The special counsel avoids the public eye

Robert Mueller has no comment

The special counsel avoids the public eye and swears others to secrecy — even as Trump allies accuse him of leaking.

By DARREN SAMUELSOHN

Robert Mueller is rarely seen and almost never heard. He doesn’t frequent popular restaurants, appear on television or even issue statements. When he meets in person with President Donald Trump’s lawyers, he does not visit the White House where reporters might notice. He instead summons them to the conference rooms of his southwest Washington, D.C., office, the specific location of which is among his many well-guarded secrets.

In those meetings and others, the special counsel investigating Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election strictly limits the number of outsiders who may attend. Militant about leaks, the former FBI director swears participants to secrecy that they have honored to a remarkable degree. Reporters have long considered him among Washington’s toughest nuts to crack: “You’d be embarrassed to ask Bob Mueller for a leak,” said the veteran journalist Steven Brill, who has written extensively about media coverage of special counsels. “It’d be like asking him to watch a porn movie with you.”

Occasionally a savvy Washingtonian scores a chance sighting. When public relations professional Eddie Gonzalez saw Mueller walking alone near Capitol Hill on a mid-September weekday afternoon, he suppressed an instinct to chase him down for a selfie, he said. But a hotel restaurant worker did score a picture with him this spring, which her son posted on Twitter. Mueller grinned for that photo, slightly. But when a CNN crew chased him down a Senate hallway in June — “The president thinks it’s a ‘witch hunt.’ Is there any way you can respond to that?” — the poker-faced G-man just stared ahead and kept walking.

The moment illustrated the strange dynamic of Mueller’s mission. He is leading a highly secretive investigation into a president who publicly criticizes the probe on a regular basis. It also underscored what former colleagues, fellow prosecutors and people close to the investigation call Mueller’s calculated effort, in the face of a president who has contemplated his firing, to make himself as small a part of the story as possible.

Even within his own investigation, Mueller takes steps to remain offstage. He deploys members of his team of 16 lawyers to question grand jury witnesses. When he does take meetings, he regulates their attendees carefully. During four trips to Capitol Hill this summer, he met only with the top-ranking members of committees leading Congress’ three Russia probes. A handful of staffers were allowed to join, according to two congressional officials, who said Mueller instructed attendees not to disclose the substance of the meetings. There is no evidence that they have.

People who know Mueller say he has relied on the same head-down style through his four decades in law enforcement and is fiercely determined to avoid compromising his investigation by exposure to charges of leaking or politicization — accusations some Trump allies have already leveled.

“I play it by the book and I tell anyone who works with me you better play it by the book,” the Washington lawyer Lanny Davis recalls Mueller, then FBI director, telling him in a conversation when Davis served on a federal oversight board.

Mueller has spoken once in public as special counsel: a late May address at his granddaughter's graduation from a Massachusetts prep school, delivered just 12 days after his appointment, which made no mention of Trump or Russia.

Mueller’s style is in contrast to that of his successor as FBI director, James Comey, who publicly discussed his investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server on multiple occasions last year during the heat of the presidential campaign.

Iran-Contra independent counsel Lawrence Walsh met regularly with reporters and granted a long on-the-record interview with The New York Times in October 1987, less than a year into his tenure. “There is just so much curiosity about what we're doing,” Walsh told the newspaper. “If I don't answer questions, the only other alternative I see is worse.”

But Mueller has thus far followed the path of special counsel, Patrick Fitzgerald, who didn’t say a word in public until almost two years after his December 2003 appointment, and then only to announce the indictment of Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, for obstruction of justice, perjury and making false statements as a result of the probe into the leak of CIA agent Valerie Plame’s identity.

Appearances can be deceiving, however: Kenneth Starr investigated President Bill Clinton for four years before going on the record with Brill to discuss his work as independent counsel, then revealing several undisclosed conversations his office had with reporters. Starr’s chief spokesman was also prosecuted after falsely denying that he leaked to the Times.

Mueller’s spokesman, Peter Carr, is a Justice Department criminal division veteran who spends much of his day refusing to answer questions. In recent weeks Carr has declined to comment on everything from the scope and progress of Mueller’s investigation to the reason why his office address — relocated this summer from a publicly disclosed site near FBI headquarters — is now secret.

