Justice & Law Quote by Robert Mueller

In Mueller's Washington dialect, "every effort" is both a reassurance and a protective hedge. Spoken in the long shadow of September 11, the phrase leans on a shared national trauma as a kind of credential: if the country is still raw, the Bureau is still vigilant. But the sentence is carefully engineered to promise cooperation without conceding control. "Try to work closely" is doing quiet bureaucratic work here, signaling goodwill while leaving room for friction, limits, and jurisdictional turf wars that have defined federal-local relations for decades.

The real subtext is about legitimacy. After 9/11, the FBI and the broader national security apparatus expanded dramatically, and with that expansion came public anxiety: about surveillance, about competence, about whether Washington was hoarding information it should be sharing. By invoking state and local law enforcement, Mueller is nodding to the people Americans actually see in uniform, the institutions that feel proximate and accountable. It's a trust-transfer maneuver: the federal government borrows credibility from local policing, and local agencies borrow resources and intelligence from the feds.

Context matters because 9/11 was also a story of missed signals and siloed data. This line reads like a corrective to that failure, an implicit promise that the next catastrophe won't be blamed on bureaucratic wall-building. At the same time, it normalizes a post-9/11 reality: counterterrorism becomes an all-of-government, all-levels project, with local police folded into national security priorities whether they asked for it or not.