Word: mueller
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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There's one job no one in America wants, and Robert Mueller's got it. And as the occupant of the hottest seat in the nation, he is our Person of the Week. Clouds have been gathering around the FBI for months, even years, but it's only over the past few weeks that the storm has moved in. Tragedy and disaster have given the FBI Director, who took on his new post six days before 9/11, an unenviable ubiquity. Now, as the hearings into intelligence failures continue on Capitol Hill, Mueller is under a very large microscope...
...Despite his role as the target of criticism and anger, Mueller, a Justice Department employee since the 1970s, is striking a deliberately non-defensive stand before the 9/11 intelligence committees. In fact, he says he is "happy" to face the scrutiny of congressional investigators, a pronouncement that jibes nicely with his live television appearance last week, during which he outlined plans to restructure the FBI. He also offered a simple and direct mea culpa, referring specifically to Coleen Rowley's now-famously scathing letter, which criticized Mueller specifically and the FBI culture in general...
...dusting information, a letter to Moussaoui from an al-Qaeda operative in Malaysia and a notebook that contained an alias eventually traced to the roommate of hijacker Mohamed Atta.) According to Rowley, the supervisor has since been promoted. FBI officials refused to comment on the tampering charge last week; Mueller also demurred, passing the contents of the memo to the Justice Department's inspector general...
...Washington's cycle of blame spun up again last week, the official caught in the blades was Robert Mueller, who until now has impressed many critics with his intelligence, energy and commitment to reform. Though the director did not comment on the specifics of the Rowley memo, he issued a statement that signaled he is serious about fixing his broken institution. "I am convinced that a different approach is required," he said. "There is no room for the types of problems and attitudes that could inhibit our efforts." One of his ideas is to create a new "flying squad...
...likely Mueller will have plenty more accounting to do. He has already been pressed to explain why the FBI did not investigate Moussaoui more aggressively; on May 8, he told members of the Senate Judiciary Committee that the lead Minnesota case agent "did a terrific job in pushing as hard as we possibly could with Moussaoui. But did we discern that there was a plot that would have led us to Sept. 11? No. Could we have? I doubt it." But in its most searching passage, Rowley's letter lays out the case that the FBI made fateful miscalculations...