Sessions’ assistant Sarah Munford demonstrated her belief that she was above the law on December 24, 1991, when two Texas state troopers stopped her and her son Glenn one mile west of San Saba, Texas, for having tinted side windows, a violation of Texas law.
According to trooper Stephen L. Boyd, as he approached the driver’s side of the car, Munford rolled down the passenger window and displayed her FBI credentials. Although she was a support employee, Munford had so-called “soft credentials” that look like an agent’s and are kept in a credentials case. Apparently she thought that waving the credentials out the window would take care of the ticket. Saying she was the assistant to the director of the FBI and that her family was in law enforcement, Munford told the trooper, “You go home at night, and your kids think you are a decent person, and then you go and do something like this.”
Boyd told me he ignored her and wrote her a ticket. He explained to her that the judge would probably dismiss the case if her son, who owned the car, mailed in a photo showing that the tinting had been removed.
Munford had attached her FBI business card to Boyd’s copy of the ticket, and the following week, he decided to call the number on the card and complain. He was quickly transferred to the FBI’s Office of Professional Responsibility, which opened an investigation into Munford’s actions.
Having learned of Sessions’ abuses and documented them when writing The FBI, I wanted to get Sessions’ comment. When the public affairs office refused to arrange an interview with Sessions to go over the items, Greenleaf, the FBI’s associate deputy director, suggested I itemize them in a letter to Sessions.
In the June 24, 1992, letter, I outlined many of the abuses. On the grounds that the FBI is obligated to make its Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) aware of any specific allegations of wrongdoing by high-level FBI officials, the bureau turned over my ten-page single-spaced letter to OPR. That office then officially gave the letter to the Justice Department’s OPR.
Just after that, Attorney General William Barr received a second, anonymous letter purportedly written by a retired FBI agent. Dated June 25, 1992, it focused on Sessions’ practice of disguising personal trips as official business. The fact that the second letter was dated a day after the FBI received my letter suggests that the anonymous writer was aware of my letter.
Based on the two letters, the Department of Justice’s OPR opened an investigation into Sessions’ actions and broadened the FBI OPR investigation into Sarah Munford’s activities.
After a month and a half, Sessions decided to grant my request for an interview. When he met with me in his conference room, the FBI director declared he would not answer any of the questions raised in the letter. Instead, he launched into a half-hour tongue-lashing.
Sessions noted that he had given me unprecedented access to the FBI, making sure that everyone cooperated and waiving the usual rules requiring public affairs personnel to be present at interviews. He said he thought the book would focus exclusively on the great work the FBI does. He said he was “offended” and “disappointed” that I had delved into any FBI personnel matters, particularly issues relating to his wife.
Predictably, Alice Sessions weighed in with her own analysis. In an interview with the San Antonio Light, she suggested that evidence had been manufactured and that her husband was “waking up out of a stupor, realizing he’s been had.” Someone tacked a copy of the article to a bulletin board in FBI headquarters with the inscription “Alice in Wonderland.”
Self-destructive or self-deluding, at the height of the investigation into his improper use of FBI planes, Sessions flew with Alice on the FBI’s Sabreliner jet aircraft to attend a performance of the Bolshoi Ballet at the Sands Hotel and Casino in Atlantic City on November 27, 1992. The Sands picked up the $100 tab for the tickets.
When it finally came out in January 1993, the Justice Department’s OPR report contained so many additional examples of Sessions’ abuses and lack of judgment that it hit like a bombshell. The 161-page report disclosed what the New York Times called “a seemingly endless record of chiseling and expense account padding.”
Besides having the FBI pay for the fence around his house even though it detracted from the security of his home, the report said Sessions abused government travel for personal gain, systematically used his security detail for personal errands, and allowed his wife an FBI building pass without the required clearance.
The report said that four times while he was director, Sessions and his wife took the FBI plane to San Francisco, where their daughter lived, for Christmas. There, in an effort to justify the trip as official business, they had the FBI generate excuses for making the trip on the government’s dime. Indeed, after Alice Sessions attended a breakfast meeting to which she had not been invited, she confided to an agent that she had come to the meeting because she had to justify her trip.
Even as the report was being written, Sessions made a similar trip to San Francisco for Christmas 1992. On another trip, Sessions had FBI agents load firewood for his home into the FBI car and drive it from Salisbury, Connecticut, to Poughkeepsie, New York, then fly the firewood back to Washington.
The OPR report concluded that the issues raised by the internal investigation were so serious that the president should decide whether Sessions should remain in office. Attorney General Barr ordered Sessions to reimburse the government $9,890 for the fence around his property, pay taxes on the value of his FBI transportation to and from work, release his mortgage documents to OPR, and repay the government for travel and per diem payments for personal trips.
The OPR report came out the day before Bill Clinton became president. Asked about the report, Clinton spokesman George Stephanopoulos called it “disturbing.” In an editorial entitled “Time’s Up for William Sessions,” the New York Times called for his removal.
In comments to the press, William Sessions blamed everyone but himself and mounted an impressive lobbying campaign. He convinced Washingtonian magazine that he was the victim of a conspiracy that included me, Hooverites, bigoted FBI agents, Michael Shaheen of Justice’s Office of Professional Responsibility, and Attorney General Barr, among others. He did not respond to a request for comment for this book.
