The Mueller Report: Presented with Related Materials by The Washington Post

by The Washington Post

But by 1995, he was ensconced in the $400,000-a-year luxury of a white-collar litigation job in the Washington office of a Boston law firm, Hale and Dorr. It was not a happy time. “He hated it,” said Wilner, the longtime friend. “He couldn’t stand selling his services to defend people he thought might be guilty. . . . There was no hesitation for Bob in leaving a lucrative job to . . . do what he thought was helping make the world a better place.” So one day, Mueller called the District’s local prosecutor, U.S. Attorney Eric H. Holder Jr., and asked for a job, not handling the office’s big national cases but working the line, prosecuting homicides on the streets of Washington. He wanted no title, no supervisory position. He told Holder that he was shaken by all of the killings in Washington, then the nation’s murder capital, and that he just wanted to try homicide cases. “I was taken aback,” Holder recalled. He reminded Mueller that coming to work at the “Triple Nickel”—as the prosecutors’ office at 555 Fourth Street NW was called—would mean a pay cut of more than 75 percent, a big step down in stature and a daunting job. The District, plagued with a crack cocaine epidemic and about 400 homicides a year, was a nightmare for prosecutors, who faced huge caseloads and witnesses who often were too scared to talk. Mueller said he knew what he was getting into. Holder hired him but insisted on giving him a title—senior litigation counsel—and eventually made him head of the homici...