Chapter Twenty-seven

MY KIND OF GUY

Bill Clinton had every right to suppose that he was the best-informed man on the planet. He had at his disposal the most sophisticated and far-flung intelligence apparatus in human history—a vast network of satellites, spies, and eavesdropping technology that employed countless thousands of people and cost tens of billions of dollars a year to maintain. All of this, comprising the work of several government agencies, ultimately was in service to one man, the commander in chief. Each morning, he received the PDB, the president’s daily briefing. Sometimes the Central Intelligence Agency director was present to deliver information in person, but Clinton generally preferred to receive his intelligence in writing, so that he could digest it on his own schedule. Each day he received a binder, usually ten pages or so, of the most interesting secrets from around the world collected by the intelligence community during the previous twelve hours. With all of this at his command, a president is not supposed to learn interesting news about national security in the morning newspaper.

The story on the front page of the Washington Post on March 9, 1997, was interesting all right—and it was definitely news to Clinton. The article ran under one of his least favorite bylines, Bob Woodward. The reporter revealed that nearly a year earlier, in the midst of the 1996 elections, the FBI had gone to a half dozen members of Congress to warn of law enforcement intelligence suggesting that their campaigns might have been targeted by China to receive illegal campaign contributions. In the current political environment, this was a stunning fact. In the wake of the election, after all, the possibility that Clinton’s re-election effort had been tainted by Chinese money had mushroomed into a major controversy. If the White House had known that China might be making such efforts, the information would have had serious ramifications for U.S.-Sino diplomacy. What’s more, the Democratic National Committee would have been on alert to ensure that any money from suspicious sources was caught as it arrived. The FBI, however, apparently had never seen fit to give the president the same briefing it gave to members of Congress. For Clinton, the implications were obvious: “That bastard was trying to sting us!”

That “bastard” was otherwise known as Louis J. Freeh, the director of the FBI. Clinton had long since come to regret appointing him. Now, tensions that had simmered for years between the two men boiled over in a painfully public dispute. The next day, reporters naturally wanted to press Clinton about the apparent rupture between the White House and the FBI over China. How could a president tolerate being kept in the dark by one of his own appointees? As he understood it, Clinton explained, the FBI had in fact briefed two lower-level officials at the White House National Security Council about the China suspicions. Then the FBI had mysteriously—and improperly, he alleged—requested that these officials not share the information up the chain of command. “The president should know,” Clinton said. He had been raging a day earlier, but his public demeanor was now composed. When a reporter noted that Clinton did not seem especially angry, the president noted archly, “What I seem and what I feel may be two different things.” By day’s end, there would be no mistaking that a civil war had broken out within the executive branch. The FBI released a statement contradicting the president: Its briefing to the NSC officials did not include any restrictions on sharing the information with superiors, the agency insisted. That assertion in turn sent White House press secretary Michael McCurry racing to the briefing room to allege that the FBI statement was “in error.”

The truth, as it later emerged, was somewhere in the middle. The FBI had indeed been reluctant to share information about its mounting suspicions over China. By 1996, Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick had become the administration’s main point of contact with Freeh on this issue. Gorelick got this job by default. The White House long ago had given up on Attorney General Reno asserting oversight over Freeh. She seemed to lack either the interest or the nerve to do so. No one in the White House, meanwhile, had relations with Freeh that were more than coolly civil. In a meeting with Gorelick at the time the China suspicions first came to light, Freeh indeed had resisted providing the White House a briefing over China. Doing so, he warned darkly, could compromise an ongoing investigation. Gorelick told him that to brief members of Congress while snubbing the White House was out of the question. The FBI needed to alert officials at the White House. The briefing that the agency reluctantly did provide, however, was apparently so opaque—and so freighted with cautions about the sensitivity of the information—that its recipients wrongly assumed they were not supposed to alert superiors that a briefing even took place.

Freeh felt so strongly about insulating his investigations from any possible taint of political interference that, just a few weeks before the Woodward revelations, he had refused a direct request from the White House that Secretary of State Madeleine Albright be given a briefing before an official trip to China. Understandably, Albright might wish to know whether the Chinese officials she would be meeting with had been involved in an improper attempt to influence U.S. elections. Freeh apparently believed that diplomacy between the United States and the world’s most populous nation could wait.

