Today, Explained - America's worst defense attorney

Episode Date: August 31, 2018

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It's our last day with Google Play for a while, so this is your third last reminder for the road that you can get $10 off your first audiobook purchase over $10 when you go to g.co slash play slash explained and log in with your Google account. Robert Mueller might be the second most powerful man in America right now, but unlike number one, he shuns the spotlight. You don't see him doing press conferences all the time. I couldn't even tell you what his voice sounded like before today. Thank you for that lovely introduction.

However this investigation goes, the special counsel will be written about for years to come. So we figured it was high time we answer a glaringly obvious question. Who is Robert Mueller? Robert Mueller was a star prep school athlete at St. Paul's with none other than John Kerry. They were high school classmates. Garrett Graff literally wrote the book on Robert Mueller. They've hung out. They've talked for hours.

Mueller's father was an executive for the DuPont Corporation. His father was captain of a submarine chaser for the Navy in World War II. And Mueller learned in many ways his moral compass from his father. In his life, he was taught that a lie is the worst sin. And a lot of his life up until a certain point looks a lot like that of the guy he's investigating right now, right? One of the things that makes this moment in history so Shakespearean is the extent that on paper, Donald Trump and Robert Mueller look so similar. They were born just two years apart, grew up in similar wealthy families in the Northeast with very strong fathers, prep school athletes, Ivy League educated. And then on paper, they diverge at a specific moment in time, which is Vietnam.

They graduate from college in the mid to late 1960s. Donald Trump, as we know, takes a number of student deferments and then gets a medical deferment for bone spurs. And Robert Mueller goes out of his way to join. He had lost a close friend, a Marine, killed while serving in Vietnam. He now felt compelled to honor his friend's memory by serving his country in the Marines. It really was a moment when people of Mueller's background didn't serve. This was before the draft lottery was instituted. If you were wealthy and you were going to a good school, you largely skipped Vietnam in those early years. I went back this year and interviewed about a dozen people who served with him in the Marines. And they said they were really wary of Bob Mueller when he first arrived in the jungles of Quang Tri Province in November 1968.

Because they heard about this new second lieutenant who went to an Ivy League school. And they're like, geez, like guys like that don't come out here into the jungle. Like, what's this guy doing here? So he's two and a half years out of college and he has this leadership position in a war. How quickly before he develops a certain style as a leader in Vietnam. The moment that his unit comes to know what his medal is, is in the Battle of Mudder's Ridge in early December, about a month after Muller arrives. To say that we are mired in stalemate seems the only realistic, if unsatisfactory, conclusion. The weather is on the side of the North Vietnamese.

Communist gunners time their attacks to take advantage of the mist closing in on the airfield that hampers American planes from striking back. They go to rescue another platoon that has been ambushed. They face very, very heavy fire. They take a number of casualties. Bob Mueller went out and rescued a Marine who had been wounded and really saved his life. And Bob Mueller actually ends up receiving the Bronze Star with valor for his actions and his leadership that day.

I mean, for a 24-year-old, you're talking about these, I mean, profound, seems like an understatement experiences. How do they shape the Robert Mueller who comes afterwards? It shapes him in one really clear way. Bob Mueller will never do anything in his life as hard as leading men in combat in Vietnam. This gives him this incredible perspective on all of the work that he is doing since. And when he was FBI director after 9-11, he used to say, even in the midst of this terrible crucible of the U.S. government after 9-11,

amid the panic and the terror of that attack in the months that followed, I'm still getting more sleep than I ever did in Vietnam. I must say I've been blessed by three families. My family, my wife, my children, grandchildren, my Marine Corps family, and for the last 12 years, my FBI family. I think Bob Mueller probably looks at leading the Russia investigation as really only the third hardest job he's ever had in his life after leading the company in Vietnam and then also leading the FBI after 9-11. So what does he do after Vietnam?

How does he get from there to the head of the FBI? So he comes back and basically wants to become a prosecutor. Ends up as an assistant U.S. attorney in San Francisco, works his way up to the top of the Justice Department in the George H.W. Bush administration. And at the end of the first Bush administration goes off into private practice. And I've talked to a lot of people who worked with him over the one year he spends in private practice, and they all have a similar story that they tell that goes something like they bring Mueller in to meet with a new potential client. As a defense attorney, Mueller

listens to the client talk about what has transpired. And then he says something along the lines of, well, if that's what you've done, then you should plead guilty and go to prison. That is not exactly the like warm reception that most people want from their defense attorney. Wow. He sounds like he was like the worst defense attorney ever. I think Bob Mueller would proudly say that he would be one of America's worst defense attorneys. Amazing. So he goes to Eric Holder, this is the early 1990s, who is then the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, and asks Eric Holder if he can come back to the U.S. Attorney's Office as a line prosecutor and work homicides in D.C.

