Robert Muller

WASHINGTON (AP) — Robert S. Mueller III, the FBI director who transformed the nation’s top law enforcement agency into a counterterrorism force after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and later became special counsel in charge of investigating ties between Russia and Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, has died. He was 81 years old.

“It is with deep sadness that we share the news that Bob passed away” on Friday night, his family said in a statement Saturday. “His family asks that their privacy be respected.”

Susan Walsh via AP

At the FBI, Mueller almost immediately set about revising the bureau’s mission to meet the policing needs of the 21st century, beginning his 12-year tenure just a week before the 9/11 attacks and serving presidents of both political parties. He was nominated by Republican President George W. Bush.

The cataclysmic event instantly shifted the bureau’s top priority from solving domestic crime to preventing terrorism, a shift that imposed an almost impossibly difficult standard on Mueller and the rest of the federal government: Preventing 99 out of 100 terrorist plots was not good enough.

He later served as a special prosecutor in the Justice Department’s investigation into whether the Trump campaign illegally coordinated with Russia to influence the outcome of the 2016 presidential race.

Trump posted on social media about Mueller’s death: “Robert Mueller just died. Well, I’m glad he’s dead.” The Republican president added: “He can’t hurt innocent people anymore!”

The FBI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

A second act as an investigator for a sitting president

Mueller, the second-longest serving director in FBI history, behind only J. Edgar Hoover, served until 2013 after accepting Democratic President Barack Obama’s request to remain in office even after ending his 10-year term.

After several years in private practice, Mueller was asked by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein to return to public service as special counsel in the Trump-Russia investigation.

Mueller’s stern face and taciturn demeanor matched the seriousness of the mission, as his team spent nearly two years quietly conducting one of the most consequential, but divisive, investigations in the history of the Justice Department. He held no press conferences or public appearances during the investigation, remained silent despite attacks from Trump and his supporters, and created an aura of mystery around his work.

In total, Mueller brought criminal charges against six of the president’s associates, including his campaign manager and his first national security adviser.

J. Scott Applewhite via AP

Their 448-page report released in April 2019 identified substantial contacts between the Trump campaign and Russia, but did not allege a criminal conspiracy. He exposed damaging details about Trump’s efforts to seize control of the investigation, and even shut it down, although he declined to decide whether Trump had broken the law, in part because of the department’s policy that prohibits the impeachment of a sitting president.

But, in perhaps the report’s most memorable language, Mueller pointedly stated: “If after a thorough investigation of the facts we were confident that the president clearly did not commit obstruction of justice, we would so declare. Based on the facts and applicable legal standards, we cannot make that judgment.”

The hazy conclusion did not deal the administration the death blow that some Trump opponents had hoped for, nor did it trigger sustained pressure from House Democrats to impeach the president, although he was later tried and acquitted on separate charges related to Ukraine.

The outcome also left room for 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 adequately capture the damaging conclusion of his report.

Mueller deflated Democrats during a much-anticipated congressional hearing on his report when he offered terse, one-word answers and appeared shaky in his testimony. He often seemed hesitant about the details of his research. It was not the commanding performance that many expected from Mueller, who had a towering reputation in Washington.

Over the following months, Barr made clear his own disagreements with the substance of the Russia investigation and decided to dismiss a false statements prosecution that Mueller had brought against former national security adviser Michael Flynn, even though that investigation ended with a guilty plea.

Mueller’s tenure as special counsel was the cornerstone of a career in government.

A transformation of the FBI into a national security agency

His time as FBI director was defined by the 9/11 attacks and their aftermath, when the FBI granted sweeping new surveillance and national security powers and rushed to confront a rising Al Qaeda and disrupt plots and take terrorists off the streets before they could act.

It was a new model of policing for an FBI that had long been accustomed to investigating crimes that had already occurred.

When he became FBI director, “I was hoping to focus on areas that are familiar to me as a prosecutor: drug cases, white-collar crime cases and violent crimes,” Mueller told a group of lawyers in October 2012.

Instead, “we had to focus on long-term strategic change. We had to improve our intelligence capabilities and update our technology. We had to build strong partnerships and forge new friendships, both here at home and abroad.”

In response, the FBI transferred 2,000 of the bureau’s 5,000 total criminal programs agents to national security.

Jacquelyn Martin via AP

In retrospect, the transformation was a success. At that time there were problems and Mueller said so. In a speech near the end of his term, Mueller recalled “those days when we were attacked by the media and beaten by Congress; when the attorney general was not happy with me at all.”

Among the issues: The Justice Department’s inspector general found that the FBI skirted the law to obtain thousands of phone records for terrorism investigations.

Mueller decided that the FBI would not engage in abusive interrogation techniques of suspected terrorists, but the policy was not effectively communicated for nearly two years. In an effort to move the FBI to a paperless environment, the bureau spent more than $600 million on two computer systems: one that was two and a half years behind schedule and a predecessor that was only partially completed and had to be scrapped after consultants declared it obsolete and plagued with problems.

For the country’s top law enforcement agency, it was a difficult journey over rugged terrain.

But there were also many successes, including foiled terrorist plots and headline-grabbing criminal cases like that of conman Bernie Madoff. The Republican also cultivated an apolitical reputation in office, nearly resigning in a clash with the Bush administration over a surveillance program that he and his successor, James Comey, considered illegal.

He famously stood alongside Comey, then a deputy attorney general, during a dramatic 2004 hospital standoff over federal wiretapping rules. The two men stood at the bedside of ailing Attorney General John Ashcroft to prevent Bush administration officials from attempting to obtain Ashcroft’s permission to reauthorize a secret warrantless wiretapping program.

In an extraordinary vote of confidence, Congress, at the request of the Obama administration, approved a two-year extension for Mueller to remain in office.

A Marine who served in Vietnam before becoming a prosecutor.

Mueller was born in New York City and grew up in an affluent suburb of Philadelphia.

He received a bachelor’s degree from Princeton University and a master’s degree in international relations from New York University. He then joined the Marine Corps and served for three years as an officer during the Vietnam War. He led a rifle platoon and received a Bronze Star, a Purple Heart and two Navy Commendation Medals. Following his military service, Mueller earned a law degree from the University of Virginia.

Mueller became a federal prosecutor and enjoyed the work of handling criminal cases. He rose quickly through the ranks of U.S. attorneys’ offices in San Francisco and Boston from 1976 to 1988. Later, as head of the Justice Department’s criminal division in Washington, he oversaw a series of high-profile prosecutions that scored victories against targets as varied as Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega and New York crime boss John Gotti.

Dennis Cook/News

In a mid-career move that surprised colleagues, Mueller left a job at a prestigious Boston law firm to join the homicide division of the U.S. attorney’s office in the nation’s capital. There, he immersed himself as lead litigator in a slew of unsolved drug-related murder cases in a city plagued by violence.

Mueller was driven by a career-long passion for the hard work of preparing successful criminal cases. Even as head of the FBI, he delved into the details of investigations, some of them important cases but others not so much, sometimes surprising agents who suddenly found themselves on the phone with the director.

“Management books will tell you that, as a manager of an organization, you should focus on the vision,” Mueller once said. But “for me there were and are today areas in which one needs to be substantially personally involved,” especially with regard to “the terrorist threat and the need to know and understand that threat to its roots.”

Toward the end of Mueller’s tenure, two terrorist attacks occurred: the Boston Marathon bombing and the Fort Hood shootings in Texas. Both things weighed heavily on him, he acknowledged in an interview two weeks before his departure.

“You sit with the families of the victims, you see the pain they suffer and you always wonder if something more could have been done,” he said.