TIME Magazine has named Special Counsel Robert Mueller one its People of the Year. He hold the number three spot behind The Guardians (of fact and truth) and Donald Trump.
TIME's profile of Mueller includes the acknowledgement he is the exact opposite of the man he is investigating.
TIME:
Trump and Mueller could hardly be more different. One created a public persona as the embodiment of gaudy capitalism; the other is a reticent patrician, driven and serious, who's devoted his life to institutions. One embodies disruption, the other consistency. One flouts the rules, the other enforces them. One is the avatar of disorder, the other the personification of order. Nothing less than core principles of American justice and self-government are at stake in their struggle.
Mueller's past military service plays a strong role in defining who he is and how he operates.
Mueller served in Vietnam for one year, but the stint would set the course for the rest of his life. "You can't understand him without understanding his roots as a Marine," says Lisa Monaco, his former chief of staff at the FBI and later homeland-security adviser to President Barack Obama. "His leadership style and his work ethic and his focus on leading by example and with integrity are all completely bound up and informed by his service as a Marine." That Mueller survived his tour while others did not only heightened his sense of duty. "Perhaps because of that," Mueller said during a 2013 commencement address at the College of William & Mary, "I have always felt compelled to try to give back in some way."
The whole piece is worth a read, but for additional insight into how Mueller's service shaped who he is, check out Garret Graff's profile in Wired from May:
Mueller, for his part, not only volunteered for the Marines, he spent a year waiting for an injured knee to heal so he could serve. And he has said little about his time in Vietnam over the years. When he was leading the FBI through the catastrophe of 9/11 and its aftermath, he would brush off the crushing stress, saying, “I’m getting a lot more sleep now than I ever did in Vietnam.” One of the only other times his staff at the FBI ever heard him mention his Marine service was on a flight home from an official international trip. They were watching We Were Soldiers, a 2002 film starring Mel Gibson about some of the early battles in Vietnam. Mueller glanced at the screen and observed, “Pretty accurate.”
(...)
ROBERT SWAN MUELLER III, the first of five children and the only son, grew up in a stately stone house in a wealthy Philadelphia suburb. His father was a DuPont executive who had captained a Navy submarine-chaser in World War II; he expected his children to abide by a strict moral code. “A lie was the worst sin,” Mueller says. “The one thing you didn’t do was to give anything less than the truth to my mother and father.” (Read more)
TIME wraps its profile of Mueller on a note of curiosity as to what the special counsel may do if his investigation concludes the president committed a crime.
... There's no definitive answer as to whether a President can be prosecuted. It's never happened before, and no court has ruled on the issue. (The Supreme Court heard arguments about it in 1974 in relation to Richard Nixon's role in the Watergate cover-up but never resolved the question.) The Constitution doesn't explicitly state whether a President can be prosecuted while in office. The official view of the Executive Branch is that it can't be done: in 2000, the Office of Legal Counsel wrote a memo arguing that a President can't be indicted.
It's not clear if Mueller has his own view of this difficult constitutional question. Nor is it clear what he thinks might be appropriate in this case. For a man devoted to protocol and committed to a black-and-white view of the world, such a moment would be the ultimate test of character. What documents will Mueller refer to if he faces that judgment? What higher principles will guide him as he sorts through his responsibilities? ...
THE SHORT LIST NO. 3 PERSON OF THE YEAR 2018 ROBERT MUELLER (TIME)