When Robert Mueller was appointed special counsel for the Justice Department’s Trump-Russia investigation, people across the political spectrum cheered that the no-nonsense former FBI director would be aggressive and thorough, and take as long as he needs to follow the facts wherever they take him.

A POLITICO examination of Mueller’s other high-profile investigation since leaving the FBI, however, suggests that many of the people who had similar hopes in that case came away disappointed.


In what the National Football League said would be a completely independent investigation to uncover “the truth,” Mueller was hired in September 2014 to determine whether Commissioner Roger Goodell and other league officials mishandled the league’s response to an incident in which star Baltimore Ravens running back Ray Rice knocked unconscious his then-fiancee, and then engaged in a cover-up.

Mueller and his team worked quickly but exhaustively for four months to produce a 96-page report that essentially cleared the NFL of intentional wrongdoing. In doing so, they helped defuse a public relations nightmare for America’s most popular and profitable league and possibly saved Goodell’s job.

But the investigation Mueller agreed to conduct for the NFL was so narrowly focused that it left unanswered some fundamental questions about the case, including whether the league ignored blatantly obvious criminal and abusive behavior among its marquee players to protect its billion-dollar revenues.

“It was like someone committed a crime, and they wanted to follow all the facts about what color shoes they were wearing, and really get to the bottom of that,” said Terry O'Neill, president of the National Organization for Women. “The questions were narrow enough in scope that Mueller answered the questions, all right. The problem is that he was asking all the wrong questions.”

POLITICO interviewed more than a dozen people familiar with Mueller’s NFL investigation, who described its inner workings and how it reached its conclusions. It also discussed the probe with associates of Mueller and representatives of the NFL, Rice and the WilmerHale law firm, where Mueller worked until last month, when he left to take on the role of special counsel for the Justice Department.

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Some of those interviewed pointed to the predetermined scope of the Mueller investigation — focusing primarily on whether the NFL had received a copy of an incriminating video of the incident — and suggested that the well-regarded former FBI director, whether he knew it or not, had become part of a suspected NFL-orchestrated whitewash or even of a cover-up of the league’s earlier attempts to sweep the Rice case under the rug.

Several participants in Mueller’s investigation, and others familiar with his thinking, indicate that he himself approved of the narrow framing of the investigation. He did so, they said, not to dodge the broader policy questions surrounding the issue of domestic violence but to address the specific allegations that NFL leaders acted improperly.

Either way, current and former associates agree that while Mueller’s mandate in the Trump-Russia probe is far more wide-ranging, his handling of the NFL investigation sheds light on how he will proceed in the current case as well — aggressively, thoroughly and methodically, and with a well-defined objective that is based on a specific set of questions.

In other words, those expecting Mueller to be some crusading white knight who blows the lid off of Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election, and possible obstruction of justice by President Donald Trump in an effort to shut down the FBI investigation, might be in for an unpleasant surprise.

“He’s an FBI bureaucrat through and through, in a good way,” said one former senior law enforcement official who worked with Mueller throughout much of the Bush and Obama administrations and closely watched his handling of the NFL investigation. “He’s going to say, here’s what the law is, here’s what these idiots did, and did they break any statutes. If the answer is no, then that’s going to be the end of it.”

In the NFL case, Goodell initially gave Rice a two-game suspension, and he only upgraded that to an indefinite hiatus after videotape emerged of Rice landing a vicious punch to his fiancée Janay Palmer’s face while the two were alone in the elevator of an Atlantic City casino.

In accepting the offer to head such a sharply focused NFL investigation, “Mueller either did not understand or did not care about the extreme violence the victim suffered and the NFL's cavalier reaction to it until the video went public,” claims Wendy Murphy, a former prosecutor and New England Patriots cheerleader who runs the Women's and Children's Advocacy Project in Boston. “In other words, Mueller ignored the core issue of whether the NFL cared less about the fact that the woman was beaten unconscious, and more about covering up the violence to protect an abuser the league saw as valuable.”

“If his assigned task was too narrowly drawn to permit him to answer important questions, then he certainly had the right to speak up,” Murphy added. “He also could have made it known in his report that he would have preferred a broader mandate, and that his hands were tied by a narrow framing of the issues.”

Veteran sports defense lawyer Peter Ginsberg said he believes the NFL has made a practice of manipulating big-name legal experts into using their hard-earned credibility to conduct investigations that were, from the outset, designed to protect the league and its top officials.

