As The Revolving Door Turns: Robert Mueller Rejoins Wilmer Hale

A D.C. economy of changing hats remains undisturbed as Mueller re-enters private practice.

Having diligently built criminal cases against everyone but the one guy he wasn’t allowed to charge, Robert Mueller has gone and done what every high-profile public servant does at this point — immediately cashed in with a high-paying private sector job. That sting of having the Attorney General lie about you can be salved with a few million bucks.

Mueller, who left Wilmer to take on the special counsel job, can now return to defending the sort of government investigations he ran for the last several months. Technically, I suppose the Ukraine facts don’t overlap with the Russia investigation — maybe he can represent some of his old DOJ bosses when that hits the fan in a couple of years. It can be a nice little reunion!

The revolving door between government and private practice is a dodgy thing, but there’s not much reason to fault Mueller his payday. Both sides of the public-private divide demand the highest levels of expertise and there really aren’t a limitless supply of Bob Muellers in the world. While constantly handing key public service positions to folks in a cloistered network invites stale thinking and industry capture, transitioning from conducting an investigation to defending other investigations doesn’t really raise the most egregious of these issues.

If anything, more prosecutors should be drawn from the ranks of those who’ve spent some time on the defense side — the kind of people capable of entertaining the best possible read of suspicious evidence and sympathetic to the potential abuse of the awesome power of the state. There’s something to be said about corporate defense attorneys moving into prosecutorial roles and taking it easier on the white-collar clients they’re used to hobnobbing with while dropping the hammer on everyone else. But Mueller didn’t seem to pull any punches on the D.C. crowd other than those the DOJ ordered him to, so this time let’s allow the guy to go back to his job in peace.

Robert Mueller Returns to Wilmer as DC Partner [National Law Journal]


HeadshotJoe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.

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