A reporter who interviewed Robert Mueller just after President Donald Trump's election revealed what he expects from the special counsel in a Washington Post column on Wednesday.
Tim Weiner accepted an invitation to interview Mueller about national security at an international conference in Mexico City.
"Mueller was dressed, as always, as if it were 1956, Eisenhower in the White House, Sinatra on the radio. He was relaxed, courtly, charming," Weiner said.
The content of the conference speech was off the record, Weiner writes, but his conversation with Mueller after they left the stage was not.
"Given that he has been dead quiet since May 17, 2017, when he became the special counsel, and that he probably won’t be scheduling a news conference anytime soon, I thought this might be the moment for that recollection," he writes.
What Weiner remembers was that Mueller saw himself as a civil libertarian.
"No, that’s not a big part of his reputation. Yes, he ran zealous counterterrorism operations after 9/11, some of them overzealous. But underneath that badge, I thought I detected a part of his heart that bleeds," he writes. "He wanted his time at the FBI to be judged not only on work to disrupt and deter terrorism, but on protecting the rights of everyone, including enemies of the state."
Because of that, Weiner believes Mueller will be very fair to Trump, possibly even disappointing the president's many detractors.
"We may want Mueller to be a lock-’em-up law man, not a civil rights advocate. I think he has the temperament to hold these two opposite ideas at once, and to reconcile them. That is justice in his eyes," he writes. "He’ll throw the book at Trump if the evidence demands it, but that book is going to contain the Constitution, not just the criminal code."
Weiner also reveals that the one thing Mueller wanted to be on the record was his statement that “the FBI director must be above politics.”
Following the 2016 election, before the Russia investigation took off, that likely referred to a decision by James Comey, his successor as FBI director, to publicize a "reopening" of the investigation into Hillary Clinton's emails.
"The clear context of that comment was Comey. These men are allies now. But I saw back then that they weren’t friends," he writes.
Read the full column here.