The relationship between Clinton and Freeh had an almost chemical instability, an acid reacting with a base. Personal animus, however, was framed by a larger institutional tension that long predated the administration. There was an ambiguity at the core of the relationship between any president and the FBI. The agency was part of the executive branch, its director appointed by the president and supervised by the attorney general. Yet a substantial measure of independence was presumed. Under law, the FBI director could be fired by a president only for cause. Otherwise, the appointment was for ten years, meaning the director was supposed to outlast any president who appointed him. The director had a dual role. On matters of criminal investigation, there was no question the FBI director had a right to full independence from the White House, especially when the investigations involved the president or his associates. Other matters between the White House and FBI, however, concerned national policy. A question of increasing importance during the Clinton years was the problem of investigating—and, if possible, interdicting—terrorist activity at home and overseas. On matters like these, a president had a right to assume that the FBI director was as much his servant as any other senior appointee of the executive branch. As the president is accountable to the electorate, so should the FBI on questions of policy be accountable first to the attorney general and ultimately to the president. While the dual roles were clear in theory, in practice they were inevitably in tension. The only way to manage them was with a certain amount of professional trust and respect between the FBI and the White House, starting at the top. What blossomed instead was one of the mortal antagonisms of the Clinton years. There simply was no working relationship at all, only profane contempt. In conversation with the president, said John Podesta, “Freeh’s first name became ‘Fucking,’ ” as in “Fucking Freeh has screwed us again.”

Yet this relationship had started splendidly. In 1993, six months into his presidency, Clinton had pushed out the FBI director he had inherited, William Sessions, a Reagan appointee who still had five years left in his term, after a Justice Department report found he had misused travel privileges and other perquisites. Clinton wanted a replacement ready to announce at the same time as Sessions’s ouster. Freeh came to his attention as a possible replacement via Bernard Nussbaum, then the White House counsel. Nussbaum had known Freeh in New York, where he had fashioned a formidable reputation as a federal prosecutor and had been appointed to a federal judgeship by George H.W. Bush at the comparatively young age of forty-one. He was only forty-three when Clinton tapped him for the FBI. Announcing the appointment, Clinton called Freeh an “amazing man,” and “my kind of guy.” Nussbaum’s last words to Vincent Foster Jr., on the morning of Freeh’s appointment and the day Foster took his life, were to remark about how the pick was a “home run.” Clinton chose Freeh after a warm two-hour White House interview that left both men thinking they had hit it off wonderfully. Freeh was a devoted Catholic and family man. One misgiving he had about the job, he told Clinton, was whether it would leave him with enough time to spend with his growing brood of young sons, who then numbered four. Clinton assured him that he, too, was a family man, and that the administration was eager to help him balance his commitments. Later, after the complexities of Clinton’s private life came into public view, Freeh would recall this conversation with acid indignation. There might have been no one in America, Freeh’s colleagues believed, more offended by Clinton’s sexual frailties. Perhaps there was no one in America, meanwhile, more offended by what he saw as Freeh’s arrogance and sanctimony than the man who had appointed him.

The first signs of a rift did not involve Clinton’s personal failings, but rather those of a cabinet member. Housing and Urban Development Secretary Henry Cisneros had acknowledged a sensitive personal matter during the FBI background check that preceded his confirmation. During his time as mayor of San Antonio, he had had an extramarital affair, and agreed to make payments to his former lover. Evidence later emerged that he had understated the amount of these payments, possibly to mislead investigators about the degree of his financial exposure. The Justice Department’s own Public Integrity Section recommended dropping the matter as trivial. Freeh did not think it was trivial. Lying to the FBI was a serious offense, and he urged Reno to trigger the appointment of an independent counsel. She did so, in March 1995. Clinton thought this was a travesty. Meanwhile, it had not escaped White House notice how closely Freeh was cultivating relationships with the new Republican majority on Capitol Hill. He was fawned over in public hearings; his budget requests sailed to passage. Many of the same Republicans who hated Clinton treated his FBI appointee as a golden boy. Which side was Freeh on?

The answer became obvious the next year. In June 1996, in the midst of answering a congressional inquiry, White House lawyers stumbled upon something truly interesting in a basement office: more than four hundred raw FBI files, many of them of prominent Republicans, including former secretary of state James Baker. It was flagrantly improper for the Clinton White House to have such material, and not hard for suspicious minds to imagine the worst: The Clintons might be running a Nixon-style intelligence operation against their political enemies. The president offered an alternate explanation. It appeared to have been “a completely honest bureaucratic snafu,” he told reporters when the matter erupted, during a campaign fund-raising stop in Las Vegas.

At a moment of acute vulnerability for the White House, Freeh’s self-protective instincts kicked in. The FBI put out a statement in his name announcing, “The prior system of providing files to the White House relied on good faith and honor. Unfortunately, the FBI and I were victimized.”

