Rob D’Amico on Passing of Fmr. FBI Dir. Robert Mueller: 9/11 Happened, an Event That Changed the Bureau Under Dir. Mueller

RUSH EXCERPT:
D'AMICO: "He’s very serious. And when. You look at it, when you come into the office to take over from actually a very popular director in Louis freeh, and it’s September 4th, 2001, and a week later, nine over 11 happens. You can only imagine, you know, you’re just getting your feet on the ground and nine over 11 happens. And it, it was an event that changed the bureau and it changed under, you know, director Mueller. But he was serious because at that time, you look at the the 12 years and he’s the second longest serving director besides, you know, hoover, he extended two years after his tenure time. Those were serious years. And there was he had five deputy directors under him that he, you know, served throughout. But it was a time that he had to change the bureau. And when you look at it, you think it’s easy after nine over 11 that you want to go from just prosecuting cases because that’s what the bureau did. Someone commits a crime, we investigate it, we prosecute it to. His thing was we have to prevent the next nine over 11 in order to do that. He got a lot of pushback from older agents. I remember, you know, I was on the FBI’s hostage rescue team during nine over 11, and he started talking about this. And I heard agents, senior agents say, nah, it’s just a fad. It’ll go away. We’ll go back to, you know, doing what we normally do. And I really couldn’t believe it. And I was in the bureau under 10 years at that time saying, what do you mean? This is historical change. And he met with a lot of, you know, changing the FBI as a as a huge bureaucracy is tough. So he met with with some things that got him really frustrated. But him coming from, you know, as a U.S. attorney, assistant us attorney, he was acting deputy U.S. attorney, attorney general. He was serious. He knew how to do cases. So he knew what it took for the bureau to get there. And then you look at his service, you know, being being a former marine myself, that was very evident to me that he was in the marine corps. He served during vietnam, won a bronze star with a v purple heart, 68 through 71. Tough years to be a commander in vietnam. And he carried that with him. He was very serious. It was everything you thought, though. When you think of FBI, you think of dark suit, white shirt and tie, and that’s always where he was. I met him several times overseas, serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. He would come over to visit, and he grabbed me a couple of times and talked. And I, you know, would say semper fi. So he knew, you know, I was coming from the same background as him. And he would ask me questions, really in-depth questions. What I was seeing over there. And a couple of times we’re embedded with special forces doing some some things that you never thought the bureau would be doing, but it was under his vision of we have to go forward. We have to get the terrorists overseas. We have to work with the CIA and the military so that we prevent it before it comes to the us, which was really something he brought in."