Issue two was broader. Listening to the briefing, I could see us walking down a path that ended up with a sitting president of the United States as the subject of a criminal investigation, perhaps even the subject of a criminal prosecution. That could automatically trigger the independent counsel statute, and even though I was only a few months into my job, I knew that would change almost everything about my relationship with the White House and Bill Clinton, on both a professional and personal level. On that front, at least, I was prophetic in the extreme.
I made my own mistakes in trying to find a working balance with Bill Clinton. I lacked subtlety at times. I had an insufficient appreciation for the nuanced life of southern politicians. I never learned to do good ol’ boy. My part of New Jersey is a long way from Hope, Arkansas.
Hard on the heels of my briefing on Madison Guaranty Savings and Loan, the White House sent over a personal pass for my use. Under other circumstances, I would have been flattered. Personal passes let you come and go at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue without having to be logged in. The passes were given out to cabinet officers as a matter of routine. Beneath that level—and I was—they’re a gift of sorts, a way of saying that you’re a key part of the team.
By then, though, a personal pass was just what I didn’t want. If the FBI was going to be involved in an investigation of the president, as seemed possible, I wanted every visit I made to the White House to be part of some public record. I was just starting law school when the Watergate scandal broke. I remembered all those shadowy late-night meetings with Richard Nixon, all those “What did you talk about?” and “Who was there?” grillings before the congressional committees. I didn’t want to go through that myself somewhere down the road, and I didn’t want that kind of taint to attach itself to whatever waited ahead when this scandal broke, if it was a scandal, if it broke at all.
So I sent the pass back with a polite but fairly terse note, expressing my thanks and simply stating that I didn’t mind signing in when I came calling, and that, I was to find out much later, offended Bill Clinton mightily even though, so far as I knew, I had been a virtual nonentity to him up to that point. Not only was returning the pass a personal affront to the president, it was seemingly a declaration of open hostility on my part. I later heard that some of the Clinton people understood that wasn’t the case and tried to tell the president as much, but to no avail. The president’s mind was made up.
In retrospect, I should have better explained my reasons, sugar-coated the action and taken more care to try to preserve my relationship with the president even as I was intentionally distancing myself from him. But was I wrong to have returned the pass? No, not at all.
I was the nation’s top cop. The president and his wife might or might not have been involved, however marginally, in an act of bank fraud; or they might simply be good friends and former business partners of someone who was involved in bank fraud; or it was possible no fraud had been committed at all. Until the matter was sorted out, I had to be accountable for every trip I made to the building where the president worked and lived. That meant no personal pass, but it also marked the end of any hope I had of establishing a close working relationship with my boss. Less than half a year after Bill Clinton had wooed me into taking the job of director, the president was seriously beginning to wish that I had said no.
The problem, of course, was that with Bill Clinton the scandals and rumored scandals, the incubating ones and the dying ones, never ended. Whatever moral compass the president was consulting, it was leading him in the wrong direction, and he lacked the discipline to pull back once he found himself stepping into trouble. Worse, he had been behaving that way so long that the closets were full of skeletons just waiting to burst out. Whitewater grew like mold through the entire first term. Travelgate went away, finally, but Gennifer Flowers and Paula Jones never really did. The women, the wheeling and dealing down in Arkansas, Webb Hubbell’s legal troubles, Vince Foster’s suicide—they were always there as background static.
We added our own mess to the pile by incorrectly sending the president’s staff more than four hundred FBI file summaries of people who had had White House security clearances during the Bush and Reagan years. It was a goof, plain and simple, as Ken Starr’s office eventually confirmed, but it was embarrassing all the same. Still, if the ethical climate at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue had not been so suspect, “Filegate” never would have provoked much more than a mild gasp.
