For two months, special council Robert Mueller — the lanky, 72-year-old independent prosecutor investigating the Russia scandal — has worked in virtual silence in a nondescript government office building in downtown Washington.
However, even without saying a word, the former FBI director and no-nonsense prosecutor has deeply unnerved the occupants of the White House just eight blocks away, especially US President Donald Trump, over where his probe is going.
Mueller has built a team of more than a dozen tough-as-nails investigators, including one expert in flipping mafia witnesses, a money-laundering specialist who chased down a corrupt billionaire, and one of the country’s most experienced Supreme Court litigators.
Photo: AP
Since May, they have been quietly interviewing witnesses and collecting documents to establish whether there are links between top aides from Trump’s campaign, members of his family and possibly the president himself and Russian interference in last year’s US presidential election.
After dismissing the probe for months as “ridiculous” and “fake news,” Trump last week laid bare his concerns, lashing out at the US Department of Justice, from his hand-picked Attorney General Jeff Sessions on down the line, over the probe.
He took special aim at Mueller, making clear he intends to try to undercut and discredit the man who could bring down his presidency — and possibly eventually remove him.
In an interview with the New York Times, Trump complained that one day after he interviewed Mueller to replace fired FBI director James Comey, Mueller instead went and took the job of investigating the Russia scandal.
“The next day, he is appointed special counsel. I said, what the hell is this all about? Talk about conflicts?” Trump said. “I have done nothing wrong. A special counsel should never have been appointed in this case.”
Any prosecutor taking on the presidency has to shoulder an immense amount of political pressure, said attorney Randall Samborn, who took part in a probe that targeted political heavyweight and then-US vice president Dick Cheney in the 2000s.
However, if anyone should be able to handle that, it would be Mueller, Samborn said.
Mueller, a former Marine wounded in fighting in Vietnam, is also a veteran of tough prosecutions, including taking on former Panamanian president Manuel Noriega and mafia don John Gotti.
He took the helm of the FBI one week before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
In the following years, he turned it into a potent counter-terrorism agency.
In a now-legendary defense of rule of law, he and Comey faced down former US president George W. Bush in 2004 over a secret, illegal domestic surveillance program.
Risking being fired, they forced Bush to adjust his plans.
It is the kind of fortitude that has garnered Mueller praise from both Democrats and Republicans for years.
“I don’t think there’s a legitimate concern about Bob Mueller,” said Ken Starr, whose 1990s investigation of former US president Bill Clinton very nearly forced him from the White House.
“Mueller is a pillar of Washington’s legal and political communities, which heavily overlap,” former prosecutor Andrew McCarthy said in the conservative National Review.
Since May, Mueller’s team of deeply experienced federal prosecutors, FBI investigators, spy-chasers and money-path followers have been talking to witnesses and amassing files, the only hints of their work coming from requests they send to their targets.
The investigation appears to have spread beyond the issue of collusion with Russia.
According to reports, Mueller is looking into Trump’s past real-estate business and his tax returns, possible money laundering by campaign aides, perjury, obstruction of justice and other possible crimes.
The investigation — as well as parallel probes by the US House of Representatives and Senate Intelligence Committees — have extended beyond campaign aides to Trump’s inner
circle, including son Donald Trump Jr. and son-in-law Jared Kushner.
Clearly off balance, the White House has recruited its own brigade of attorneys with expertise in constitutional law, criminal defense, and cold-blooded media counter-attack.
They have accused Mueller’s team of being biased toward Democratic US presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton and have assailed the breadth of the investigation.
Media reports say Trump’s legal team has studied the possibility of him issuing pardons to protect those in Mueller’s crosshairs.
In a Saturday morning tweet, Trump boasted of a US president’s “complete power to pardon.”
Analysts say Team Trump is laying the groundwork for removing Mueller.
Trump’s interview with the Times “is one more widening of the window on discussions taking place within the White House about a potential firing of Robert Mueller,” said Bob Bauer, the former White House counsel to former US president Barack Obama, on the Lawfare Web site.
Samborn, who took part in the investigation that exposed Valerie Plame’s identity as a covert CIA agent during the George W. Bush presidency, said such pressure is unsurprising.
His team fought off constant media stories aimed at throwing investigators off balance, most of them likely leaked by the lawyers, investigation targets and others not under the control of then-special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald.
“It was a very highly charged political atmosphere,” said Samborn, now a senior vice president at public-relations firm Levick. “There was a lot of criticism and commentary, and that you have to shut out or ignore... You keep your head down.”
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