NEWS ANALYSIS : Sessions Puzzle Threatens His Reputation, FBI’s Gains

WASHINGTON — As a federal judge for 13 years in San Antonio, William S. Sessions had a well-earned reputation for honesty and no-frills integrity. He lived in a modest home and drove an aging car to the courthouse downtown.

“He has an impeccable reputation here as an ethical, professional judge,” says U.S. District Judge Edward C. Prado, who tried cases before Sessions as a public defender and prosecutor before serving with him on the federal bench.

Today, little more than five years after he was sworn in as FBI director, Sessions stands accused by the Justice Department itself of systematically abusing his position in dozens of ways, from chauffeuring family members aboard FBI planes and cars to engaging in a “sham” to avoid taxes and receiving what investigators suggest was a sweetheart deal on a home mortgage.

Sessions has orchestrated an almost desperate campaign to save his job and salvage his reputation, ridiculing the charges as trivial matters twisted and exaggerated by his enemies. He is fighting to line up political support outside the bureau. Even at Thursday’s funeral for retired Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, Sessions moved through the crowd of mourners like a politician on election eve, seeking hands to shake.

In the end, however, the findings by the Justice Department’s internal watchdog unit, based on an investigation by FBI agents, and Sessions’ counterattack boil down to this: Did the FBI director lose his ethical compass, or is he a victim of a vendetta instigated by former Atty. Gen. William P. Barr--whose disdain for Sessions’ performance was well known--and abetted by FBI officials unhappy with his reign?

When the answer comes, it will reverberate throughout law enforcement, echoing far beyond whether Sessions completes the final half of his 10-year term. The affair has raised anxiety within the FBI that the crisis may undo the hard-won reforms of the post-J. Edgar Hoover era. If Clinton replaces Sessions quickly with his own director, he risks creating the appearance of politicizing the nation’s premier law enforcement agency.

The White House is reviewing the charges, which Clinton spokesman George Stephanopoulos has called disturbing. Clinton has legal authority to dismiss the FBI director at any time, but no decision is expected until a new attorney general is named.

How could William Steele Sessions, the former federal prosecutor and respected judge who took over the FBI in November, 1987, have come to this point?

The Justice Department opened an investigation of Sessions’ actions last June after receiving two letters accusing him of improprieties. One letter was anonymous but clearly from someone well acquainted with the inner workings of the director’s office. The other was from author Ron Kessler, who was working on a book about the FBI authorized by Sessions himself.

As FBI agents examined the allegations and began to take them seriously, Sessions hired two lawyers and began to resist the inquiry--even though agents are not allowed outside counsel in such proceedings.

Largely because of the FBI’s strait-laced reputation as a law enforcement agency and partly in reaction to the corruption of Hoover’s reign, petty abuses that would be swept under the rug elsewhere are not tolerated there. For instance, when the well-regarded Clarence M. Kelley was discovered to have received gifts from subordinates, symbolized by $335 worth of drapery valances, he was forced to take early retirement as director in 1977, although he was given a year’s grace to do so.

Sessions’ troubles were compounded because he has never been popular among many career officials, who chafed as Sessions became regarded by outsiders as “an agent of change.”

One arena where Sessions pushed for reform was in the hiring and promotion of female and minority agents, an effort that drew praise from liberals in Congress but created animosity in some sectors of the FBI. One of his staunchest defenders, Rep. Don Edwards (D-San Jose), chairman of the House subcommittee that oversees the FBI, rose to the director’s defense last week, calling him “the best FBI director ever.”

But even before the current scandal broke, critics and allies alike said that Sessions was rated far lower than that within the agency. He was perceived as out of touch, a manager who appeared to pay little attention to details and became bored easily.

“I always felt I could never get him tuned in to my frequency and vice versa,” said one longtime FBI official, who spoke only with a promise of anonymity, as did the other current and former officials interviewed.

This bureau veteran contrasted Sessions’ attitude with that of his predecessor, William H. Webster, who had the habit of peppering briefers with detailed questions.

“You talk case-related issues, and (Sessions’) mind would wander, and he’d finish without asking questions,” said the official. “So you’d say: ‘All right, director, then we’ll have this for you in five days.’ And he’d often respond with: ‘No, make it tomorrow.’ ” This, the official said, was Sessions’ way of trying to show “he was on top of things--setting a short deadline instead of really understanding the issue.”

Another official who briefed Sessions recalled a meeting in which details of an espionage case were being summarized. The director interrupted and said: “Those moujahedeen do everything in those pots. They cook in them. They shave in them.”

Startled, the briefer turned around and followed Sessions’ gaze to a television screen showing men handling large pots.

Even congressional supporters often find Sessions unusually detached. “Goofy,” as one congressional source put it.

A few days after the start of the air war against Iraq in January, 1991, then-Atty. Gen. Richard L. Thornburgh convened a meeting of top officials to discuss anti-terrorist measures. The session took place in the security “bubble,” a special room on the Justice Department’s sixth floor with elaborate safeguards against listening devices.

Thornburgh said that the President had called him about the start of the air war, and Thornburgh offhandedly asked the others how they had learned. When the question was addressed to Sessions, two participants recall the director sitting bolt upright and saying the information was classified.

