Word: mueller
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...When Bob Mueller took over the Justice Department's criminal division in 1990, his subordinates teased him about his patrician manner and the pressed jeans that were his idea of a dress-down Saturday in the office. His high-Wasp name, Robert Swan Mueller III, led them to call him Bobby Three Sticks...
...Early this year, the Bush transition team asked Mueller to return to Washington temporarily to serve as acting Deputy Attorney General - the day to day chief operating officer of the Justice Department - until Larry Thompson could be confirmed as the permanent Deputy. "He worked with a number of people in Justice and gained their confidence as someone who was capable of running the FBI and also someone who the department could work with," says Thompson...
...Thompson says Ashcroft's team was especially impressed by Mueller's extraordinary 1995 decision to abandon a lucrative private practice to take obscure murder cases in DC's hellish Superior Court. "He's not a person who's all that concerned about his ego," says Thompson. "He doesn't need to have a high-profile position to determine his self-worth...
...Mueller will be tested as never before. The FBI director exercises immense power over countless lives, and he enjoys perks unusual even in Washington. Unlike most office-holders, the director can confine himself on the seventh floor of the FBI building for months at a time, making only rare, carefully controlled appearances on Capitol Hill. Mueller will be faced with the task of fixing the problems that got the FBI into the McVeigh and Hanssen messes, while repairing the bureau's flagging morale...
...Mueller's critics are skeptical. "The cynics are saying, let him take over the FBI, it'll be great theater, and he'll run it into the ground in six months," says one former prosecutor who found Mueller overbearing. But his friends insist that behind his earnest demeanor, Mueller has the balance, wisdom and wry sense of humor to manage the task...