Policy / Obituary / March 22, 2026
The cult of Mueller foolishly prioritized prosecution over political organizing.
Former Special Counsel Robert Mueller testifies before the House Intelligence Committee about his report on Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election in the Rayburn House office building July 24, 2019 in Washington, DC.
(Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images) For most of his life, Robert Mueller was a pillar of bipartisan civility, an institutionalist respected by both major American political parties, but over the past decade he has become emblematic of polarized politics. Liberals hailed Mueller as a patriotic public servant who courageously tried to defend the rule of law, while MAGA smeared him as part of a deep state conspiracy to destroy Donald Trump. Mueller, who died Monday at the age of 81, served as FBI director from 2001 to 2013 but is best known for being the special prosecutor who from 2017 to 2019 oversaw the investigation into possible collusion between the Trump campaign in 2016 and the Russian government.
Displaying his usual magnanimous spirit, Trump reacted to the news of Mueller’s death by posting on Truth Social”Robert Mueller just died. Well, I’m glad he’s dead. He can’t hurt innocent people anymore!” The “innocent people” Trump had in mind were his acolytes—including his 2016 campaign adviser, Paul Manafort, his longtime associate, Roger Stone, and his national security adviser, Michael Flynn—who had been convicted of various offenses during the investigation. Manafort was convicted of fraud while Stone and Flynn were found guilty of lying to investigators. Trump pardoned all three in late 2020.
Unlike Trump’s position, former presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama both paid tribute to Mueller’s transformative tenure as head of the FBI. According to ObamaMueller deserved praise for “his unwavering commitment to the rule of law and his unwavering belief in our core values that have made him one of the most respected public servants of our time.”
Speaking to MS NOW, Rachel Maddow, a journalist who had high hopes for Mueller’s Russiagate investigation, recalled the former law enforcement official as “the last in a line of people that I don’t think we’ll ever see like this again.” To Maddow, Mueller “belonged to a now-vanishing class of hard-core Republican officials who are best known for their convenience, nonpartisan competence, and willingness to rise…above the party.”
Maddow’s effusive words seemed to be the product of a time distortion: They recalled the heady days of Trump’s first term, when liberals widely hailed Mueller as a savior. These liberals viewed Trump as fundamentally illegitimate and alien to American politics, an intrusive force who could only have defeated Hillary Clinton through the dark machinations of a foreign tyrant, Vladimir Putin.
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In the context of the Russiagate narrative, Mueller was perfectly suited to be the hero: he was an old-school Republican who would legitimize criticism of Trump by putting nation above party. Mueller even looked the part. Like The New York Times notes, Mueller himself I looked the partbeing a “buttoned-down, clench-jawed, stone-veined example of a vanishing caste, the Liberal Republicans.”
A true cult of Mueller flourished during his investigations, when we could shed light Mueller Votive Candlesplay with Mueller Action Dollsand carry Mueller T-Shirts by listening to podcasts called Mueller, she wrote. There were children’s books featuring a heroic, buff Mueller as well as cartoons showing him as a masked superhero flying in the sky. Saturday evening live regularly featured sketches where the greatest actor of our time, Robert De Niro, played Mueller as a tough cop about to put the miscreant president in handcuffs. De Niro I ended up regretting the fact that Mueller did not live up to the ideal image presented in the comedy series.
The cult of Mueller was ridiculous and reflected poorly on liberalism. It showed that too many liberals trusted nonpartisan proceduralism more than politics. At a time when they should have been organizing against authoritarianism, they took comfort in the easy fantasy that an old white establishment prosecutor would solve the problem of Trumpism.
The truth is, Robert Mueller was never going to risk everything to challenge a sitting president. Like his New York Times obituary makes clear, he rose through the ranks by never upsetting the status quo, often by hiding embarrassing state secrets.
Like the Times note, Mueller was:
a descendant of what was once known as the Establishment.
His patrician parents lived first on Park Avenue, then in a stately mansion on Philadelphia’s Main Line. His father, a naval officer in the Atlantic and Mediterranean during World War II, became an executive at DuPont, America’s oldest and most powerful chemical company. His mother was a first cousin of Richard M. Bissell Jr., later head of the CIA’s clandestine service, creator of both the U-2 spy plane and the plan for the disastrous 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion.
Two incidents illustrate Mueller’s habit of protecting power established well before Russiagate. In 1991, a federal agent named Robert Muzer, who had played a leading role in the investigation of the corrupt Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), spoke before a Senate committee. According to The New York Times,Muzar complainedthe investigation “failed to follow up on “hundreds of leads” that the foreign bank may have been involved in other drug money trafficking, arms sales and secret holding of U.S. banks. Muzar’s testimony was challenged by Mueller, then an assistant attorney general.