Thus Sessions emerged as an enigma, not at all a clone of Webster, who leaned over backward to avoid the appearance of impropriety. While Sessions acted as a cheerleader for the bureau, the reality was that he—like his wife—mistrusted the FBI and had disdain for its agents.
Instead of the pleasant man Sessions appeared to be, Barr and other Justice and FBI officials concluded he was, in fact, arrogant. How else to explain Sessions’ position that he was not subject to the rules that governed everyone else?
The standoff over Sessions and his future paralyzed every other facet of the bureau’s operations—administration, personnel, legislative, and budget. With crime increasing and the federal budget tightening, the FBI needed to enhance its technological capabilities. For months such proposals had been piling up on Sessions’ desk.
Twice Sessions met with Janet Reno in a futile effort to refute the charges against him. Twice Reno refused Sessions’ requests to fly on a Justice Department plane to visit his son in San Antonio and to see his daughter in San Francisco. Each time, Sessions invented business reasons for the trips. Reno, like Bill Barr, had taken to groaning each time she heard Sessions’ name.
“I knew I should have stayed in Miami,” she remarked one time when hearing of Sessions’ latest misuse of power, saying he had “brought this all on himself.”
After Reno gave a speech in the courtyard of the Justice Department on April 6, 1993, Sessions began walking toward her, apparently hoping to speak with her. Ignoring him, Reno walked in the other direction. Finally Reno asked Sessions to meet with her at the Justice Department on Saturday morning, July 17, 1993. With White House counsel Bernard Nussbaum present, Reno told Sessions that President Clinton would fire him if he did not resign by Monday.
After leav
ing the meeting with Reno, in full view of television and newspaper cameras, Sessions tripped on a curb outside the Justice Department. He broke an elbow. After spending the evening in a hospital, Sessions appeared outside his home. Defiantly, he told reporters that as a “matter of principle” he would not resign. Beyond promoting his own self-interest, it was not clear what principle he was upholding. By ignoring Clinton’s wish that he resign gracefully, Sessions had plunged the FBI into turmoil as he battled pointlessly to keep his job.
On Monday, Clinton made the announcement he should have made six months earlier. In the White House briefing room, the president said he had telephoned Sessions to tell him he was removing him. Appearing with Clinton at the White House, Reno said she had concluded that, as outlined by the facts contained in the OPR report, Sessions had exhibited “a serious deficiency in judgment.”
In the end, it came down to the question of whether Sessions would leave FBI headquarters on his own or whether he would have to be carried out by agents. To make sure he got the message when Clinton called him at 3:50 p.m. to dismiss him, Philip Heymann, the deputy attorney general, met with Sessions in his office to warn him the call was coming. Heymann explained to Sessions what the procedures would be. Like any agent removed from the rolls, the director would have to turn in his FBI credentials and badge and remove from his office only personal effects. Meanwhile, Clinton faxed Sessions a letter informing him of his removal. But Sessions was still in his office at 3:59 p.m. Clinton called him a second time, this time telling him his firing was to take effect “immediately.”
Finally Sessions got the message. As instructed, he handed over his FBI credentials to Heymann. Now considered a visitor, Sessions had to be escorted through the halls by his security detail. He gave a final press conference at headquarters. Saying he had been subjected to “scurrilous attacks,” Sessions vowed to continue to “speak in the strongest terms about protecting it [the FBI] from being manipulated and politicized both from the inside and out.”
Sessions left FBI headquarters at six o’clock. He got one last ride home from his security detail. It was the first time an FBI director had been fired.
Within the FBI, there was jubilation, tinged with sorrow that events had taken such a tragic turn. Darlene Fitzsimmons, Sessions’ secretary, began sobbing.
“Sessions is a very nice man, but he was led around by Sarah Munford and his wife,” she told me.
Other secretaries on Mahogany Row broke out a bottle of champagne.
13
BEHIND VINCE FOSTER’S SUICIDE
THE DAY AFTER WILLIAM SESSIONS WAS REMOVED AS DIRECTOR, a man drove his white van into the parking lot at Fort Marcy Park along the Potomac River in northern Virginia to find a place to urinate. While walking through the woods just before 6:00 p.m., he discovered a dead body. He reported it to two U.S. Park Service employees, who called 911.
At 6:10 p.m. on July 20, 1993, U.S. Park Police and rescue personnel found Vincent W. Foster Jr., the deputy White House counsel, dead with a .38-caliber revolver in his right hand and gunshot-residue-like material on that hand. There was a gunshot wound through the back of his head. There were no signs of a struggle.
An autopsy determined that Foster’s death was caused by a gunshot through the back of his mouth, exiting the back of his head. The police learned that Foster had called a family doctor for antidepressant medication the day before his death. Four days before his death, he had told his sister Sheila that he was depressed, and she had given him the names of three psychiatrists. However, he expressed concern that his security clearance might be lifted if he saw a therapist.
