In last week’s other Justice Department scandal, Sessions, halfway through his 10-year term, was charged with a raft of ethical violations that read like Leona Helmsley’s Greatest Hits. After a six-month investigation, the department’s ethics office said Sessions, 62, repeatedly flouted regulations on the use of FBI aircraft, cars, money and personnel. He’s accused of making his bodyguards fly a load of firewood from upstate New York to Washington, having his wife driven around town for shopping and personal errands, taking his wife along on a plane to 111 locations, getting reimbursed for a jaunt in the French countryside and using $9,890 in government funds to build a fence at his home despite several warnings that the fence actually impeded security. He is also accused of evading several thousand dollars a year in income taxes on the perks that went with his office and refusing to cooperate with a probe of his home mortgage, on which he may have gotten a sweetheart deal.
Accompanying the report was a memo to Sessions from outgoing Attorney General William Barr ordering Sessions to make restitution, Barr, whose relationship with Sessions had deteriorated over Other matters, went out of his way to ridicule the director. “… Your explanations, where provided, are wholly unpersuasive … The notion that you could convert an executive chauffeur-driven limousine into a tactical police vehicle simply by keeping an unloaded gun in the trunk does not even pass the ‘red face test’.” Barr, concluding that Sessions had been engaged in a “clear pattern of … taking advantage of the government,” sent the report to the White House.
Sessions claims the investigation into his actions was “conducted without the barest elements of fairness, and marked by press leaks calculated to defame me.” Sources close to the director say the report relies on too few sources, and reflects Barr’s “clear animosity” toward Sessions. Last Saturday Sessions’s lawyers issued a point-by-point response, calling the report “inaccurate, incomplete and biased.” The wooden fence, the lawyers say, cost only $3,750; the rest of the money went for iron gates and an electronic gate opener, justified by security needs. The “load of firewood,” they claim, consisted of four sticks of aspen; all his trips were approved by the FBI counsel.
But this rebuttal may have been a wasted effort. FBI sources believe President Clinton will fire Sessions if he doesn’t resign. (Only a president can dismiss an FBI director.) “These aren’t petty things,” Says a senior FBI official. “If they’re true-and it looks like they are-then he should step down.” In its first week in office, the Clinton administration seemed to be preparing Sessions to walk the plank. Spokesman George Stephanopoulos called the charges “disturbing,” though he promised that the FBI director would have a chance to respond in fall. When Sessions’s name came up at an Oval Office photo op on Saturday, the president said, “I don’t want to talk about it.” And the name of a presumed front runner for Sessions’s job has bobbed up: Lee Colwell, a former senior FBI official in the mid-’80s and a Friend of Bill. “I don’t see any way he can survive from the standpoint of the bureau, which universally condemns him,” says Ronald Kessler, who is writing a book on the FBI.
Sessions, a silver-haired Texan known for meting out stiff jail sentences as a federal judge, looked like the ideal FBI director when Ronald Reagan appointed him. Yet he has never fit into the insular world of the agency J. Edgar Hoover ran for nearly five decades. Field agents contemptuously refer to him as “Director Concessions” because they believe he caved in to a federal court in settling a case in 1990 on racial discrimination at the bureau. Senior FBI officials consider him a poor manager. That he occasionally bucked the Bush administration and got along with liberal Democrats in Congress didn’t help him either. Regardless of the current controversy, says a top official, “a lot of us don’t think he is suited to be director.”
Since even his detractors regard him as a nice guy, the question asked by those who know him is why he might have used his office for private, petty gain. Some at the FBI blame his wife, Alice-who took an active role in bureau affairs and was quoted as calling her husband’s colleagues “bores and self-serving.” But one senior Justice lawyer who knows Sessions says there is a simpler explanation that official Washington knows too well, no matter the administration. “He fell into this typical pattern that he’s one of these philosopher-kings who is above the law.” If that syndrome topples a director of the FBI-as it already did a nominee for attorney general-it should give all the new Clintonians something to think about.
Among the charges against FBI Director William Sessions:
That a $9,890 fence at his house actually detracted from his security. He says the expense was justified.
That he repeatedly took an FBI plane to visit his daughter in California. He says each trip was cleared by an FBI lawyer.
That FBI agents carried firewood from New York to Washington. He says it was four sticks of Aspen.
That he made his limo a tax-exempt cop car by carrying an unloaded gun. He says that was fine by the FBI chief counsel.
