President Trump sank lower than low, even by his standards, after he learned on Saturday that former special prosecutor Robert Mueller had died.
“Good, I’m glad he’s dead,” Trump posted on Truth Social. “He can no longer hurt innocent people!”
Much of Trump’s rancor no doubt stems from Mueller’s investigation into possible Russian interference in the 2016 Presidential election. The probe led to indictments against 34 individuals, but not Trump himself.
Trump declared himself exonerated.
But, as he now strives in his second term to play a wartime commander-in-chief, Trump cannot escape a stain from a past collusion: this with a Queens podiatrist. Trump remains a draft dodger. And he has not likely forgotten comparisons that had been made between himself and Mueller, who not only enlisted but also overcame what initially kept him from serving.
When Donald Trump secured his infamous bone spur draft deferment in September of 1968, Robert Mueller had spent a year waiting for a sports-related knee injury to heal so he could be cleared for combat duty with the Marine Corps.
That November, 24-year-old Mueller arrived in Vietnam and became a platoon leader in “The Magnificent Bastards,” Second Battalion, Fourth Marine Regiment. He had been there a month when his platoon became embroiled in an eight-hour battle.
“2nd Lt. Mueller fearlessly moved from one position to another, directing the accurate counterfire of his men and shouting words of encouragement to them,” the citation for his Bronze Star medal with a V for valor reads.
In April of 1969, Mueller rushed to support a squad of his Marines who were caught in an ambush. An AK-47 round tore through his right thigh, but he kept on fighting.
“Although seriously wounded during the firefight, he resolutely maintained his position and, ably directing the fire of his platoon, was instrumental in defeating the North Vietnamese Army force,” said the citation for his Bronze Star medal.
Trump had gone into his father’s real estate business and later called himself “a great and very brave soldier” for avoiding STDs as a nepo baby about town.
“It’s amazing, I can’t even believe it,” he told radio host Howard Stern in a 1997 interview. “I’ve been so lucky in terms of that whole world, it is a dangerous world out there. It’s like Vietnam, sort of. It is my personal Vietnam.”
He suggested that vaginas were “potential landmines…there’s some real danger there.”
Mueller went on to become an attorney and rose to the upper echelon of the U.S. Department of Justice before leaving for a job with a fancy Washington law firm where a secretary answered his phone with “Mr. Mueller’s office.”
But he remained too much of a Marine to just keep making money when the nation’s capital was also becoming its murder capital, with more than 400 killings a year. He telephoned the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, Eric Holder, and said he wanted to become a frontline homicide prosecutor.
In 1995, at the age of 50, Mueller arrived at his new job with a Marine Corps pin on his suit lapel and became the oldest and most improbable rookie in the history of the homicide bureau. He now answered his own phone.
“Homicide, Mueller.”
The victim in Mueller’s first homicide case was three-year-old Rhonda Morris. He impressed the victim’s mother as well as the detectives and his fellow prosecutors with his focus, energy, and unfailing attention to the smallest details.
“He takes a personal interest in whatever he is doing,” Rhonda’s mother, Valerie Morris-Murdock, previously told the Daily Beast. “He gave it his all. He didn’t take shortcuts. He didn’t hand it to his investigators.”
Mueller was gentle, supportive, and reassuring with Morris-Murdock, but all the more so with her surviving daughter, Remi, who witnessed the killing when she was just a year older than Rhonda.
Remi instantly recognized Mueller when she saw a news report about the new director of the FBI on September 4, 2001.
“She said, ‘Mom, did you see Mr. Mueller on TV? You know he’s the director with the FBI,’” Morris-Murdock previously told me.
A high-ranking FBI official remembers that on his very first day, Mueller asked to be walked through all the bureau’s critical emergency procedures. He was fully briefed when the planes flew into the World Trade Center seven days after his arrival.
“He actually understood how to crank up the FBI machine to full tilt and turn it on and make it effective,” the official told the Daily Beast following Mueller’s death. “You know, after 9/11, everybody wanted to make the FBI a scapegoat. He was the guy who saved the FBI.”
And Mueller kept at it.
“He showed up every day at 6:18 in the morning,” the official said. “If you wanted to set your watch by it, you could. Because at 6:18, that elevator door opened from the director’s elevator, and he stepped out into the office and he was there until six or seven at night, and then he left with a briefcase. Who the f--- still had a briefcase?”
“And what wouldn’t fit in the briefcase, he carried to the car, and then he read all that stuff at night at home.”
The official recalled a day in the director’s office when he urged Mueller to be more “out front” as the public face of the FBI. Mueller pointed out the window and to the left.
“He said, ‘What’s down at the end of that street?’ and I said, ‘The Capitol’,” he said. “Any time, I start what seems like the administration’s line there, they tell me I’m kowtowing to the White House.”
Mueller then pointed to the right.
“He said, ‘What’s down there?’ I said, ‘The White House.’ And he said, ‘And any time, advance the FBI’s interest in front of Congress, [the administration] says I’m going around them, and, you know, bending over to Congress.”
The official recalled Mueller then saying, “By not being out there all the time, taking positions on all of these things, by not being the face and the voice of the FBI and what some people would interpret as aggrandisement, people look at me as neutral.”
The official added, “What he meant was, ‘They look at me as an honest broker who’s not self-dealing. That’s more valuable than me being out there all the time.’”
Mueller remained unflaggingly disciplined and precise right up to when he retired on September 4, 2013, 12 years to the day after he arrived.
In May of 2017, Trump fired FBI director James Comey. Then Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein called 72-year-old Mueller out of retirement to serve as a special counsel to investigate what Trump had been dismissing as the “Russian Hoax.” A special counsel’s report revealed Trump’s reaction to the appointment.
“Oh my God. This is terrible. This is the end of my Presidency. I’m f---ed.”
As Trump must have feared, Mueller undertook his new duties just as he had as a platoon leader and as a homicide prosecutor. Mueller filed a final report for Congress that essentially led nowhere. Trump to this day continues to rage about “the Russian hoax.”
And, with the news of Mueller’s death, there also comes a reminder of that other collusion involving a Queens podiatrist.
That is a stain that only deepens as the draft dodger mounts a war of his choosing. And Trump compounds it by now going so low as to say he is glad a decorated and truly glorious war hero is dead.