While the U.S. Park Police and autopsy reports concluded that Foster had committed suicide, questions inevitably were raised. Some suggested that Foster had been murdered and moved to the park to conceal the location of the crime. While suicide cannot be explained rationally, the investigations as reported publicly never established what may have triggered Foster’s decision to take his own life at that particular time.
As part of his broader investigation into allegations surrounding Bill and Hillary Clinton’s investments in the Whitewater real estate development, independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr investigated Foster’s death. One reason was that records involving Whitewater were in Foster’s office. Starr retained current and former FBI agents to conduct interviews with those who dealt with Foster, both at the White House and in Little Rock.
Former FBI agent Coy Copeland was the senior investigator who read the reports of the other agents. According to Copeland, what never came out publicly was that the agents learned that about a week before his death, Hillary Clinton and Foster, who was her mentor at the Rose Law Firm in Little Rock, held a meeting with other White House aides to go over the health care legislation she was proposing. Those who were present told the FBI agents working for Starr that Hillary violently disagreed with a legal objection Foster raised at the meeting and humiliated Foster in front of aides, Copeland says.
“Hillary put him down really, really bad in a pretty good-size meeting,” Copeland says. “She told him he didn’t get the picture, and he would always be a little hick-town lawyer who was obviously not ready for the big time.”
Based on what “dozens” of others who had contact with Foster after that meeting told the agents, “The put-down that she gave him in that big meeting just pushed him over the edge,” Copeland says. “It was the final straw that broke the camel’s back.”
After the meeting, Foster’s behavior changed dramatically. Those who knew him said his voice sounded strained, he became withdrawn and preoccupied, and his sense of humor vanished. At times, Foster teared up. He talked of feeling trapped.
On Tuesday, July 13, while having dinner with his wife, Lisa, Foster broke down and began to cry. He said he was considering resigning.
That weekend, Foster and his wife drove to the Eastern Shore of Maryland, where they saw their friends Michael Cardoza and Webster Hubbell and their wives.
“They played tennis, they swam, and they said he sat in a lawn chair, just kind of sat there in the lawn chair,” Copeland says. “They said that just was not Vince. He loved to play tennis, and he was always sociable, but he just sat over in the corner by himself and stared off into space, reading a book.”
Two days later, Foster left the White House parking lot at 1:10 p.m. The precise time when he shot himself could not be pinpointed. After Park Police found his body, they notified the U.S. Secret Service at 8:30 p.m.
“I think he had pretty much made up his mind that weekend what he was going to do,” Copeland says.
In issuing his 114-page report, Starr exhaustively detailed a series of issues that were troubling Foster, including critical Wall Street Journal editorials and upcoming congressional hearings on the firings of White House Travel Office personnel.
A perfectionist, Foster placed tremendous demands on himself. In days or weeks before his death, he had written that he “was not meant for the job or the spotlight of public life in Washington. Here, ruining people is considered sport.”
“I have never worked so hard in my life,” Foster wrote to a friend on March 4. “The legal issues are mind-boggling, and time pressures are immense. The pressure, financial sacrifice, and family disruption are the price of public service at this level. As they say, ‘The wind blows hardest at the top of the mountain.’ ”
Starr’s report recounted how the FBI ran down even the most bizarre theories about Foster’s death and conducted extensive ballistics tests that refuted assertions that Foster had not committed suicide. Starr retained Dr. Brian D. Blackbourne, a forensic pathologist who is the medical examiner for San Diego County, California, to review the case. He concluded that “Vincent Foster committed suicide on July 20, 1993 in Ft. Marcy Park by placing a .38 caliber revolver in his mouth and pulling the trigger. His death was at his own hand.”
Starr also retained Dr. Henry C. Lee, an expert in physical evidence and crime scene reconstruction who then was d
irector of the Connecticut State Police Forensic Science Laboratory. He reported that “after careful review of the crime scene photographs, reports, and reexamination of the physical evidence, the data indicate that the death of Mr. Vincent W. Foster Jr. is consistent with a suicide. The location where Mr. Foster’s body was found is consistent with the primary scene,” meaning the place where he committed suicide.
But in his report, Starr never referred to the meeting where Hillary humiliated Foster in front of aides, nor to the change in his disposition after that. The findings are included in the agents’ reports of interviews, according to David Paynter, the archivist who read the reports when cataloguing them and making them available under the Freedom of Information Act at the National Archives. However, those reports are now missing from the appropriate files at the archives.
Starr never told Copeland why he decided to exclude the material from his report, and Copeland can only speculate on his reasoning.
“Starr was a very honorable-type guy, and if it did not pertain to our authorized investigation, he did not want to pursue it,” Copeland says. “And I think he felt that Hillary’s personality and her dealings with subordinates in the White House were immaterial to our investigation.”
Clearly, Foster might have decided to commit suicide regardless. But based on the FBI investigation, this episode a week before his suicide triggered his decision to end his life. Asked why he excluded it from his report, Starr did not respond.
In response to a request for comment from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Philippe Reines, senior advisor to the secretary and deputy assistant secretary of state, said that since she is focused on “the world’s problems,” her advisors “spare her from baseless distractions such as your fantastical accusations.” As a result, “we will neither share them with her nor have comment for you,” Reines said.
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