Quote:Terrific piece in Wired on Muellers scary good team Trump is in for world of hurt. Happy birthday
Gee, this sounds like a mismatch to me. LOL!
From the list of hires, it’s clear, in fact, that Mueller is recruiting perhaps the most high-powered and experienced team of investigators ever assembled by the Justice Department. His team began with three lawyers who also quickly left WilmerHale, the law firm where Mueller has also worked since he left the FBI in 2013—Zebley, James Quarles III, and Jeannie Rhee.
The rapid recruitment of Quarles attracted immediate attention: A famed litigator who was an assistant special prosecutor for the Watergate investigation, Quarles specialized in campaign finance research for the Watergate task force, which surely will be an area of focus for Mueller’s investigation.
(The FBI has been serving subpoenas regarding the finances of campaign adviser Michael Flynn and campaign chairman Paul Manafort, both of whom have retroactively registered as foreign agents, admitting that they were paid by foreign governments during the period when they were also advising Trump.)
In more recent years, Quarles has risen through the law firm’s ranks to run its DC office, and is an experienced manager.
In granting him the firm’s top recognition in 2007, one of his colleagues said that Quarles “represents precisely the values that should define us culturally and reputationally: He is an excellent lawyer, he is an extraordinary hard worker, he is the ultimate team player, and he treats everyone with respect and collegiality.”
It’s a team that’s not just a paper office tiger but one with deep experience investigating crime around the world.
More recently, Mueller has recruited Andrew Weissmann, his one-time general counsel at the FBI and a long-time adviser who once led the Justice Department’s fraud unit. In the early 2000s, Weissmann also oversaw the Enron Task Force, the storied Justice Department unit that investigated the complex machinations of the failed energy giant.
(The task force’s team of prosecutors was so well-respected that they went on to dominate the Justice Department’s top ranks for the better part of a decade, including former officials like White House homeland security adviser Lisa Monaco, White House counsel Kathy Ruemmler, assistant attorney general Leslie Caldwell, and acting assistant attorney general Matthew Friedrich.)
Then Mueller added Michael Dreeben, who has worked for years in the Justice Department’s solicitor general’s office, which argues the government’s cases before the Supreme Court. “Dreeben is 1 of the top legal & appellate minds at DOJ in modern times,” tweeted Preet Bharara, the former top Manhattan federal prosecutor.
Walter Dellinger, an accomplished law professor at Duke and former acting solicitor general, went one step further, telling The Washington Post, “Michael is the most brilliant and most knowledgeable federal criminal lawyer in America—period.” Writing on the Lawfare blog, Paul Rosenzweig recalled watching Deeban argue a Supreme Court case—one of more than a hundred he’s done—without a single note, and also concluded, “He is quite possibly the best criminal appellate lawyer in America (at least on the government's side). That Mueller has sought his assistance attests both to the seriousness of his effort and the depth of the intellectual bench he is building.”
Also, while the Special Counsel’s office has yet to make any formal announcements about Mueller’s team, it appears he has recruited an experienced Justice Department trial attorney, Lisa Page, a little-known figure outside the halls of Main Justice but one whose résumé boasts intriguing hints about where Mueller’s Russia investigation might lead.
Page has deep experience with money laundering and organized crime cases, including investigations where she’s partnered with an FBI task force in Budapest, Hungary, that focuses on eastern European organized crime. That Budapest task force helped put together the still-unfolding money laundering case against Ukrainian oligarch Dmitry Firtash, a one-time business partner of Manafort.
But despite the other more high-profile names, it’s the career of Zebley, a dogged FBI agent turned prosecutor turned confidant, that perhaps best points to how Mueller intends to run his new investigation: ***With absolute tenacity and strong central leadership from Mueller himself. It’s a team that’s not just a paper office tiger but one with deep experience investigating crime around the world.***
fascinating long read:
https://www.wired.com/story/robert-mueller-sp...=social_fb
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