ROBERT MUELLER

Even in his own domain, Robert Mueller is often silent. When witnesses arrive at the special counsel’s office in southwest Washington, they are ushered through an underground parking garage and up to an austere, windowless conference room. Mueller’s prosecutors do the talking. The man in charge, if he appears at all, greets visitors with a polite handshake and then retreats to a seat against a wall.

Since becoming special counsel for the Russia probe, Mueller has spoken only through his work: in the hundreds of pages of known court filings, some of which laid out Moscow’s alleged plots to help Donald Trump win the presidency; in the 34 people and entities he charged with crimes this year; in the plea deals he made with Trump’s former lawyer, former campaign chairman and another top campaign aide. Beyond that: Nothing. No interviews. No press conferences. No tweets. No leaks.

Mueller’s silence has invited noisy speculation from partisans. To critics on the right, he is an overzealous prosecutor drunk on power and roaming beyond his mandate in a bid to drum Trump out of office. To liberals, he is a crusading hero who won’t quit until he brings the President to justice. The public narrative of Mueller’s investigation this year has often described its central character more as myth than man.

So it is instructive to hear friends and former colleagues talk about Robert Swan Mueller III. Not because they portray a perfect person, but because they describe a complicated one: relentless but circumspect, impatient but thorough, difficult but respected. Mueller, they say, is the kind of man who flicks the lights off and on at his home to inform guests that it’s time to leave a social gathering, and who is so keenly aware of any appearance of impropriety that he won’t even enter the same room as friends who are working on