I didn’t help matters either by the way I handled the Larry Potts promotion. I had known Larry since my U.S. attorney days when we worked together down in Atlanta on the Moody case, and I had the highest regard for him. He’d had a distinguished career in the FBI, rising to the rank of assistant director before I came on the scene, and he had every right in the normal course of affairs to expect that I would make him my number two, the deputy director, at some point after I took over the top post. But Larry was also a Bureau lightning rod. He had supervised two of the FBI’s most controversial undertakings in the early 1990s, the siege at Ruby Ridge, in Idaho, and the one at the Branch Davidian compound in Waco. Both had attracted plenty of media scrutiny and outside criticism, and a lot of that had attached to Larry.
From what I knew, Larry was getting an unfair rap, but when Floyd Clarke announced at the end of 1993 that he would be vacating the deputy director’s post, I thought the time wasn’t yet right to elevate Larry. I wanted to let all the controversy die down before I did that. Otherwise, the promotion would turn into yet another media circus. So I picked David Binney for the post. Understandably, Larry was very upset about being passed over, and he told me so. I explained my reasons to him, told him the furor needed more time to die down, and in effect promised him the deputy director’s position when David left. That was my mistake. David Binney quit less than a year after accepting the job, to become director of corporate security at IBM, and, as promised, I named Larry Potts to succeed him while the controversy over Waco and Ruby Ridge was still raging. Ten weeks later, in mid-1995, I had to pull Larry out of the job and transfer him to one of our training units.
The promotion-demotion was an embarrassment to the FBI, Larry, me, and to Janet Reno, who had approved my selection. It reflected poorly on the administration generally. This was an important post, responsible for day-to-day operations of the Bureau, not some Ping-Pong ball to be knocked all over the place. Most of all, though, my mistake was unfair to Larry Potts, and for that I feel deep regret.
Bernie Nussbaum, who had been my first connection to the Clinton White House and my best friend in it, resigned after only fourteen months as White House counsel. Whether Bernie left on his own or was nudged toward the door, I still don’t know. I’ve never asked, but he’d had a rough run. Vince Foster’s suicide, our bungling with Filegate, the flogging he took in the press when it was revealed that he had met with officials of the Resolution Trust Corporation over the Madison Guaranty criminal referrals—Bernie got it from all sides. What’s more, his strategy for protecting the president wasn’t working. Bernie was a top Wall Street lawyer. He was used to circling the wagons, locking the doors, and denying everything when things went bad. Offer up nothing. Make them get it out of you. My feeling was that the president needed to be disclosing more, not less; he needed to be more forthright with the American people about the charges and insinuations flying around him. Bill Clinton wasn’t a corporate CEO; he was the leader of a nation. There’s a big difference.
Bernie also never got over the fact that the president had failed to follow his advice to resist an independent counsel to investigate Whitewater. That more than anything else, in my opinion, is what made Bernie head for the door, but it was a door that would get plenty of use. In eight years in office, Bill Clinton ran through six White House counsels, a telling index of just how troubled his tenure was. But none of them had Bernie’s depth and high integrity.
For me, Bernie’s departure was a serious loss. As I wrote earlier, there’s a special bond between th
ose of us who have come out of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York. Bernie was proud that he had recommended me for the job, and he would remain so even after Bill Clinton had changed his mind on that one. For my part, I was proud that Bernie had thought I was up to the task, and of course, it’s always nice to have someone you trust and like inside the lion’s den. But Bernie’s departure did leave me feeling slightly abandoned. I still had plenty of channels to the Oval Office. Leon Panetta, John Podesta, Mack McLarty, George Stephanopoulos—I was on good terms with all of them despite our occasional differences over particular issues. Every one of them was a pro, but none of them was Bernie, and that became a problem as the first term wore on. Also in Bernie’s departure I was struck at how easily Clinton played hardball politics even with his loyal and closest friends.
An FBI director should be able to go directly to the president, sit down with him and say, You should know about this. I wish that I had been able to do that. We had vital business to discuss. But almost from the very beginning, I felt uncomfortable spending private time with the president. There was always some new investigation brewing, some new calamity bubbling just below the headlines.
