Paul Ryan in a statement. “That is what we’ve been doing here in the House. The addition of Robert Mueller as special counsel is consistent with this goal, and I welcome his role at the Department of Justice.”
“A special counsel is very much needed in this situation and Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein has done the right thing,” said Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer. “I now have significantly greater confidence that the investigation will follow the facts wherever they lead.”
The investigation will drag on for months, maybe years. The process won’t be pretty. It is likely to result in great costs both in money and to the reputation of anyone caught in its scope. But for Trump opponents convinced of the worst, for Trump allies convinced of deep-state sabotage, and for the bulk of the country just looking for a reason to trust their institutions again, Mueller’s appointment as a special counsel provides a real chance for resolution. There may finally be an authoritative answer to what the Russians really did or didn’t do during the 2016 presidential campaign.
The wellspring of this confidence in the new special counsel is the man himself: Robert Mueller. The former FBI director is respected on both sides of the aisle and throughout the world of criminal justice. “Former Director Mueller is exactly the right kind of individual for this job,” said Schumer. Jason Chaffetz, the Republican chair of the House Oversight Committee, called Mueller a “great selection” and a man with “impeccable credentials.”
Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard law professor who worked with Mueller in the George W. Bush Justice Department, called him a “man of extraordinary integrity.” “He’s not afraid to stand up to POTUS when the law demands,” Goldsmith wrote on Twitter the night of Mueller’s appointment. “I also think it is a great choice for Trump if he is innocent. Mueller is one of few people who can reach that conclusion with credibility.”
A Republican, Mueller had stints as a federal prosecutor during the 1970s and ’80s. After Bill Clinton was elected president, Mueller settled into a good job at a litigation firm in Boston. But he grew antsy in the private sector and, in 1995, called up an old friend who’d become the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, Eric Holder, and asked if there was a job where he could put away murderers. Obama’s future attorney general placed Mueller in the homicide division. Three years later, after Holder became Clinton’s deputy attorney general, Mueller was named U.S. attorney in Northern California—the job he held until Bush appointed him FBI director in 2001, just days before 9/11. The terrorist attacks defined Mueller’s 12-year term as director of the bureau, which he transformed into an institution that prioritized counterterrorism.
A Marine platoon commander who served in Vietnam, Mueller can be rigid to a fault, as an FBI employee who worked closely with him for years says. He arrived at FBI headquarters every day at 6 a.m. Staff in the office of the director joked that because Mueller wore only white shirts with either a blue tie or red one, this became the de facto dress code of the bureau. “He’s the human embodiment of the first of the FBI’s core values,” says the employee. “He is ‘rigorous obedience to the Constitution.’ ”
That obedience led him to clash with the president who had named him to the directorship. In 2004, Mueller and James Comey, then the deputy attorney general, fought an effort by the Bush administration to overrule the Justice Department’s finding that the administration’s domestic wiretap program was unconstitutional. When Mueller and Comey threatened to resign, the White House backed off and implemented changes to the program.
If Trump allies have any objection to Mueller, it will be the perceived closeness with Comey and Holder. But there are very good reasons to be at ease with the appointment.
Mueller is 72, at the end of a long career in public service, and has no obvious political ambitions or scores to settle. The contrast with the last special counsel to haunt a Republican president is acute. Patrick Fitzgerald was just 43 and in the middle of his career when he was tapped to lead the investigation into the Valerie Plame affair during the George W. Bush administration. Republicans found Fitzgerald obsessed with his power, fishing for indictments anywhere he could find them. He eventually charged the vice president’s chief of staff, Scooter Libby, with five counts of perjury and obstruction of justice—charges that came directly from statements Libby made during Fitzgerald’s investigation, not from any wrongdoing related to the leaking of Plame’s identity (which was not his doing).
Mueller is also the polar opposite of the showboater critics accuse Comey of being. As FBI director, Mueller avoided the spotlight. “He’s uncomfortable with the press,” says the former employee. “He is extremely reticent.” While the controversy over Russia and Trump has become a media circus, Mueller should be a sobering force.
His appointment has already been that on Capitol Hill. Republican lawmakers had spent the better part of last two weeks praying for some calm. On May 16, Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell said Congress could “do with a little less drama” from the White House. “It feels like we’ve lived three months in one week,” South Dakota senator John Thune told reporters.
Rosenstein’s announcement was met with a bipartisan chorus of praise. Republicans were quick to say that their agenda and the legislative process were still on. “It’s very important that people know that we can walk and chew gum at the same time,” Paul Ryan told reporters. “I realize that there’s a lot in the media these days. That doesn’t seize up Congress. That doesn’t stop us from doing our jobs to work on people’s problems.”
