NewsMax.com Wires
Friday, June 29, 2001

Though Mueller, a Justice Department veteran, was touted as the prospective nominee, he was sharply opposed by some in the department, according to a former senior official there.

White House officials determined over the weekend that the president needed a better candidate to head the United State's premier law enforcement agency, an administration source told UPI.

Mueller would have replaced Louis Freeh, who retired last Friday, eight years into a 10-year term. Freeh announced his retirement last spring after the FBI had stumbled from one major blunder to another.

In February, veteran counterintelligence agent Robert Hanssen was charged with spying for Moscow for 15 years and collecting $1.4 million in money and diamonds. Next, the execution of Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh had to be postponed because the bureau discovered that thousands of documents had not been turned over to the court.

The FBI is under investigation by Congress and the Justice Department, and many in Congress appear to want to limit its jurisdiction and increase congressional oversight of the agency.

The FBI's troubles and Freeh's announcement of a resignation took the Bush White House by surprise. Already taxed trying to get people in place in the new administration, the White House put together what one former senior Justice Department official called a "hasty list" of candidates.

Three candidates - Mueller, Washington lawyer George Terwilliger, veteran Chicago prosecutor and white-collar defense lawyer Dan Webb - were interviewed by White House counsel Alberto Gonzalez and Attorney General John Ashcroft.

Webb pulled himself out of consideration. Terwilliger fell from the short list because his work as a Bush strategist in the Florida recount was thought to have made him a target for Senate Democrats. Another candidate, 67-year-old Judge Sterling Johnson Jr. of New York City, a former police narcotics detective and the only black on the list, was determined to be too old for the 10-year appointment.

By mid-June, Mueller, 56 and a Justice Department professional, was standing alone. The decorated former Marine officer (he was wounded in Vietnam) joined the department in 1976 as an assistant United States attorney in San Francisco, the office he now heads. He stayed there until 1982 and then moved to Boston, where he eventually became the U.S. attorney.

President Bush's father appointed him assistant attorney general in charge of the criminal division in 1990, and when Bush left office Mueller took a lower position in charge of a specialized homicide task force in Washington's U.S. attorney's office.

As the Clinton administration was winding down, Mueller was brought to Washington as acting deputy attorney general. When Ashcroft took office, Mueller impressed Ashcroft and his staff, and he was put on the list of possible FBI directors.

But a former senior Justice Department official said Mueller was sharply opposed inside the department. Several years after he left the assistant attorney general's post, a Justice Department inspector general's report criticized the management of Criminal Division operations and people he had put in place.

This same source said it was Mueller who ordered the prosecutors on the Hanssen case to ask for the death penalty, which ran counter to Justice Department policy since the 1950s. "Asking for the death penalty in spying cases is counterproductive," this former official said. "What you are trying to do is to get the turncoat to tell you what damage he's done."

The Justice Department later dropped the request for the death penalty.

This former official, who asked that his name not be disclosed, said that Mueller's reorganization of the San Francisco office was heavy handed and that he "demeaned and denigrated many employees." Repeated calls to Mueller on Wednesday were not returned.

The Bush administration appears to be divided over what sort of director it is seeking. On the one hand, some officials want to rein in the powerful and independent agency and bring it more squarely under Ashcroft's control.

Others believe the bureau must be better managed, but it needs also to be given more resources and wider jurisdiction. This is not a new debate. It has been at the core of every director's appointment since J. Edgar Hoover died in 1972.

The bureau, with 11,215 sworn law enforcement agents, 15,000 support personnel, 56 offices in the United States and offices in U.S. embassies in 44 foreign countries, is the most powerful and effective national police agency in the world. With the Russian KGB largely dismantled, there is no other police or counterintelligence agency in the world with the technological or personnel resources of the bureau.

Though Freeh left under criticism, most law enforcement officials credit him with understanding that crime and terrorism had become as international as the Internet and the global economy.

He pushed the bureau into joint investigations with police around the world, training and liaison with Russia, daring international investigations that not only snared foreigners who committed crimes on U.S. soil, but built cases against people who planned the crimes abroad and never set foot in the United States.

This has made the director's job an astounding combination of manager, senior diplomat and hard-nosed cop. The FBI's employment ads in the nation's newspapers tell a lot. They need agents who speak Arabic and Farsi, Urdu and Korean. They need computer wizards who can tract cybercrimes and financial analysts who follow money-laundering trails through the most sophisticated banks in the world.

Perhaps the greatest complaint against Freeh, a former agent, is that he couldn't break the bureau tradition of promoting from within so that these exotic new investigations were being managed by officials who had come up in the old bureau image.

Hanssen was a good example. He was in the J. Edgar Hoover mold: son of a Chicago cop, religious, conservative and a family man. "Freeh put men in charge of sophisticated information technology departments and laboratories who had no experience in those fields," said one former official.

Like most of the candidates in Bush's first list, Freeh had never managed an entity larger than a medium-size law firm before taking on this 25,000-employee agency.

"He operated like a field supervisor, becoming personally involved in a lot of things he should have delegated," said a former FBI official.

Others believe that Freeh became deluded that he could "handle Congress," because his support from the New York delegation made him seem invulnerable to congressional criticism. But as hearings before the Senate Judiciary committee earlier this month showed, a lot of people in Congress are out to clip the FBI's wings.

Oddly enough, filling the FBI director's job is not an easy task.

Politicians are driven away by the 10-year tenure, which means a political career could be ended. Police executives seldom have the stature and the international savoir faire to carry off the assignment. The best post-Hoover choice was William Webster, a U.S. Judge who is helping Bush in the search.

Copyright 2001 by United Press International.

All rights reserved.

Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics:

Bush Administration

Hanssen Case

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