Freeh’s statement was not only gratuitous; it was wrong. The White House security office had requested the FBI files for permanent White House employees who were holdovers from the Bush administration. This was a proper request. What came back from FBI headquarters were the files not only of the permanent employees but of the political appointees who had left with the change of administrations. No doubt it was sloppy for the Clinton White House not to notice this immediately and return the wayward files. It was sloppier, and more troubling, for the FBI to have sent over errant files in the first place. At Justice, Gorelick blew up in a conversation with Freeh, who responded with a dubious claim that he had not known about the initial statement in his name. He issued a second one later in the day, saying he took responsibility. In the meantime, the matter of the FBI files was added to the growing brief of independent counsel Kenneth Starr. Four years later, his inquiry would find no criminal violation by the Clinton White House. Clinton’s explanation of a bureaucratic snafu had been correct.

From this time forward, from Clinton’s vantage point, the relationship with Freeh was beyond salvage. Others in the White House, meanwhile, did their best to work with a man who seemed to view it as a point of professional pride that he would not work with others. Sandy Berger, who prided himself on maintaining a civil working relationship with Freeh, found his patience tested even so. Once Freeh mentioned, seemingly in passing, that the bureau later that week planned to arrest a Caribbean leader on drug charges as he switched planes in Miami. “Gosh, Louie,” Berger inquired sarcastically, “do you think this is the kind of thing the White House might want to know?” Among the people who were most frustrated with Freeh and his agency was one of Berger’s deputies, Richard Clarke, who was the White House’s official in charge of counterterrorism. Colleagues regarded him as a man possessed by convictions of an imminent threat. Clarke was trying to coordinate, across several agencies, the government’s efforts to identify, track, and react against terrorist threats abroad and domestically. The FBI was invariably the most resistant.

It was extremely difficult for the FBI to coordinate with a White House against whom, on other fronts, it was in increasingly open warfare. On the campaign fund-raising controversy, Freeh had drafted a memo to Reno asking her to appoint an independent counsel to investigate potential abuses by the Clinton White House. For once, she resisted. After several years’ experience with open-ended and expensive independent counsel probes, Reno had become more skeptical. Freeh’s memo soon found its way to Republicans on Capitol Hill and to the press. In December 1997, McCurry was asked at his daily briefing whether Clinton still had confidence in Freeh. He responded with a masterpiece of a quote: “The president has great confidence that Louis Freeh is leading that agency as best he can.” When reporters noted that this was not exactly full-throated praise, the press secretary noted, “I am pretty careful on how I choose my words.” A couple of weeks later, the question was put directly to the president, who declined his endorsement. “On this confidence business,” he noted, “I think there’s been too much back and forth on that, and I don’t want to get into it.” Freeh made plain this did not bother him at all. After all, he was a man who refused to accept a badge giving him White House access, believing it would send the wrong message to the public. Instead, he needed to be cleared in by security each time he came to the White House, visits that were increasingly infrequent, and included zero one-on-one visits with the president in the second term. “My job is not to make people happy or please them or be a loyal subordinate,” he explained, “when that conflicts with what I think my job is.”

The disjunction between the FBI and the rest of the executive branch had an obvious and troubling precedent. From 1924 until his death in 1972, J. Edgar Hoover had presided with little accountability over an FBI empire. With his thick dossiers of gossip and damaging personal information, he kept presidents and Congress at heel. With a sure instinct for public relations, he turned himself into a national hero. Only after his death did the world learn about a long record of agency abuses. Clinton regarded Freeh as very much in the Hoover tradition. This was a stretch. Freeh was by most accountings an honorable man, yet one who many colleagues believed had become so gripped by self-righteousness that his judgment suffered. And he was far from a skilled administrator. Clinton was right that the FBI was operating without effective oversight. The director ignored and intimidated his superiors at the Department of Justice. At the same time he was the toast of Capitol Hill, where his Republican patrons fully shared his disdain for the president.

Clinton had cause to fire Freeh after the China briefing debacle, but there’s no evidence it was considered. One can sympathize with the president’s dilemma. Such a move would have unleashed a thunder of denunciation by those who said Clinton was purging an enemy. There would have been inevitable comparisons to Nixon’s “Saturday Night Massacre” firing of the Watergate special prosecutor. “No one in the press or Congress would have believed we were doing it for any reason other than to protect the president,” one of Clinton’s chiefs of staff later recalled ruefully.

The comment underlined a paradox of Clinton’s presidency. In 1997 he stood astride the world, a newly re-elected president whose job approval ratings measured far above those for any other American politician. Yet this imposing exterior was held in place by some weak beams. Clinton was harried from inside his own government, and neither his temperament nor his political circumstances gave him any choice but to take it.