“There were some serious questions about what Goodell, [top deputy] Adolpho Birch and others at the NFL — and the Ravens — knew and when, and clearly that wasn’t part of what Mueller was assigned to investigate,” said Ginsberg, who represented Rice in his successful challenge of his indefinite suspension. “He was retained for a very specific, very limited and comparatively irrelevant issue. His authority was limited, and he stayed within the lines that were painted for him.”

“Hopefully what he is doing now is far broader,” Ginsberg added, “and he can exercise his own judgment of what he should be looking at, rather than being an attorney hired by an entity for a specific purpose.”

Some people who know Mueller well say that his history of focusing just on the facts doesn’t preclude him from conducting an ambitious and broad review in the Russia-Trump probe. His early push to assemble an all-star leadership team, including his top deputy from the NFL probe, Aaron Zebley, is proof of that, they say.

Suspended Baltimore Ravens running back Ray Rice arrives for a hearing on Nov. 5, 2014, in New York City. | Getty

“I have so much more faith in Mueller to do a real investigation than the Hill,” where various House and Senate committees are also looking into Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election and possible collusion by Trump associates, said a high-ranking counterterrorism official who reviewed Mueller’s leadership of the FBI as part of the congressional Joint Inquiry into the 9/11 attacks.

“He won’t be Ken Starr,” that official said, in reference to the independent counsel who infamously expanded his investigation of President Bill Clinton’s Whitewater real estate investments into numerous other areas, including his extramarital affair with intern Monica Lewinsky.

“In terms of identifying and finding crimes, he will be very aggressive,” the counterterrorism official said. “But in terms of informing the American people, he won’t deem that to be his job.”

Into the NFL maelstrom

Mueller’s appointment to head the NFL probe came late on the evening of Sept. 10, 2014, just as the league’s crisis over its handling of the Rice case had reached a fever pitch.

Two days earlier, the news site TMZ Sports had posted an extremely graphic in-elevator video of Rice decking Palmer —whom he married six weeks after the Feb. 15, 2014, incident — with a left hook.

In defending their decision to issue Rice a mere two-game suspension, Goodell and other NFL officials had repeatedly denied that anyone with the league had seen the violent images until the TMZ report, much less covered it up. They also rebutted claims that they didn’t aggressively pursue the case because it involved a popular three-time Pro Bowl rusher who had helped his Baltimore Ravens win the 2013 Super Bowl.

"We did not see video of what took place inside the elevator until it was publicly released," Goodell said in a memo issued on Sept. 10 to team executives. "None of the law enforcement entities we approached was permitted to provide any video or other investigatory material to us."

Later that day, The Associated Press reported that a law enforcement source had not only sent a copy of the video footage to the NFL five months earlier, but had its receipt confirmed by a 12-second voicemail from an NFL phone number. "You're right. It's terrible,” a woman says on the recording, according to the AP report.

The AP report prompted immediate calls for an investigation and for Goodell to step down, and not just from domestic-violence prevention advocates. Within hours, the crisis had reached Capitol Hill, where lawmakers, including some with oversight of the NFL and the anti-trust exemptions it receives for television deals worth billions of dollars, demanded action.

Republican Sen. Dean Heller of Nevada wrote a lengthy letter to Goodell, saying that “as the father of two daughters,” he believed it was imperative for the commissioner to "address the harm your league has inflicted on survivors of domestic violence going forward."

"I am highly disappointed the NFL's reaction was only heightened once the public witnessed the elevator video,” wrote Heller, the ranking member of the powerful Senate Commerce subcommittee with jurisdiction over the NFL. “By waiting to act until it was made public you effectively condoned the action of the perpetrator himself. I cannot and will not tolerate that position by anybody let alone the National Football League.”

With such vast resources at its disposal, Heller told Goodell, he was also “extremely concerned … that not one person within your organization knew anything about the existence of the elevator video before it surfaced on September 8th. The security of the NFL is first-rate and your qualified security professionals hold those positions due in part to their ability to obtain facts quickly and accurately through their expansive network.”

Citing Goodell's “burgeoning, insurmountable credibility gap," Sen. Richard Blumenthal, a Connecticut Democrat and former state attorney general, announced that "if these reports are true, Commissioner Goodell must go.”

