Why doesn’t Clinton just fire Sessions? J. Edgar Hoover hung on for decades as the nation’s G-man by collecting damaging information on his employers. Does Sessions enjoy some undisclosed leverage that keeps the president from dismissing him? Probably not. A more likely explanation is Clinton’s natural tendency to dither on personnel decisions, compounded by a reluctance to look overtly partisan in dumping a Republican appointee from one of the nation’s most sensitive law-enforcement jobs. It could also be in deference to Sessions’s efforts, against fierce internal opposition, to improve diversity in the bureau’s ranks. He settled a discrimination lawsuit brought by Hispanic agents. Earlier this year he approved a plan to allow a federal judge to oversee the bureaus’s treatment of black agents.
But Sessions has been damaged goods for months. A scathing report last January by outgoing Attorney General William Barr detailed a litany of unethical practices, including personal use of government aircraft and spending bureau funds to build a $10,000 wooden fence around his Washington home. Sessions charged that Barr’s report was a political vendetta. His obsessive fight for survival has isolated him from his senior managers and destroyed morale in the ranks. It has also coincided with a series of disastrous recent episodes, including a recommendation to Reno that the bureau pump tear gas into the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, and a bloody confrontation with an Idaho white supremacist last summer. There have been a few vigorously promoted successes, like the unraveling of the World Trade Center bombing conspiracy and last week’s capture of eight California white supremacists allegedly preparing to assassinate Rodney King and blow up a black church. But the prevailing picture is of an agency leaderless and adrift, plagued by warring fiefdoms.
Freeh, if appointed, might be able to help. A onetime agent, he became a federal prosecutor who led the government’s successful case against New York’s “pizza connection” heroin ring in the mid-1980s. George Bush named him to the federal bench in 1991. “He’s a naturally gifted leader,” says former U.S. attorney Rudolph Giuliani, Freeh’s ex-boss. “He has a great sensitivity towards people, a great understanding of how to motivate people.” After Sessions’s turbulent departure, Freeh will need every scrap of motivational skill to revive a troubled law-enforcement agency.