And then when the second Bush administration starts, he is brought back to Washington by John Ashcroft and then nominated that summer to become FBI director. Thank you all for coming. General, thank you for being here. It is my honor to nominate Robert S. Mueller of California to become the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. He becomes FBI director a week before 9-11? Yeah, he starts on September 4th, and on Tuesday

morning, September the 11th, he is sitting in his first briefing and an aide interrupts the meeting to say a plane has hit the World Trade Center. And he spends the next 12 years remaking the FBI from a domestic law enforcement agency into an international intelligence agency. My term as FBI director is due to expire later this summer. However, in early May, the president asked if I would be willing to serve an additional two years. Upon some reflection, discussion with my family, I told him that I would be willing to do so. Twelve years at the head of the FBI seems like a fairly solid run. Yes, it is.

Absolutely. He is the longest serving FBI director since J. Edgar Hoover himself. And that was actually what got me first interested in him in the spring of 2008 was I was writing about him at the time because he was the last senior U.S. official in his same job from 9-11. He had outlasted, you know, five CIA directors. You know, Bob Mueller has no further ambitions. You know, he wasn't doing the FBI as a stepping stone to some other job. This was where he planned to end his career. We are an organization where integrity is at the heart and soul of what we do.

And I think that is a quintessential value that postures us for success in the future. Was Robert Mueller well-liked in the FBI? He was well-respected within the FBI, which I say is a distinction from well-liked. He was not someone who is particularly warm and fuzzy. He was famous for telling meetings the old Crimson Tide movie line, we're here to preserve democracy, not to practice it. Once a decision is made, Bob Mueller is not one who brokers a lot of dissent or criticism. Those sailors out there are just boys.

Boys who are trained to do a terrible and unthinkable thing. If that ever occurs, the only reassurance they'll have that they're doing the proper thing is going to derive from their unqualified belief in the unified chain of command. He is a Marine. You know, if you ever look at photos of Bob Mueller, he still wears his watch on the inside of his wrist because that's the way Marines are taught so that your watch doesn't catch glare in the jungle and give away your position. Wow. I'm going to start wearing my watch that way. Well, it's actually, it's an interesting, you know, once you start noticing it, I mean,

that's how a lot of military folks and combat veterans wear their watch. And that's still, you know, every day when you look at Mueller, you know, that's one physical sign of his service in the Marines. So if not well liked, what made Robert Muellerrespected for those 12 years as FBI director? There is no I in Bob Mueller's world. Mueller was famous for going through all of his speeches and crossing out the word I and writing the word we just to underscore that it was always a team effort. And again, that's really the polar opposite of the president, right? I was just thinking you could imagine the president going through his

speech and crossing out the we's and making them I's. Exactly. I mean, this is a guy who stood up at the Republican convention and said, I alone can fix it. Everything in Donald Trump's orbit revolves around I. And I think that sort of part of what makes these two people staring each other down so fascinating is I just don't think at the end of the day, Donald Trump can wrap his mind around people like Bob Mueller who believe in serving an institution or a tradition larger than oneself. Coming up, to understand how this Mueller investigation might play out, it's helpful to look at the last Mueller investigation. It's a doozy. This is Today Explained. All together now, Google Play has audiobooks.

I went just to make sure. Right now you can get $10 off your first purchase of an audiobook that's over $10 when you go to g.co.play.explained and log in with your Google account. One of the books you can get is The Last Black Unicorn by Tiffany Haddish, narrated by Tiffany Haddish. It's a side-splitting, hysterical, edgy, and unflinching collection of extremely personal essays, as fearless as the author herself. Growing up in one of the poorest neighborhoods of South Central Los Angeles, Tiffany learned to survive by making people laugh. If she could do that, then her classmates would let her copy their homework.

