Mueller Is Admirably Apolitical. That’s the Problem.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/29/opinion/mueller-trump-russia-report.html

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Robert S. Mueller III has spoken, but he had very little to say. As he said at a brief news conference on Wednesday morning, he will not go beyond what his report said. He will not criticize Attorney General Bill Barr, even though he wrote a letter to Mr. Barr in late March complaining that the attorney general’s summary of the Mueller report did not capture its “context, nature, and substance.”

And while he didn’t completely close the door on appearing before Congress, Mr. Mueller made it clear that it wouldn’t exactly be must-see TV, so what would be the point.

What we saw on display in Mr. Mueller’s nine-minute statement was his often discussed sense of rectitude and propriety. These are admirable attributes, normally. But we might well wonder whether those attributes are what is needed in the age of Donald Trump, or whether the preservation of our democratic institutions demands more.

Born in Manhattan to a former Navy officer and the granddaughter of a railroad executive, Mr. Mueller was the product of an era and a social class to whom the kind of flesh-ripping partisanship we have today was absolutely anathema.

He grew up mostly in Princeton, N.J. At a private school he attended in New Hampshire, a lacrosse (yes, lacrosse) teammate was John Kerry. It’s worth mentioning Mr. Kerry, because he was the same sort: well-born and imbued with the identical sense of class duty. Mr. Kerry, as is well known, enlisted in the Navy even before he graduated from Yale in 1966, and insisted he be sent to Vietnam.

Mr. Mueller graduated from Princeton that same year and soon enlisted in the Marines. Like Mr. Kerry, he saw combat in Vietnam. He won a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart. “One of the reasons I went into the Marine Corps was because we lost a very good friend, a Marine in Vietnam, who was a year ahead of me at Princeton,” he said in a 2016 interview. “There were a number of us who felt we should follow his example and at least go into the service. And it flows from there.”

Mr. Kerry is a Democrat, and Mr. Mueller a Republican. But in their social stratum, while Republicans surely outnumbered Democrats, it didn’t matter all that much. You could, in those days, be in either party and still have the same sense of duty and even, unimaginable as it seems today, believe many of the same things. Thus Mr. Mueller could be comfortable spending much of his career in the Department of Justice in one form or another, being named to posts by Democrats and Republicans alike.

And that is the Robert Mueller who did not want to be seen as being part of anything too “political.” As a creature of his generation, his class, the Marines and the Justice Department, being political surely goes against every instinct he has.

But there is another ideal that men like Mr. Mueller and Mr. Kerry were raised to uphold: the willingness to stand up to the dark impulses of the moment. There is a story, first reported by Jane Mayer in The New Yorker, that illustrates the mind-set perfectly. Shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks, in the face of all the hysteria, precious few lawyers were willing to defend suspected terrorists. At a Washington dinner party, guests began to turn on Tom Wilner, a corporate lawyer who was at the time defending a Guantánamo detainee.

After a guest asked Mr. Wilner how he could do such as thing, Mr. Mueller, who was also at the party, stood up. He raised his glass and said: “I toast Tom Wilner. He is doing what an American should.”

Now let us ask: What do we suppose a man who toasted Tom Wilner in such a fashion must think of Donald Trump?

I think we know. And yet, Mr. Mueller will not say so publicly. He just reiterates that he wants the evidence to speak for itself. The evidence, however, was not allowed to speak for itself, as he knows. The attorney general spoke for it. And many Republican members of Congress apparently didn’t even read the evidence. The president of the United States mocks it and lies about it, saying the report found no evidence of obstruction.

And so we are living in a clash of Robert Mueller’s two Americas. In the America in which he grew up, and the America he has served with rectitude and dignity, riding quietly off into the sunset would perhaps have been the right thing to do.

But that America is no longer. Shards of it remain, but it is under constant assault. If Mr. Mueller wishes to serve and preserve that America, he might still ask himself whether this brief statement followed by silence is the best way to do that. And he should determine to do, to quote his old toast, what an American should.

Michael Tomasky is a columnist for The Daily Beast, editor of Democracy: A Journal of Ideas and a contributing opinion writer. He is the author, most recently, of “If We Can Keep It: How the Republic Collapsed and How It Might Be Saved.”

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