The president’s frequently expressed point of view was that his troubles stemmed from political enemies who wouldn’t leave his past alone and a special prosecutor he never should have agreed to. The White River real-estate deal was a decade and a half old by the time Bill Clinton moved into the Oval Office. He’d first met Gennifer Flowers even before that, in 1977, when she was a local television reporter and he was a wet-behind-the-ears attorney general. The commodities deal in which Hillary allegedly made a sweetheart $100,000 profit—another fork in the river as Whitewater flowed along—dated back to the late 1970s, as well. Paula Jones was old news, and a gold digger, too. As for Robert Fiske, the former U.S. attorney from New York whom I had recommended Janet Reno appoint as special prosecutor, he was “the worst presidential decision I ever made,” Clinton writes in his memoir.
I don’t happen to agree with him on all those points, and not at all on the matter of a special prosecutor, but the campaign contribution investigation that dogged the beginning of the president’s second term was none of those things. It was new; the makings were homegrown in the White House, not back in Arkansas; and Bob Fiske had nothing to do with it.
On November 24, 1997, I sent to Attorney General Janet Reno and to Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick—and to those two only—a twenty-seven-page memo accompanied by a two-page cover letter in which I provided an overview of an ongoing FBI investigation into allegations of illicit fund-raising during the 1996 presidential campaign. In addition to the facts of the case, I outlined the provisions and requirements of the independent counsel statute and recommended that the attorney general invoke it in this instance. By now, it should go without saying that word of the memo leaked to the press almost instantaneously.
It wasn’t long before Dan Burton, the Indiana Republican and chairman of the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee, was demanding that Janet provide him with a copy of what I had written. Janet’s refusal touched off a war of words between the two of them that almost earned her a contempt of Congress citation. (Most of the words in this “war” were fired by Burton, who is rarely without something to say when he’s riled up. Janet tried to keep a dignified silence through the ordeal.) But I didn’t write the memo to stir up the war.
Nor did I write the memo to make myself even more of a persona non grata at the White House. The president had assured me before I took the job as director that I would be immune from political pressure. That was my bottom line on the professional side, and he had agreed to it wholeheartedly. But he obviously had second thoughts when my political immunity crept too close to his own skin. Bill Clinton stopped talking with me just about the time word of my memo surfaced, and he didn’t speak to me again until shortly after the USS Cole was attacked almost four years later, and then only a few words.
I didn’t even write the memo with the thought that anyone was “guilty” of anything. As I told Chairman Burton when he pressed me, unsuccessfully, to divulge the contents of the memo before his committee:
“In recommending to the attorney general that an independent counsel be appointed, I did not and do not believe that any particular person has committed a crime or is a target of a grand jury, or even has done anything improper. I recommended appointment of an independent counsel to investigate whether crimes may have been committed, but nothing more should be inferred from that recommendation.”
And I certainly didn’t write the memo as an act of partisan politics. To be sure, appearing to buck President Clinton won me GOP fans on the Hill, but believe me, it wasn’t always thus. As the Democratic commentator Mark Shields noted on PBS’s The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer just as the memo flap was hitting its high point: “Six months ago Republicans—I mean, the majority of Republicans—were calling for [Freeh’s] scalp on Capitol Hill. You name the offense … he was a bum. Now he’s the pinup boy.” Don’t worry, I would be a bum again.
I wrote that memo for the simplest of reasons: because I felt that as FBI director, I had to write it. “Soft money” appeared to have seeped into the 1996 presidential and congressional campaigns, in staggering quantities, and from alarming sources, including the People’s Republic of China. Not surprisingly, the great bulk of the money seemed to have ended up in the Clinton-Gore reelection coffers. The presidency is the biggest prize, and Bob Dole never appeared to have much of a chance against Bill Clinton. Everyone likes to back a winner, at the highest level possible.
