Putting Robert Mueller Into Context

Robert Mueller, whose testimony to two committees of the House of Representatives on the scandal enveloping Donald Trump this week dominated the headlines, took up his job as director of the FBI on September 4th, 2001, exactly a week before Al Qaeda took down the twin towers in Manhattan and blasted a huge hole in the side of the Pentagon in Washington DC.

The attacks on 911 were a massive indictment of America’s intelligence apparatus. Both the FBI and the CIA had missed clear signals that the attack was being prepared and compounded their folly by stubbornly refusing to share what intelligence they had.

It became Mueller’s task to rehabilitate the FBI (the CIA had their own way, to which the people of Iraq can attest) and the way he went about it reveals enough about the man and his value system to make his pathetic performance at Congress last week no surprise at all, except to those many US journalists who failed to do their homework on the man, or if they did, to ignore it.

I must admit I didn’t follow every twist and turn of the media coverage that followed Thursday’s debacle in Washington but I watched and read enough to notice that there was virtually no mention of how this sordid chapter in Mueller’s professional life marked him out as a government servant for whom no depth was too low if the end result suited the needs of his political masters and kept all his confreres in well paid, prestigious employment.

I’ll leave it to The Guardian’s Paul Harris to describe, in this November 2011 article, how Robert Mueller went about the job of rehabilitating the FBI, post 911, and why no-one should have been surprised at the man’s refusal to tell Congress the truth about what his investigation had unearthed about Donald Trump.

Enjoy – if that is the right word.