Person of the Year 2017 Runner-Up: Robert Mueller

A prosecutor known for rigor and rectitude goes after the president’s men
MASSIMO CALABRESI @CALABRESIM
DEC 6, 2017 7:34 AM EST
Massimo Calabresi joined the Washington bureau of TIME in 1999 and has covered the CIA, State, Justice, Treasury, Congress and the White House. He covered the wars in Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo as TIME's Central Europe bureau chief from 1995 to 1999 and the collapse of the Soviet Union as a freelancer in Moscow in 1991.

On May 17, the U.S. Department of Justice gave Robert Mueller a mission at once simple and daunting: investigate the Russian government’s efforts to interfere in the 2016 U.S. presidential election; uncover any coordination between Moscow and members of Donald Trump’s campaign; and prosecute any crimes that were committed in the process.

Since Mueller took up that task, the special counsel has held the country in his thrall. Backed by an independent budget, rare bipartisan support and a team of veteran cops and prosecutors, he has made news even when he tried not to. Loose-lipped lawyers for Trump and his associates leaked details of the probe to the media. Scraps of evidence made their way into public view from separate investigations in Congress. And the President, not known to be a target of the probe himself, fumed publicly as his first year in office was consumed by the once-in-a-generation spectacle of a powerful prosecutor on the trail of the President’s men.

Watch: Why the Silence Breakers Are the 2017 Person of the Year

The tension rose when the special counsel started laying out his case. On Oct. 30, Mueller charged Trump’s former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, and Manafort’s deputy with money laundering and other crimes, and secured a plea deal and pledge of cooperation from a low-level campaign adviser. A month later, on Dec. 1, Trump’s former National Security Adviser, retired Lieut. General Michael Flynn, pleaded guilty to a single charge of lying to the FBI and swore to tell Mueller everything he knew about contacts that he and others had with Moscow.

As the investigation edged closer to Trump himself, and speculation ramped up about where it would all lead, it was easy to forget the essential dynamic of how it all began.

Washington is all about rules. One branch of government writes them, another settles arguments about them, the third enforces them. The high political drama of 2017 flowed from the arrival in our nation’s capital of a roguish figure elected on the exhilarating notion that rules are to be flouted. But what felt liberating on the campaign trail proved challenging in a city built on constraint, where every 12th resident is a lawyer, or an officer of the court.

There is barely a handful of people in all of America with the reputation and experience to take on the task of untangling a multi­pronged Russian influence operation from one of the most disorganized presidential campaigns in memory. After Trump fired FBI Director James Comey in May, initiating a crisis at the very top of government, the sighs of relief in Washington were audible when Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein named Robert Swan Mueller III to the task of investigating. Democrats and Republicans alike praised the patrician former Marine. Even Newt Gingrich, a close Trump ally, tweeted that day, “Robert Mueller is superb choice to be special counsel. His reputation is impeccable for honesty and integrity.”

Mueller leaves a closed meeting on June 21 with the Senate Judiciary Committee about Comey's firing