The Bureau had been looking into what we called Campcon (campaign contributions) since early 1997. By November, when I sent the memo, we had divided the investigation into three distinct but interrelated matters. To quote from the memo that almost earned Janet Reno a contempt citation, those three matters were:
• an aggressive campaign fund-raising operation developed and executed by a core group of individuals from the DNC [Democratic National Committee] and the White House, including the president, the vice president, and a number of top White House advisers.
• allegations of illegal conduct by a myriad of opportunists and other individuals who gained White House access in order to further their personal, business, and political interests.
• efforts by the PRC [People’s Republic of China] and other countries to gain foreign policy influence by illegally contributing foreign money to U.S. political campaigns and to the DNC through domestic conduits.
As noted in item one, above, the president and the vice president were equally subjects of the investigation. If anything, the onus of the allegations seemed to be falling more heavily on the VP than on his boss. But Bill Clinton and Al Gore were anything but equal in their understanding of my motives and those of the Bureau. The vice president got it; Clinton did not.
Granted, I was on much closer terms with Al Gore than I was with the president. I was a member of the vice president’s Air Safety Commission. My wife, Marilyn, served on the committee for the Race for the Cure, the fund-raiser for breast cancer research that Tipper Gore had been instrumental in launching. Al and I both ran in the race several times. I also was good friends with a wonderful Mississippi lawyer named Frank Hunger. Frank’s wife—Al Gore’s sister—had recently died of cancer, and Marilyn and I had gone to the memorial service. Afterward, we’d been part of a small dinner party at the Gores’ vice-presidential mansion on the grounds of the U.S. Naval Observatory.
I couldn’t talk directly to the vice president about the allegations any more than I could talk directly to the president. They were, after all, subjects of the investigation. But I did hear from people in the White House that Al had said to the president and his protectors, “I don’t know why you’re so upset at Freeh. He’s just doing his job.” Certainly, his conduct toward me reflected that attitude. I have always had tremendous respect for Al Gore, and in this instance, an investigation found
no evidence of any improper activity.
Hillary Clinton, I think, got it, too. I had almost no dealings with her, socially or professionally. Like the president, though, she had been the subject of our investigative attentions and might well have resented it. But on the one occasion when I did spend some time with her—at the May 2000 funeral services for Cardinal John O’Connor, the Roman Catholic archbishop of New York—I had no sense of hostility on her part. (John Cardinal O’Connor, Navy admiral chaplain and the best archbishop New York ever had, was a great friend and teacher. Over the years he had personally expended great efforts, prayers, and real help to dozens of FBI agents and their families—especially to me. Later, Cardinals McCarrick and Law continued this special ministry to the FBI family, who revered both of them.) By chance, Hillary Clinton and I sat side by side and shared a hymnal that day. She seemed perfectly at ease.
Not so her husband. With him, it always seemed to be personal.
“I didn’t believe Freeh was foolish enough to think the Democratic party would knowingly accept illegal contributions from the Chinese government,” Clinton writes in his autobiography; “he was just trying to avoid criticism from the press and the Republicans, even if it damaged our foreign policy operations.”
That’s his take. Maybe he has even convinced himself it’s true. Certainly, I’ve seen the charge made often enough, by the president’s defenders and apologists, that it no longer angers or surprises me. But Clinton couldn’t have this more wrong.
Men and women I was being paid to oversee and for whom I had the highest regard had uncovered without any direction on my part a troubling pattern of very aggressive fund-raising that included shadowy figures such as John Huang, and questionable practices such as overnight White House stays for the largest donors. We didn’t know if illegal acts were involved, but the Campcon Task Force had turned over a rock and found a situation highly conducive to illegal acts with lasting consequences—acts that might subvert the integrity of our political system if they went unchecked. I believe I would have lost the respect of the agents who served under me had I not pursued the investigation further. What’s more, I believe I would have deserved to lose their respect had I failed to do so. It might have come as a surprise to the man who hired me, but I didn’t take the job of FBI director so I could roll over and play dead whenever it became convenient for the White House.
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