Robert Mueller, special counsel who investigated Russia-Trump campaign ties, dies at 81

2026.03.21 18:20 Former special counsel Robert Mueller arrives for a House Intelligence Committee hearing on Capitol Hill in July 2019. Photo: AP Robert S. Mueller III, the FBI director who transformed the nation’s premier law enforcement agency into a terrorism-fighting force after the September 11 attacks and who later became special counsel in charge of investigating ties between Russia and Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, has died. He was 81. “With deep sadness, we are sharing the news that Bob passed away” on Friday night, his family said in a statement on Saturday. “His family asks that their privacy be respected.” No cause of ⁠death was given for Mueller, a decorated Vietnam war veteran. The New York Times reported last year that Mueller had Parkinson’s disease. At the FBI, Mueller set about almost immediately overhauling the bureau’s mission to meet the law enforcement needs of the 21st century, beginning his 12-year tenure just one week before the September 11 attacks and serving across presidents of both political parties. Former special counsel Robert Mueller departs from the US Capitol in July 2019. Photo: Reuters He was nominated by Republican President George W. Bush. The cataclysmic event instantaneously switched the bureau’s top priority from solving domestic crime to preventing terrorism, a shift that imposed an almost impossibly difficult standard on Mueller and the rest of the federal government: preventing 99 out of 100 terrorist plots was not good enough. Mueller retired as FBI director after 12 years in 2013 but was summoned back to public service by a senior Justice Department official four years later as a special counsel to take over an inquiry into Russia’s election meddling after Trump fired then FBI chief James Comey. Mueller conducted a 22-month investigation that produced indictments against 34 people, including several Trump associates as well as Russian intelligence officers and three Russian companies, and a series of guilty ple

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