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Friday, July 6, 2001

Bush announced Mueller's appointment in the Rose Garden shortly before noon.

"I am deeply honored," said Mueller, who appeared alongside Bush and Attorney General John Ashcroft. "I look forward to the confirmation process."

Mueller, 56, emerged in recent weeks as the front-runner in the White House's search for an FBI director. However, administration and FBI sources recently said the search was expanding because Bush wanted options in addition to Mueller.

Freeh stepped down last month. His resignation was unexpected, and recent troubles at the bureau clouded the search for a new director.

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.

Bush had said he wanted a strong manager to oversee the FBI in the wake of revelations about the missing McVeigh documents.

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

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 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., a former New York City police narcotics detective and the only black on the list, was determined to be too old for the 10-year term.

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

Bush's father, President George Bush, appointed him assistant attorney general in charge of the criminal division in 1990 and when he 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 him and his staff and he was put on the list of possible FBI directors.

But a former senior Justice Department official said that 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 death penalty request.

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 its technological or personnel resources.

Although 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 also 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 trace cybercrimes and financial analysts who follow money-laundering trails through the most sophisticated banks in the world.

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 on 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.

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 fare to carry off the assignment.

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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