Robert Mueller

Robert Mueller was the head of the Department of Justice's criminal division.¹

Role in BCCI Scandal

Mueller appeared on ABC's Nightline to refute Time magazine's charges regarding the BCCI scandal.² He stated that the Justice Department had won a victory in the Tampa money-laundering case and disputed claims of insufficient investigation.³ He denied the existence of missing tapes from Jack Blum's interviews with former BCCI bankers who discussed political payoffs and BCCI's secret ownership of First American Bank.⁴

Mueller asserted that the Justice Department had provided information leading to the shutdown of BCCI's offices in Florida.⁵ He maintained that all allegations or evidence provided to the Justice Department were being pursued.⁶

Testimony to the Kerry Subcommittee

As Assistant Attorney General for the Criminal Division, Mueller told Senator John Kerry's subcommittee in prepared testimony on November 21, 1991: "We are responsible, ethical prosecutors. We will not indict simply to get favorable press coverage or to quiet our critics... a fair review of the available facts will show that the Department of Justice has done an excellent job on the BCCI investigations, and that the criticisms of the Department are fundamentally unfair." The Kerry-Brown Senate Report named the department's critics as the Customs undercover agent Robert Mazur, Commissioner William von Raab, Robert Morgenthau, Jack Blum, and the former United States Attorney in Miami, Dexter Lehtinen, and found that the department had "masked inactivity" by telling critics that matters were "under investigation" when they were not.⁷

Asked why the department had not followed up leads on BCCI's secret ownership of First American Bank, Mueller, in the report's words, "passed the buck" to the Federal Reserve, saying the information had been passed to it after the arrests of October 1988. He called the letter of the narcotics chief Charles Saphos urging Florida to keep BCCI open "ambiguous at best." The report found that the department obstructed congressional and New York inquiries until William Barr became Attorney General in October 1991, and that "some public statements by the Justice Department concerning its handling of matters pertaining to BCCI were more cleverly crafted than true."⁷