Politics

Mueller Has Bipartisan Appeal

By CBSNews.com staff CBSNews.com staff

July 5, 2001 / 1:20 PM EDT / CBS

If President Bush was looking for an FBI director with some bipartisan appeal, he might have found the right man in Robert Mueller III.

It's a good bet that if Bob Mueller hadn't made a bold career move six years ago, he never would have been nominated for FBI Director in the Rose Garden Thursday, reports CBS News Correspondent Jim Stewart.

It was 1995 and Washington D.C.'s crime rate was exploding when Mueller offered to take a huge pay cut from private practice and return to Washington as a homicide prosecutor.

Already popular with Republicans for his service in the elder President Bush's Justice Department, the new move also endeared him to Democrats like Janet Reno and Eric Holder who rapidly promoted him. That sort of bipartisan popularity is expected to lead to a quick confirmation.

But the 56-year-old career prosecutor isn't likely to clinch the confirmation on outspokenness.

"He's so shy that he is not the type of person to phone around for people to come to his aid or make public statements," said U.S. District Judge Charles R. Breyer, brother of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen G. Breyer.

"He's a true professional. He's not guided by a particular ideology. He's guided by a sense of what the law is and what is fair," Charles Breyer added.

Robert Mueller III

Born August 7, 1944

Republican

Married, two daughters

Lives in San Francisco

University of Virginia Law School, 1973

United States Marine Corps, 1967-1970, decorations include Purple Heart

U.S. attorney in San Francisco, 1998 to present

Acting Deputy U.S. Attorney General, January to May 2001

Chief of Homicide Section in U.S. attorney office in Washington, D.C., 1996 to 1998

Senior Partner at Hale and Dorr in Washington D.C., 1993-1995

Assistant Attorney General in U.S. attorney office in Washington, D.C., 1990 to 1993

U.S. attorney in Boston, 1986-1987

Federal prosecutor in San Francisco, 1973 to 1976

(AP)

As a young prosecutor Mueller led a nine-month racketeering investigation against the Hell's Angels. He was involved in the Pan Am 103 indictments, the decision to prosecute Panamanian strongman Manuel Noreiga and the controversial BCCI banking scandal case.

Most recently, it was Mueller who helped Attorney General John Ashcroft settle into his new job. And it was Mueller sources say, who pushed hardest — and unsuccessfully — to try accused FBI spy Robert Hansen on death penalty charges.

Mueller would succeed Louis Freeh, a former federal judge who left the bureau last month, two years before his 10-year term would have expired.

Freeh had been credited with extending FBI's influence around the world and making cooperative law enforcement agreements with many countries. But his tenure has tarnished — particularly at the end — by scandal, including the bureau's failure to produce some 4,000 pages of documents to lawyers for Timothy McVeigh.

McVeigh was executed June 11, and bureau officials have said that Freeh did not know about the misplaced evidence papers at the time he announced his retirement.

Mueller, a former acting deputy attorney general at Justice, won the support of Ashcroft by aiding in the transition from the Clinton administration from January until May, when he resumed his job in San Francisco.

"He reorganized the U.S. attorney's office and replaced a lot of people and the number of prosecutions did increase significantly after he came in," said Barry Portman, the government's public defender in San Francisco. "I think he's got good judgment about cases."