Goodell and NFL General Counsel Jeff Pash knew they had to get out in front of the story, and immediately “discussed who would have the credibility to do something independent like this,” said a person with direct knowledge of the discussions. “Who has the credibility and ability and the reputation in the marketplace to do this?”

Mueller was hired before the clock struck midnight, during a phone call with league officials, the person with direct knowledge said. The NFL announced Mueller’s appointment immediately, as well as the specifics of the investigation. NFL leaders had already determined its broad outlines by the time they called Mueller, but he had a say in what he would be expected to deliver, that person and several other sources told POLITICO, including someone familiar with Mueller’s thinking on the discussion.

The next morning, the two old-guard NFL owners overseeing the investigation, both of them lawyers, said Mueller had assured them his investigation would be “thorough and independent.”

"No timeline was established, and we stressed that he should take as much time as necessary to complete a thorough investigation," the New York Giants' John Mara and Art Rooney II of the Pittsburgh Steelers said in a joint statement.

“Our sole motive here is to get the truth and then share Mr. Mueller's findings with the public,” the owners said. They said they would neither conduct nor direct the investigation and that Mueller had been given no timeline to finish. He would also have the full cooperation of NFL personnel and access to the league’s records on Rice, who by then had been cut by the Ravens.

Also, the owners said, "We agreed that the scope of the investigation should be aimed at getting answers to specific questions, including what efforts were made by league staff to obtain the video of what took place inside the elevator and to determine whether, in fact, the video was ever delivered to someone at the league office, and if so, what happened to the video after it was delivered.”

A barrage of accusations

From the outset, the NFL was sharply criticized, both for the narrow focus of the probe and also for selecting Mueller to lead it.

Mueller enjoyed a stellar reputation, both for his work as a Justice Department prosecutor and for transforming the FBI during his 12 years at the helm to fix the many problems laid bare by the 9/11 attacks, which occurred just a week after he started the job.

But Mueller had joined the influential law firm WilmerHale, which had deep and profitable ties to the NFL, including helping it negotiate an annual fee increase from DirecTV for Sunday games worth several billion dollars alone.

WilmerHale had also done legal work for several owners of NFL teams, including the Dallas Cowboys and Washington Redskins, and many of its lawyers had left the firm to take top positions at the NFL or its teams. One was Jay Bauman, the NFL's second-highest ranking in-house lawyer, who left WilmerHale in 1999. Another was Richard Cass, who had spent 30 years at WilmerHale before becoming the Baltimore Ravens' president — and the man who reportedly helped shield Rice from public scrutiny by getting him into a diversion program that was usually off-limits for violent offenders, and one of the team leaders who allegedly pressured the NFL front office to go easy on the star rusher.

“The optics are terrible,” Robert Boland, a former prosecutor, criminal defense lawyer and sports agent who headed New York University’s Tisch Center for Sports Management, told the New York Daily News.

At his first news conference after the TMZ video a week earlier, Goodell was asked why the NFL picked Mueller for an investigation designed to restore public trust, given his ties to WilmerHale.

“Even if he does a flawless investigation, isn't there an element here of you're leaving the door open for doubt?” Goodell was asked.

“Unfortunately we live in a world where there's a lot of litigation. There are a lot of law firms, a lot of people who have had maybe some interaction with us in the past,” Goodell responded. “Robert Mueller has not. Law firms may have. But we were hiring Robert Mueller, and his credentials, his credibility to do an independent investigation, reporting to the owners. And I am confident that that will be the case.”

What Goodell told the public, it turns out, wasn’t exactly true. Mueller had indeed met with Pash and some other top league officials shortly after joining WilmerHale in March 2014, to discuss ways in which he might use his experience to help the firm do more work for the league, according to the person with direct knowledge of the NFL’s interactions with the former FBI director.

“It was a request by Mr. Mueller to get in front of us and discuss what we could do,” said the person familiar with the meeting. “It was not long after he went to WilmerHale, and was just about getting things started.”

Rice’s assault case, which occurred weeks earlier, wasn’t specifically discussed at the meeting, that person said, adding, “But that’s definitely the kind of thing he came to talk about — that as a former prosecutor and director of the FBI, we’re out here and happy to help with investigations and the like.”

NFL spokesman Brian McCarthy confirmed that the meeting took place, but downplayed its significance.

“It was just one meeting after Mueller joined WilmerHale, and nothing came of it until the NFL appointed him to oversee the investigation,” McCarthy said. “It was an introductory meeting,” the kind the league has with many law firms, given all of its varied legal and investigative requirements.

