When the news broke yesterday that special counsel Robert Mueller had tapped a grand jury as part of his investigation into Russia’s interference in last year’s presidential election, there were two common reactions: One, that in beefing up its legal authority, the Mueller probe was plowing full speed ahead. (“You don’t impanel a grand jury if you only have smoke,” Congressman Ted Lieu observed. “Mueller must be seeing fire.”) And, two, that Mueller was beginning to feel extra-special to some of his supporters. Or as Chelsea Handler bluntly put it on Twitter: “I’m starting to have a real crush on Mueller.”

She wasn’t the only one who’d felt a tingle while reading The Wall Street Journal breaking news alert. Handler’s tweet about the 72-year-old grandfather was met with responses like, “Intelligence is sexy”; “It’s Mueller Time” (there are now even T-shirts and trucker hats to this effect); #SilverFox; and from one man, “I wanna have his baby.” Kindly step aside, Messrs. Idris Elba and Chris Hemsworth, because America has a deeply passionate, totally red-hot new crush, and it’s on Robert Mueller.

While he can evoke shades of Humphrey Bogart and has mastered a nearly Zoolander-esque gaze, the sense of adoration going around is less objectification, more idolization. As a nation starved for heroes (though not heroines—see: Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, Lisa Murkowski, Susan Collins, and, um, Wonder Woman), Mueller is slaying us with a trait that’s all too rare in Washington these days: good old-fashioned dignity. While President Trump lies and cyberbullies with impunity (not to mention his declared penchant for grabbing women’s genitals), and his cohorts include a former White House communications director who refers to himself in the third person as “The Mooch” (and advertises to The New Yorker that he does not perform self-fellatio), Mueller is a widely-respected-on-both-sides Vietnam vet and career public servant who is silently, stoically suiting up and doing his job (without tweets, leaks, or, God forbid, reference to anybody’s genitals). He towers above the fray in Washington with the authoritative air of a professor emeritus—or, once upon a time, a U.S. president.

It helps, of course, that Mueller also has a mythical white knight vibe going: By some estimations, in the absence of congressional Republicans standing up to Trump in any meaningful way, Mueller’s investigation is the great white—and possibly only—hope for finding out once and for all whether or not the Trump campaign colluded with Russia, and whether or not the president himself obstructed justice in the course of the Russia investigation. As Democratic Coalition Against Trump cofounder Scott Dworkin summed it up: “Dear Robert Mueller, Please hurry. The human race.”

This hot pursuit of the truth has made Mueller hot, but he’s not the only one. On the day of his much-watched testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee, James Comey drew swoons on Twitter, including suggestions he be the next Bachelor. (It seems we all have a type: former FBI directors.) And hard-charging CNN host Jake Tapper, too, has become a journalistic crush among the resistance. The truth, it seems, has never been sexier.