Frustrating as it may be for reporters, political insiders and news junkies desperate for insight into Mueller’s investigation, legal experts say Mueller is playing his cards exactly right.

“It’s not the role of the prosecutor to be making comments about an ongoing grand jury investigation. It’s inappropriate. It’s unwise. It’s inappropriate legally. It’s unethical,” said Peter Zeidenberg, a former federal prosecutor who served as deputy to Fitzgerald during the Plame investigation.

What’s more, Zeidenberg said, Mueller’s silence can help the investigation. “Keeping potential targets in the dark is a good thing,” he said.

Talking to the media in such a politically charged environment is dangerous business, not just for a special counsel like Mueller—but for his subordinates as well.

Only one person was criminally prosecuted as a result of Starr’s probe into Clinton’s affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky: his own spokesman, Charles Bakaly. The cause was a January 1999 New York Times report that Starr believed he could indict a sitting president and that the newspaper attributed to “several associates of Starr.” Bakaly strongly denied that Starr’s office had leaked the story — but later admitted to assisting the Times reporter. (He was charged with lying in a sworn statement; a judge acquitted him.)

The episode may serve as a cautionary tale for Mueller: Clinton’s lawyers quickly filed a legal complaint about the Times story—one of several instances when the White House accused Starr of “illegal and partisan leaking.”

“There are consequences to all of this,” said Robert Ray, who succeeded Starr as the Clinton independent counsel, referring to the examples of both Comey and Bakaly. “If you speak out, boy I tell you, you’ve got to be real sure about what you’re doing and why. The default position to have is to have nothing to say.”

Mueller’s office says it follows Justice Department’s guidelines which prohibit comments on the “nature or progress” of a case beyond what has been publicly filed in court. “The special counsel’s office has undertaken stringent controls to prohibit unauthorized disclosures that deal severely with any member who engages in this conduct,” Carr told reporters in June.

Despite Trump’s public anger at Mueller’s investigation, his lawyers aren’t accusing the special counsel of foul play.

John Dowd, Trump’s lead outside attorney, said in an interview that he doesn’t think Mueller — whom he’s known for decades — talks to reporters, even on background.

“I don’t think Bob leaks at all,” Dowd said.

But some Trump allies see it differently.

Conservative legal activist Larry Klayman last month petitioned the Justice Department and two federal judges to investigate what he calls “how new improper leaks are occurring nearly every single day from Mr. Mueller’s investigation.”

“You don’t get this level of detail on what’s going on in the investigation unless you’re leaking,” Klayman said in an interview.

“The leaks have to be coming from inside Mueller's team. So who’s leaking?” former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who led the push for impeachment against Clinton, asked on Fox News in July.

Others reject the premise that Mueller’s team is dishing on its work, noting that many of the stories about his probe could have come from people with whom he has interacted.

“I’ve seen almost nothing at all in any story in any newspaper that could not have come from somebody else,” said Paul Rosenzweig, who served as a senior counsel to Starr. “There’s very little evidence that this is Mueller—and if you read it closely in most instances it’s not.”

It’s a “dirty little secret” that defense attorneys can talk to reporters about any aspect of the investigation they’ve seen, said Benjamin Wittes, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who edits the blog Lawfare.

Some defense lawyers also speak on background with reporters, agreeing to provide quotes or information if it is attributed in a way that could point a finger back at prosecutors — or in this case, some suspect, at Mueller.

“Then [they] turn around and complain of prosecutorial leaking,” Wittes added — a tactic Starr’s office accused the Clinton White House of using during the Lewinsky investigation.

Rosenzweig noted that Mueller would be wise to avoid a war of words with Trump: “If you get into a public relations fight with the president the prosecutor loses,” he said.

But Rosenzwieg added there is little reason for Mueller to be defensive, noting that the attacks leveled against him so far seem to have done little damage.

“They haven’t gotten a lot of credibility and traction, so why waste time?” Rosenzweig said.

Mueller’s office declined to comment.