Arizona senator John McCain said that the controversies may divert attention, but they don’t slow the overall legislative progress. “We are proceeding with health care reform, we are proceeding with the defense authorization act,” he said. “We all have to walk and chew gum at the same time up here,” quipped Idaho senator Jim Risch, picking up Ryan’s metaphor. “You guys are kind of focused on all this stuff. But believe it or not, we’re actually legislating. Congress is working.”
South Carolina’s Lindsey Graham was particularly vocal about the Mueller appointment. “We can get back to the normal business of legislating,” he said. “You know, the winners of this would be the new FBI director—they don’t have to deal with it—and Republicans in Congress, because we don’t have to talk to y’all anymore.” He continued: “The losers I think are Democrats because they don’t have a perch, and the Trump administration, because this is going to go on longer, and there will be a thousand leaks a week.”
The most pressing question: What will the president do?
His uncharacteristically conventional statement the night of May 17 suggested Trump might be listening to the advice of his aides that the best he can do is stay out of the way. The unexpected show of temperance from Trump lasted about 12 hours.
By 8 a.m., Trump was tweeting his thoughts, calling the investigation “the single greatest witch hunt of a politician in American history” and complaining that no special counsel had been appointed to investigate “all of the illegal acts that took place in the Clinton campaign & Obama Administration.” The New York Times reported senior White House adviser (and Trump son-in-law) Jared Kushner had “[urged] the president to counterattack” rather than accept the special counsel.
And Trump seemed eager to counterattack. In a lunch with television news anchors, he said he believes the continued investigation is a “pure excuse for the Democrats having lost an election that they should have easily won because of the Electoral College being slanted so much in their way.” Trump also said it “hurts our country terribly, because it shows we’re a divided, mixed-up, not-unified country.”
Perhaps. But the controversy leading up to the appointment of Mueller showed a divided, mixed-up White House. The mood within the administration is grim. Already understaffed and spread thin, the West Wing will now find itself under the unyielding magnifying glass of the FBI—and with a president who has little political clout to protect his staff. Aides already suspicious of their colleagues in this highly factional White House may start shutting down and lawyering up.
Ari Fleischer, the first press secretary for President George W. Bush, said a situation like this is “draining” for staff. “You go to the White House for the purpose of supporting the president and advancing his policy agenda, and it’s a thrill,” he said. “You’re used to playing defense because you must. There’s always something that goes wrong. But when it enters the realm of a legal investigation, it can become paralyzing.”
The leak to the Times about Kushner’s “counterattack” advice to Trump is “a perfect sign of a White House that is working against itself,” Fleischer added.
The best thing for the White House and the president to do, Fleischer said, would be to ignore the special counsel’s investigation altogether and turn their attention to the administration’s policy agenda. “It’s a test of the White House, it’s a test of whether or not they can focus on policy, right the ship, and lead the government,” he said. “If they can’t focus on policy, what are they there for?”
The biggest threat to the administration’s ability to focus on policy, beyond Trump’s own inability to stay on message or keep his head down, would be a revolt from staff. The West Wing isn’t close to mass walkouts yet, but some aides will be pushed in that direction by the pressure of the investigation. It doesn’t help when the president undermines and muddles their work, as Trump did in revealing his premeditated reasons for firing James Comey, or puts them in potentially compromising positions, as he did with his national security adviser H. R. McMaster following the firestorm over his meeting with Russian officials.
So what does the president do? If the investigation continues to vex him, will he do the unthinkable and fire Mueller, Rosenstein, or anyone else supporting the special counsel’s office? As with the sacking of Comey, this remains within Trump’s rights. But ousting Mueller would drain his remaining political capital in Washington. It would sink the best opportunity for Trump and his team to be vindicated if there’s been no wrongdoing, and it would further harden his opponents in their quest to drive him from office. If he did so before the 2018 midterm elections, it would compound whatever losses his party is already likely to take.
Republican senators certainly seemed wary of defending the president as the week came to a close. “I’ve grown less responsive to tweets,” said Tennessee senator Bob Corker, usually a reliable Trump ally, before sliding into his car and heading back to Chattanooga. He’d already described the White House as in a “downward spiral” earlier in the week.
“We’re a nation of laws,” said Florida senator Marco Rubio. “A special counsel has been appointed, and I anticipate everyone is going to fully cooperate with it.”
Lindsey Graham may have had the best advice for Trump. “If I were the president,” he said, “I would stop tweeting about this investigation.”
Michael Warren is a senior writer and Jenna Lifhits is a reporter at The Weekly Standard.
