Former U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara said America owes special counsel Robert Mueller “incalculable thanks” for agreeing to lead the investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election.

Bharara, who served as the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York until Trump fired him in 2017, penned Mueller’s blurb for the annual “Time 100” list and praised his long commitment to public service.

“Mueller’s buttoned-down discretion has made him an enigmatic vessel into which polarized sides pour their hopes and fears. To millions, the special counsel is either a political savior or berserk villain. He is neither,” Bharara wrote. “He’s a by-the-book lawman who, with nothing to prove and a lifetime of service behind him, agreed to lead the most fraught, least understood, highest-stakes investigation of our time.”

Bharara opened his blurb by saying Mueller “doesn’t seek deferments,” a knock on Trump, who received five draft deferments during Vietnam. Four of Trump’s deferments were for education, and the fifth he obtained because of bone spurs in his heel.

“After a classmate died in Vietnam, this well-do-to Princeton athlete traded his lacrosse stick for a military rifle and volunteered for war,” Bharara wrote of Mueller. “He returned with a Bronze Star, a Purple Heart and a gunshot wound.”

Bharara praised Mueller as “straitlaced and tight-lipped, a legal and sartorial traditionalist.” He recalled one instance when Mueller, the former FBI director, scolded him for wearing a blue shirt while the pair was announcing charges in an international assassination plot.

Mueller was tapped to oversee the investigation into Russian meddling and possible collusion between Trump campaign officials and Russia in May 2017, after the president fired former FBI Director James Comey.