NFL commissioner Roger Goodell speaks at an NFL press conference announcing new measures for the league's personal conduct policy during an owners meeting in Irving, Texas, on Dec. 10, 2014. | AP Photo

As Mueller went to work, more details came out about potential misconduct by the Ravens, and the NFL, in the Rice case. A 7,000-word expose by ESPN said the Ravens' security director knew exactly what happened in the elevator assault almost immediately, thanks to a police lieutenant who described the video to him frame by frame. That prompted the Ravens to conduct a wide-ranging cover-up that included an effort to prevent the video from ever becoming public, according to ESPN, which also quoted four sources as saying Goodell lied by saying Rice never told him the gruesome details of the attack before his initial suspension, when in fact he’d told the commissioner the truth.

The Ravens issued a lengthy statement aimed at contradicting and clarifying what the team said were inaccuracies in the ESPN report. But Ravens owner Steve Bisciotti also acknowledged that, “we did not do all we should have done, and no amount of explanation can remedy that. But there has been no misdirection or misinformation by the Ravens.”

Reached on his cellphone, Ravens general manager Ozzie Newsome Jr. had no comment on the Mueller investigation or the underlying allegations about possible misconduct by the team, including failure to share key information with the league about the incident. “You’ll have to talk to the league about that,” he told POLITICO.

Mueller’s first step was to bring aboard Zebley, a former whiz-kid counterterrorism agent and federal prosecutor who had risen to become Mueller's trusted chief of staff at the FBI before going to WilmerHale. Soon, he had assembled a core team of about eight investigators and lawyers from WilmerHale, forensic experts and other specialists.

For the most part, Mueller operated behind the scenes, meeting with senior NFL officials on occasion but delegating the questioning of witnesses and other investigative work to others, according to the person with first-hand knowledge of the Mueller team’s interviews of NFL employees.

Even during the questioning of Rice himself, Mueller wasn’t there, the person familiar with those interviews said.

“Director Mueller is not generally about opening up too much,” that person said. “He was very matter of fact. He is not known for his effusive personality.”

Two other people who sat in on interviews said two to three of Mueller’s team members would show up armed with reams of preparatory material before spending from one to two hours asking questions and taking copious notes.

“They went to the nth degree on every single point. Which is fine,” said one. “They were very effective in that way. They were not there to prejudge anything, but to gather the facts.”

As Mueller would later note in his report, the team collected, searched and analyzed millions of documents, emails and text messages from the league’s network. They interviewed all 188 female employees, contractors, vendors and interns whose electronic badge recorded them being in the office on April 9, the day the AP said someone from the NFL left a voicemail confirming receipt of the Rice tape, the report said.

And they assembled a database of every call placed to the NFL’s main number, and every call made from the NFL, including break rooms and mailrooms. In all, they tracked 1,583 calls to 1,050 unique phone numbers, and identified and interviewed every single person involved. And the team reviewed all electronic logs for tracked and interoffice mail, and established an anonymous tip line so NFL employees could share information about the investigation.

Jeffrey Miller, then the NFL’s senior vice president and chief security officer, told POLITICO that Mueller’s investigators “were very thorough and prepared, and treated everyone fairly.”

They were so thorough, in fact, that senior NFL executives who might have had knowledge of the league receiving the Rice video in the mail were asked to submit their “personal phones, business phones, laptops, iPads, work computers and home computers” so they could be copied and analyzed for clues, according to a person with direct knowledge of the team’s questioning of NFL officials.

NFL executives who were in the habit of deleting old texts and emails watched as investigators recovered and analyzed them, especially those exchanged with journalists and anyone else who might shed light on the veracity of the AP report.

As the investigation neared completion, Mueller met again with some top NFL officials “and bounced some things off of [them] and made some suggestions about things that, going forward, the league could consider doing.”

The person familiar with the investigation said that despite the meetings, Mueller didn’t share his formal findings with the NFL before completing his report, given his pledge at the outset to remain independent.

Some questions answered, others raised

Mueller issued his report on Jan. 8, 2015, concluding that his team found no evidence that anyone at the league office received or reviewed the videotape before TMZ released it, or that any woman working at the NFL had acknowledged receipt of the video.