The other foster kids she lived with wouldn't beat her up, and she might even get a boyfriend. Or at least she could make enough money as the paid school mascot and in-demand bar mitzvah hype woman to get her hair and nails done so that she might get a boyfriend. None of that worked, and she's still single, but it allowed Tiffany to imagine a place for herself where she could do something she loved for a living. Comedy. Sounds like a great Friday listen. Another great Friday listen is the Verge cast, because it comes out on Fridays. The top dogs at the Verge get together every Friday and unpack the most important talked

about stories in technology, they explain why they all matter. Type The Verge Cast into whatever thing you use to get your podcasts and subscribe and listen and love and rate and review. And you can rate and review today explained while you're there. It's perfect. You mentioned that Robert Mueller looked at the end of his tenure as FBI director as sort of the end of his career in public service. So what does he do after he leaves the FBI? So Robert Mueller leaves the FBI September 2013. He goes off into private practice and he is hired by the NFL to investigate the Ray Rice domestic violence incident. And this is the thing that I actually always point people to when they ask about how is he going to conduct this

investigation of special counsel? What should we expect from him i always point them back to that ray rice investigation raven's running back ray rice and his fiancee were arrested over the weekend after a fight at a casino in atlantic city there was surveillance video of it that came out the videos show rice and palmer in an elevator in an atlantic city casino each hits the other before rice knocks pal Palmer off her feet and into the railing. After Palmer collapses, he drags her out of the elevator and is met by some hotel staff. The NFL sort of faced this huge public outcry,

so they wanted Mueller to come in and investigate how they had handled the incident and the response. And what exactly is the mandate he's given by the NFL? This is where I think that there's reason to be cautious about what we should all expect out of the Mueller Russia report. He's given a very narrow mandate by the NFL just to investigate how the NFL handled the video of this incident and responded to the video of this incident. And that's all Bob Mueller goes out and does. He writes this incredibly detailed report just looking at that simple question. There's this five-page section of the report that just deals with how the NFL mailroom

signs for packages. Like, it is, you know, I always joke, like, Bob Mueller probably learned things about the NFL mailroom that the NFL mailroom employees didn't know before he and his team showed up there to investigate it. It's a forensic examination, you know, unlike almost anything you could imagine. And what did Mueller find?

What he actually ends up proving is that they never actually got the video. The NFL did not get a copy of that video. And it interviewed 200 people at the NFL headquarters. It went through forensic evidence. It could not find a single person at the NFL office that had a copy of the video, that saw a copy of the video, that spoke to another person who that had a copy of the video, that saw a copy of the video, that spoke to another person who did see a copy of the video. That's part of what ends up being why they spend so much time talking about how the NFL

mailroom signs for packages. And he leaves aside all of the other larger questions about, you know, does the NFL coddle abusers? Does the NFL have sufficient support in place for battered women? All of the bigger questions, Bob Mueller skips over. And I think we see that in this investigation today with Russia, which is Bob Mueller is laser focused in the work that he does and doesn't use any of these positions as an opportunity to do larger fishing expeditions. Did he catch any flack for not answering some of the bigger questions in the NFL investigation? There were a lot of people who absolutely criticized his report for the NFL for not tackling those bigger questions.

Do we need an investigative report? Do we need a team to tell us? Do we need somebody to deduce that this woman got knocked out? I mean, please, everybody knew that. The NFL had enough information here from the elevator that it should have acted in a more appropriate manner. It didn't. So does this just go back to his military service, to his adherence to following the rule of law and just following orders where he can't go outside the parameters of what he's told to do,

even when it seems like there's an obvious reason to do so? This is the Marine in him. You take your orders and you go out and you execute your orders and you don't freelance. So he might approach the Russia investigation in the same way? Exactly. in him. You take your orders and you go out and you execute your orders and you don't freelance. So he might approach the Russia investigation in the same way? Exactly. And why do you think he took the job? He's been done with public service for a while now and he shies away from the spotlight. And to put yourself in the center of one of the most

divisive and important investigations in the history of American politics feels, I don't know, contrary. I think, though, the way that Bob Mueller probably looks at it is that this was his country asking him to serve. So he served again. In the end, it is not only what we do, but how we do it. And regardless of your chosen career, you are only as good as your word. You can be smart, aggressive, articulate, indeed persuasive, but if you are not honest, your reputation will suffer, and once lost, a good reputation can never, ever be regained.

As the saying goes, if you have integrity, nothing else matters. And if you do not have integrity, nothing else matters. Garrett Graff is a contributing editor at Wired and the author of The Threat Matrix, inside Robert Mueller's FBI. I'm Sean Ramos from This Is Today Explained. We're off Monday for the road. Google Play has audiobooks. There's over a thousand titles to choose from. You don't have to subscribe. You just need a Google account.

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