When Thornburgh pointed out that everyone in the room had proper clearances and asked again, Sessions said stiffly that he had been asked not to talk about the air strike.

Perhaps the most damning accusation in the 161-page report prepared by the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility is that Sessions tried to avoid paying income tax on the value of the rides he gets to and from work in his chauffeur-driven FBI limousine.

Other government officials--including the attorney general--pay several thousand dollars a year in taxes on the benefit. However, police officers who drive government vehicles to and from work as part of their job can claim an exemption if they carry a gun and limit personal use of the car.

In the spring of 1990, Sessions received a legal opinion from Joseph R. Davis, the FBI’s chief lawyer, that he could use the exemption to avoid taxes if he carried a firearm or kept one close by in the limo. To qualify, Davis told Sessions, he would have to take FBI firearms training.

The internal report found that Sessions obtained a handgun and kept it unloaded in a briefcase in the trunk of the car. He never took any training, and the bullets remained in a safe at FBI headquarters.

Barr, who adopted the internal report’s findings on his last day in office last month, called the scheme a transparent attempt by Sessions to avoid taxes. “The notion that you could convert an executive chauffeur-driven limousine into a tactical police vehicle simply by keeping an unloaded gun in the truck does not even pass the red-face test,” Barr wrote to Sessions.

The FBI chief contends that he was simply following his lawyer’s advice, although he acknowledged that his failure to learn how to use the gun was an oversight. He told reporters recently that he is in the midst of filing new tax forms.

Another financial allegation involves the manner in which Sessions and his wife, Alice, obtained the mortgage on their home in Northwest Washington in 1989. The report suggests that the transaction was a “sweetheart deal.”

The Sessionses obtained a $375,000 mortgage on the $435,500 house. Under a conservative interpretation, the monthly payments constituted 47% of the couple’s gross monthly income--far above the 28% cap normally imposed by Riggs National Bank.

Sessions acknowledges that he knew Joe L. Allbritton, the chairman of Riggs, and that the two have become friends since the loan was granted. But he said that he never discussed the loan with Allbritton and denied any knowledge of receiving preferential treatment.

A Riggs spokesman said that the bank never comments on customer business, but the Justice Department is preparing another report on the transaction after receiving access to the loan documents.

Sessions is criticized in the report for 126 trips on FBI planes on which he was accompanied by his wife, most times at government expense. Each Christmas but one, for instance, the Sessionses flew on FBI planes to San Francisco, where they visited their daughter and the director engaged in some FBI business.

As a yardstick, the report compares travel by Sessions and Thornburgh, the former attorney general, between Oct. 1, 1988, and March 31, 1990. Thornburgh’s wife accompanied him on 10 trips and he reimbursed the government each time. Alice Sessions traveled with her husband on 32 trips and the government was reimbursed once.

Sessions characterizes criticism of his wife’s presence as “inappropriate and inflammatory” because the trips were approved by FBI lawyers. But a still-to-be-released analysis of Sessions’ version by the Office of Professional Responsibility contends that FBI counsel Davis assessed the propriety of only a handful of the flights.

Similar accusations were leveled about transporting friends and associates in the FBI limo and allowing his wife to use it for personal trips, including one to get her nails done. The report says that such personal use of a government car violates FBI regulations. For instance, it said, in a typical punishment, an agent was suspended for 30 days after he picked up his son, whose car had broken down, and drove him seven blocks to school.

Of course, security precautions require that Sessions be accompanied by FBI agents any time he is in public, and that he travel as quickly and safely as possible.

“On the way home I go to a food store and I go to the cleaners, with a security detail,” Sessions told reporters on Jan. 23. “It’s not unusual for me to do that. Is that personal business? Sure, it’s personal business.”

But, Sessions seemed to imply, it is unavoidable when you spend your life inside the security bubble.

But even a government official allied with Sessions believes that the FBI director and his wife found the limousine to be a valuable social cachet.

“Alice gets in a social circle beyond her wildest expectations,” said the official. “In that situation, it’s easy to depend on security to do things for you that others in the circle employ people to do.”

The director’s wife has emerged as his most ardent defender, at times describing him as “naive” about Washington infighting. He appears to have followed her lead in developing some of his response.

When word of the internal investigation first surfaced last fall, Alice Sessions told Texas reporters that her husband was a target of disloyal bureau employees. On Jan. 22, she repeated the theme in an interview with the Dallas Morning News, accusing Barr of relying on “disgruntled people” in the FBI to try to remove Sessions. One of the betrayers, she said, was Floyd I. Clarke, the FBI’s deputy director.

The next day, when Sessions called reporters to his office to defend himself in a 90-minute session, he berated Barr. In the following days, he moved his campaign to the network news shows.

Even if the defense succeeds and Sessions holds on to his job, some senior FBI officials believe that he will have a difficult time recovering credibility and respect.

Already, the scandal has taken on a cartoonish character among agents and their superiors. “Special FBI Income Tax Rules” circulating at the J. Edgar Hoover building in Washington lampoon Sessions and his side of the story mercilessly. They conclude by offering agents who run afoul of the rules and regulations a general defense: “Claim that you were advised by bureau lawyers to act as you did. This gets the responsibility for your actions off you.”