An Associated Press spokeswoman told POLITICO this week that AP officials reviewed the Mueller report when it was issued “and stand by our original reporting.” The AP has also noted that the law enforcement officer who said he sent the tape to Miller, the NFL security director, and whose identity the AP did not disclose, had not been interviewed by Mueller’s team because the news agency would not cooperate. “We do not offer up reporters’ notes and sources.”

The Mueller report also criticized the NFL, saying Goodell and his NFL investigators likely could have gotten the tape if they had tried before giving Rice the initial slap on the wrist.

"The NFL should have done more with the information it had and should have taken additional steps to obtain all available information about the Feb. 15 incident," Mueller said in the report. He also proposed a series of recommendations designed to correct weaknesses in the NFL’s system.

Team owners rejoiced at Mueller’s findings and said that while his report showed the need for reform, it also proved that Goodell deserved their support.

Critics, however, were furious. “How Do You Spell Whitewash? N-F-L,” O’Neill, the NOW president, said in a news release at the time.

The narrow focus of Mueller’s “non-report … was designed to protect Goodell from accountability for his failure to lead, and deflect the possibility of real and lasting change at the NFL,” she said.

“If one of Robert Mueller’s FBI agents had turned in a report as incomplete as the Ray Rice investigation, that agent would have been transferred to Peoria,” she said. “It was like the house was on fire, and they wanted to know all the facts about the color of the living room sofa.”

O’Neill, like other domestic violence activists, said the report showed that Goodell continued “to run away from the questions that need to be investigated: When the NFL learns of an intimate-partner violence incident, what immediate steps does it take to ensure the physical safety of the victim? What does the league do to ensure survivors’ longer-term economic security? What concrete steps has the NFL taken to change its business model — the way it treats cheerleaders, the absence of women in positions of authority, the failure to deal transparently with traumatic brain injury, the too-cozy relationship between league security and law enforcement — in order to reduce both the incidence and harm done by intimate-partner violence attacks?”

Two lawyers familiar with the case said Mueller’s investigation and lengthy report also sidestepped key questions about how the Ravens — and the NFL — claimed to be ignorant of the details of the attack, even after the general public had seen another videotape of Rice dragging an unconscious Palmer out of the elevator and dropping her like a sack of potatoes. And they wondered why Mueller didn’t single out more Ravens officials, or Goodell and other league officials, for failures he identified in the report.

Ginsberg, Rice’s lawyer, added that the report also laid bare the NFL’s effort to steer the investigation away from questions about the conduct of its senior officials in the case, including the widespread belief that Goodell and his top associates knew exactly what was on the Rice videotape before giving Rice the two-game suspension, even if they didn’t have it in their possession.

“A full investigation into the entire matter necessarily would have concluded that the NFL never particularly cared about, or made it a priority to address, that kind of behavior until the public outcry became a PR disaster for Goodell,” Ginsberg said. “Goodell hired Mueller in order to use the release of the videotape, and more particularly to focus on the issue of whether the NFL had received the videotape before imposing the first punishment, to change the subject matter and try to placate critics. The NFL failed in that attempt, but Mueller stayed in his lane and fulfilled his limited assignment in a professional, thorough manner.”

Mueller acknowledged some shortcomings in the report, saying that he could have done more to force The Associated Press, the Atlantic City police department and others to answer his questions if he had had the subpoena power he enjoyed at the FBI.

In an appendix to the report, Mueller said nothing had undermined the independence of his investigation, including the oversight by team owners Mara and Rooney. He also dismissed concerns about potential conflicts of interest, saying he didn’t know Ravens President Richard Cass, who had left WilmerHale 10 years before he got there.

Also, Mueller said, WilmerHale’s renewal negotiations for DirecTV ended in 2009, its similar work for Total Sports Network ended in 2007 and the firm’s only work for the league since 2010 was $5,672 for legal advice on immigration issues.

“Neither I nor any member of my team has ever provided legal services to the NFL,” Mueller added.

Mueller declined to comment on any aspect of this article through a spokesman, referring questions about the investigation’s independence to the report’s appendix. In keeping with his insistence on secrecy and operational security, the report itself contains no details about who was on Mueller’s team, or what they did, with the exception of Boston-based digital forensics firm Elysium Digital, which also had no comment.

A spokeswoman for WilmerHale, Molly Nunes, said there was nothing she could discuss about Mueller’s investigation.

“There just isn’t anything we can say about it at all,” Nunes said. “That’s Director Mueller’s preference.”