Robert Mueller, an attorney and former FBI director, loomed large over Donald Trump’s first presidency as the special counsel who investigated the president’s ties to Russia. As supervisor of the investigation and author of the Mueller Report, Mueller obtained dozens of indictments and several convictions. However, he did not ultimately indict or convict Trump of a crime or end his first presidency.
Mueller passed away on Saturday at the age of 81, after several years of battling Parkinson’s Disease. And Trump, on Truth Social, celebrated his death.
“Robert Mueller just died. Good, I’m glad he’s dead. He can no longer hurt innocent people! President DONALD J. TRUMP,” Trump said on Truth Social, shortly after the news broke of Mueller’s death.
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Per the New York Times obituary, Mueller “led the Federal Bureau of Investigation for 12 tumultuous years, brought politically explosive indictments as a special counsel examining Russia’s attack on the 2016 presidential election, and then concluded that he could neither absolve nor accuse President Donald J. Trump of a crime, died on Friday.”
Mueller was appointed FBI director by President George W. Bush, shortly before the 9/11 attacks, and remained in that position well into the Obama Administration. The Times described him as “a button-down, lockjawed, rock-ribbed exemplar of a vanishing caste, the liberal Republican.”
President Donald Trump cheering the death of Robert Mueller – an American citizen, public servant and veteran pic.twitter.com/Aj8mbjK6GS
— Jonathan Lemire (@JonLemire) March 21, 2026
The Mueller probe, beginning in 2017, and one of the biggest ongoing stories of the first Trump presidency, had some successes.
“They brought indictments against a cohort of Russian spies and the command structure of a troll farm in the Russian city of St. Petersburg, the Internet Research Agency, which had conducted a misinformation campaign in the 2016 election at the direction of the Kremlin,” the Times obituary said. “They sent Paul Manafort, Mr. Trump’s first campaign manager, to prison for fraud. They won a guilty plea from retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, Mr. Trump’s first national security adviser, and a conviction of Roger Stone, one of Mr. Trump’s oldest political advisers, for lying to investigators.”
Trump, however, went on to pardon all three of those people.
Photo courtesy of the Political Tribune media library.
