COMETH THE MOMENT, COMETH THE MAN:

Robert Swan Mueller III wears a $35 Casio watch with the face on the inside of his left wrist, in the style of an infantryman trying to avoid giving away his position with a glint of sunshine off the glass.

Covert and careful, Mueller is still moving with stealth in Washington DC, 50 years after he was shot and wounded in Vietnam as a first lieutenant in the US Marines.

For 18 months now, the former long-serving director of the FBI has been the calm centre of a gathering storm which may be about to break over Donald Trump's White House. [...]

In attempting to discredit Mueller, Trump has implied that the lifelong Republican is a partisan stooge of Barack Obama. In fact, since the 1980s, Mueller has been appointed to public positions - as prosecutor and investigator - by five consecutive presidents, one of them called Reagan and two of them called Bush.

He was inherited by Obama as director of the FBI, and was so widely admired that when his term limit of 10 years in the job approached, the Senate voted 100-0 to change the law so that he could stay on for two more years.

Garrett Graff, author of The Threat Matrix: Inside Robert Mueller's FBI and the War on Global Terror, interviewed Mueller for about 12 hours for the 2011 book. He said: "He is probably America's straightest arrow, very by-the-book, very professional."

The word integrity seems to be almost sewn into the fabric of his pin-striped suits. "It's why [Deputy Attorney General] Rod Rosenstein brought him into this role of special counsel," Graff said, "because he is probably the one person in Washington that you could never accuse of having a partisan agenda - he's always seen things with a very strong moral compass, instilled in him by his father, and really sees the world with a pretty black and white, right or wrong vision."

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