Robert S. Mueller, American Hero

I try to avoid political bias in these blog posts, as I have said before. And indeed, I think that this blog post will hold to those standards: its hero and its villain vote for the same party. I am not, however, without bias towards those involved in the story, and I feel that I should disclose as much. As for our villain, while I do not like his politics or personality, I am no more likely to believe him guilty than anyone else (that is to say, I need quite a bit of evidence before I believe him to have committed a crime.)

As for our protagonist, I think that Robert S. Mueller is an American hero through and through.

I am not going to focus this story on the target of Mueller's investigation. To try and piece together the various claims and separate the true from the false is something far beyond the scope of this blog. (In fact, it is precisely the scope of Mueller's current position, but I digress). Instead, I am going to keep this post relatively positive and focus on what Mueller has done to fight corruption and the untruth of allegations against him.

According to biography.com, Mueller served "with distinction" as an officer in Vietnam, earning several medals (including the Purple Heart for being wounded in action) before returning to the United States and becoming a lawyer, a career path which led him to the FBI. He then went on to become FBI director from 2001 through 2013 (including guiding it through 9/11) and was called back after his retirement (in a conversation that I assume went much like the stereotypical buddy cop movie) to serve as special prosecutor for the corruption case involving the President and his campaign.

This is, of course, all excellent evidence of this man's patriotism. But perhaps the best evidence would be the two photos below, showing how in his tenure as FBI Director he went grey in service to his homeland.

Robert Mueller, 2001. Image Credits

One decade later. Image Credits

But enough about the man himself, since far more important than his resume than the fact that he may be our best bet at rooting out corruption in the government. I'd like to spend the rest of this blog post instead discussing what he has done to try and lead the fight against a corruption scandal the likes of which has rarely, if ever, been seen before.

This investigation has been moving at what seems to laypeople (myself very much included) as the pace of an arthritic glacier, but that is the unfortunate nature of the legal process of indicting large portions of a campaign team for what may well be a multitude of crimes. Thankfully, we have received something of a regular trickle of criminal charges that indicate that Mueller is closing in on the truth.

The most recent indictment to occur in the investigation was the 13 indictments that Mueller recently made against Russians who are accused of engaging in a plot to interfere with the 2016 election, as reported by TIME Magazine. Perhaps notably, this indictment does not accuse any Americans of knowingly aiding the Russians in these efforts; rather, it only deals with the specific crimes that the Russians committed. This interference, which was conducted by 13 individuals as well as a number of companies, took place in the form of advertisements undisclosed to the proper authorities attacking Hillary Clinton, Marco Rubio, and Ted Cruz and supporting Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump.

There was even more recent news. Only a few hours ago as of the time of writing (that is to say, about 10 or 11 pm on Wednesday), Vox published an article talking about the direction that Mueller was evidently pointing his investigation in. According to the article, Mueller had plans to begin investigating Trump's attempted firing of Jeff Sessions earlier in 2017. While this is hardly conclusive, it does show that he is still active and that the investigation will continue to produce results.

Of course, this is not everything. Detailing the full list of Mueller's activity in this investigation would make a better topic for an essay than a 750-word blog post, but to briefly summarize, he has spent the past months slowly indicting members of Trump's campaign team one by one (usually with enough evidence that they plead guilty) in spite of unfounded accusations of bias (remember, as I stated when this article began, that Mueller is a Republican) in a process that will hopefully end only when the last corrupt official is out of the White House and in prison.