Robert Mueller is the most unknowable man in Washington

Mueller. Mueller. Mueller. Mueller. Mueller. Mueller. Everywhere, at any hour, it’s Mueller time.

Special counsel Robert Swan Mueller III is the second-most famous man in Washington. Time Magazine just ranked him No. 3 on their Person of the Year list, after crusading journalists and President Trump. It is impossible to spend a day in this town without hearing or reading Mueller’s name. He will go down in history, for better or worse, as one of the pivotal figures of the Trump era.

All this for a man who seldom speaks and is rarely seen. He is omnipresent and absent, inescapable but elusive, the invisible yang to Trump’s gold-plated yin.

“Mueller’s silence has invited noisy speculation from partisans,” writes Time. “To critics on the right, he is an overzealous prosecutor drunk on power and roaming beyond his mandate in a bid to drum Trump out of office. To liberals, he is a crusading hero who won’t quit until he brings the President to justice. The public narrative of Mueller’s investigation this year has often described its central character more as myth than man.”

Such is the peculiar nature of Washington that a powerful man who shuns the spotlight should become an object of fascination, and the specific character of Mueller — an old-school WASP indifferent to entreaties for speeches, interviews and photo-ops. More people have seen Robert De Niro playing Mueller on “Saturday Night Live” than have seen the special counsel himself.

“I always joke that Bob Mueller has turned down more interview requests in his career than most people in Washington ever get in the first place,” says Garrett Graff, author of “The Threat Matrix: Inside Robert Mueller’s FBI and the War on Global Terror” and Mueller’s de facto biographer. “Contrary to every single thing that the president tweets today, Mueller is and always has been probably the most apolitical nonpartisan person in the city. He does everything that he can to avoid the public spotlight and anything even slightly resembling politicking.”

Mueller is content to be known and respected within a very small circle of close friends and colleagues. That’s rare in a town filled with former high school class presidents with enough egos to “float battleships,” as former senator Alan Simpson put it. Politicians love cameras — and Twitter feeds, Instagram and more — but Mueller’s only public statement as special counsel came on May 17, 2017, the day he was appointed: “I accept this responsibility and will discharge it to the best of my ability.”