America's straightest arrow': Robert Mueller silent as urgency mounts

Robert Swan Mueller III wears a $35 Casio watch with the face on the inside of his left wrist, in the style of an infantryman trying to avoid giving away his position with a glint of sunshine off the glass.

Covert and careful, Mueller is still moving with stealth in Washington DC, 50 years after he was shot and wounded in Vietnam as a first lieutenant in the US Marines.

For 18 months now, the former long-serving director of the FBI has been the calm centre of a gathering storm which may be about to break over Donald Trump’s White House.

During an exhausting period of perpetual leaks across DC, the office of Special Counsel Mueller has stood apart, seemingly impervious and water-tight.

While Mueller has cast a shadow over Trump for 18 months now, he has been almost entirely silent since he was brought out of retirement as a special counsel tasked with picking up the FBI investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 US election, and “any links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump”.

Mueller’s silence has led to intense scrutiny of his personal appearance – that watch, steely hair parted on the left with scrupulous accuracy, his pin-striped Brooks Brothers suits, the white Oxford button-down collar shirts, always paired with dull geometric print ties. A study in methodical caution.

Robert De Niro has played him with predictable menace on Saturday Night Live, looming like a predator from every shady character’s worst nightmare.

Trump, of course, has had a lot to say about Mueller – denouncing his work as an all-caps “WITCH HUNT”, calling him “highly conflicted” and declaring last week that his team was not only “a disgrace to our Nation” but had gone “absolutely nuts”.

In attempting to discredit Mueller, Trump has implied that the lifelong Republican is a partisan stooge of Barack Obama. In fact, since the 1980s, Mueller has been appointed to public positions – as prosecutor and investigator – by five consecutive presidents, one of them called Reagan and two of them called Bush.

He was inherited by Obama as director of the FBI, and was so widely admired that when his term limit of 10 years in the job approached, the Senate voted 100-0 to change the law so that he could stay on for two more years.

Garrett Graff, author of The Threat Matrix: Inside Robert Mueller’s FBI and the War on Global Terror, interviewed Mueller for about 12 hours for the 2011 book. He said: “He is probably America’s straightest arrow, very by-the-book, very professional.”

The word integrity seems to be almost sewn into the fabric of his pin-striped suits. “It’s why [Deputy Attorney General] Rod Rosenstein brought him into this role of special counsel,” Graff said, “because he is probably the one person in Washington that you could never accuse of having a partisan agenda – he’s always seen things with a very strong moral compass, instilled in him by his father, and really sees the world with a pretty black and white, right or wrong vision.”

Following a period of self-imposed public inactivity during November’s midterm elections, there is a new urgency surrounding the investigation.

Trump has fired the attorney general, Jeff Sessions, and installed Matthew Whitaker, a political ally who many fear will move to shut Mueller down; Trump has huddled with lawyers and has submitted his written answers on questions from Mueller’s team about possible collusion between his campaign and Russia; Paul Manafort, the convicted former Trump campaign chairman, is co-operating with the special counsel and by 26 November could be unveiled as a star witness in a new criminal case aimed squarely at Trump world. Could Donald Trump Jr or the longtime Trump aide Roger Stone be next?

Yet as rage, speculation and tension mount, Mueller keeps his profile low.