In the years after the September 11 attacks, while Mueller was director of the FBI, he uncovered evidence of serious crimes committed by the administration, including spying on Americans and torture. He never communicated this information to the public but rather, as Times According to the obituary, he tried to pressure Bush into reforming from within.
THE Times This account paints an overly rosy picture of Mueller as a reformer. As journalist Laila Al-Arian says note, “Below [Mueller’s] leadership, the FBI has trapped countless vulnerable Muslims, including those with developmental delays and literally wearing adult diapers, in plots fabricated, concocted, financed and planned by the FBI in order to justify their massive budgets.
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In truth, Mueller has always been a cover-up. His management of the Russiagate file was part of a logic.
In investigating Trump, Mueller was so eager to obey the rules of comity that he made some major mistakes. One was his reluctance to investigate Trump’s finances. Write in The Washington SpectatorBob Dreyfus underlines in 2024, “Andrew Weissman, Mueller’s lead prosecutor and former FBI general counsel, criticizes Mueller and his deputy, Aaron Zebley, for an overly cautious, even fearful, approach related to anything involving Trump’s money. » In his 2020 book Where the law stopsWeissman wrote: “Our office was warned from the outset that engaging in…a full-scale financial investigation could lead to our termination. »
Moreover, as The New York Times According to one report, Mueller “did not issue a grand jury subpoena to compel Mr. Trump to testify under oath. He relied only on written questions and allowed White House lawyers to limit them to events leading up to Mr. Trump’s ascension to the presidency.”
Ultimately, Mueller allowed William Barr, Trump’s attorney general, to sabotage the report’s release. Rather than immediately releasing the full report, Barr released a redacted version and added his own conclusion that Trump had been exonerated. In fact, the Mueller report states: “While this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him. »
Even Maddow admits that Mueller was “blindsided” by Barr’s tactics and that “Barr completely buried him in terms of the impact of this report.”
Ultimately, Mueller concluded that Russia systematically interfered in the election and that the Trump campaign was happy to benefit from its actions. But the report could not confirm widespread coordination between the Trump campaign and the Russian government.
The problem was not just that Mueller was inadequate, but that his cult was based on a misunderstanding of politics. Throughout the Trump era, it has been clear that the only thing that can block authoritarianism is mass mobilization, whether it is the George Floyd protests in 2020 or the current protests against ICE. But the Cult of Mueller trusted elites to police bad behavior. But figures like Mueller can’t really be expected to punish wrongdoing. The elites, as the saga of Jeffrey Epstein and his network clearly shows, are too concerned with protecting their own interests to do any real housecleaning.
The Mueller report is a perfect example of how elites cover up crimes: it found a few convenient scapegoats (Manafort, Stone and Flynn), but let Trump himself escape any consequences.
Donald Trump is undeniably the most corrupt president in American history. Overall, Russiagate was one of his lesser sins. Her financial ties to Middle Eastern autocracies billions of dollars far exceed any influence Putin might have and appear to be a hidden backdrop to Trump’s foreign policy. Russiagate appealed to liberals as a way to create a bipartisan consensus that attracted hawkish Republicans. But focusing on Russiagate proved costly at the cost of investigating and mobilizing against Trump’s more serious transgressions.
Mueller was neither the villain Trump complains about nor the hero Maddow now mourns. He was simply an exemplary and pathetic character demonstrating that the current American elite does not have the political skills necessary to defend democracy and fight the authorities.
Support independent journalism that does not follow the rules Even before February 28, the reasons for the implosion of Donald Trump’s popularity ratings could not have been clearer: rampant corruption and personal enrichment to the tune of billions of dollars during an affordability crisis, a foreign policy guided only by his own abandoned sense of morality, and the deployment of a murderous campaign of occupation, detention and deportation on American streets.
Today, an undeclared, unauthorized, unpopular and unconstitutional war of aggression against Iran has spread like wildfire across the region and Europe. A new “forever war” – with an ever-increasing likelihood of US troops on the ground – could very well be upon us.
As we have seen time and time again, this administration uses lies, misdirection, and attempts to flood the zone to justify its abuses of power at home and abroad. Just as Trump, Marco Rubio, and Pete Hegseth offer erratic and contradictory justifications for attacks on Iran, the administration is also spreading the lie that the upcoming midterm elections are threatened by non-citizens registered to vote. When these lies go unchecked, they become the basis for further authoritarian encroachment and war.
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Damn Lord Jeet Heer is national affairs correspondent for The nation and host of the weekly Nation podcast, Time of the Monsters. He also writes the monthly column “Morbid symptoms.” The author of Art lovers: the adventures of Françoise Mouly in comics with Art Spiegelman (2013) and Sweet Lechery: reviews, essays and profiles (2014), Heer has written for numerous publications, including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, The American perspective, The guardian, The New RepublicAnd The Boston Globe.