Jessica Yellin Instagram – Robert Mueller, the former FBI director who led the special counsel investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, died Friday. He was 81.
Mueller ran the FBI for 12 years — longer than anyone since J. Edgar Hoover — and reshaped the bureau after 9/11, shifting its focus from domestic law enforcement to counterterrorism. In 2004, he threatened to resign rather than certify a warrantless wiretapping program the Bush White House was pushing through, a moment widely cited as a rare act of institutional courage.
His legacy became impossible to separate from the Russia investigation during the first Trump term. To MAGA conservatives, he was a deep-state operative running a politicized witch hunt. To liberals, he was a man whose rigid devotion to process — and failure of imagination — allowed an unprecedented constitutional crisis to go unanswered.
Today’s remembrances reflect a country that can’t agree on what it is looking at. | Posted on 22/Mar/2026 01:22:20
