By Steve Neavling
Ticklethewire.com
Robert Mueller, the special counsel investigating Russia and Trump’s campaign, made the short list for Time’s Person of the Year 2018.
The magazine ran a lengthy, insightful piece about how the often silent prosecutor has continued his investigation in spite of constant attacks by President Trump and his backers, who claim Mueller is on a “witch hunt.”
Just this year, Mueller charged 34 people and entities with crimes, often convincing them to cooperate as the investigation balloons and begins to focus on the president.
Time wrote:
Mueller’s silence has invited noisy speculation from partisans. To critics on the right, he is an overzealous prosecutor drunk on power and roaming beyond his mandate in a bid to drum Trump out of office. To liberals, he is a crusading hero who won’t quit until he brings the President to justice. The public narrative of Mueller’s investigation this year has often described its central character more as myth than man.
So it is instructive to hear friends and former colleagues talk about Robert Swan Mueller III. Not because they portray a perfect person, but because they describe a complicated one: relentless but circumspect, impatient but thorough, difficult but respected. Mueller, they say, is the kind of man who flicks the lights off and on at his home to inform guests that it’s time to leave a social gathering, and who is so keenly aware of any appearance of impropriety that he won’t even enter the same room as friends who are working on the other side of the Russia case. As FBI director, he twice threatened to resign over matters of legal principle, winning the standoff both times, and was infamous for eviscerating ill-prepared underlings. “If indicting his own mother was the right thing to do,” says former FBI assistant director Tom Fuentes, “he would do it.”
These qualities, manifest in Mueller’s work this year, are why many believe he was ideally suited to oversee the biggest test to the American system of justice since Watergate. As the nation awaits Mueller’s report and the political pressure intensifies, he has led the investigation with the same rigor and sense of duty that has marked his life. “He likes to follow procedures,” says David Kris, former Assistant Attorney General in the national-security division of the Department of Justice. “And those procedures he sees as a safe harbor against the stormy seas of politicization.”
Time placed Mueller on the “short list,” as the No. 3 person of the year for 2018.
Time named a group of journalists it referred to as “The Guardians” as the 2018 Person of the Year, referring to the reporters “who have taken great risks in pursuit of greater truths.”
