[Infowarrior] - Obama to Pick Former Bush Official to Lead F.B.I.

[Richard Forno]

May 29, 2013

Obama to Pick Former Bush Official to Lead F.B.I.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/30/us/politics/obama-to-pick-james-b-comey-to-lead-fbi.html

By MICHAEL S. SCHMIDT

WASHINGTON — President Obama plans to nominate James B. Comey, a hedge fund executive and a former senior Justice Department official under President George W. Bush, to replace Robert S. Mueller III as the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, according to a person with knowledge of the selection.

Mr. Comey, 52, was chosen for the position over the other finalist for the job, Lisa O. Monaco, who has served as the White House’s top counterterrorism adviser since January. By choosing Mr. Comey, a Republican, Mr. Obama made a strong statement about bipartisanship at a time when he faces renewed criticism from Republicans in Congress and has had difficulty confirming some important nominees.

Some Democrats had feared that if the president nominated Ms. Monaco — who oversaw national security issues at the Justice Department during the attacks in Benghazi, Libya, last September — Republicans would use the confirmation process as a forum for criticism of the administration’s handling of the attack.

As deputy attorney general in the Bush administration, Mr. Comey was a critical player in 2004 in the dramatic hospital room episode in which the White House counsel, Alberto Gonzales, and Mr. Bush’s chief of staff, Andrew H. Card Jr., tried to persuade Attorney General John Ashcroft — who was ill and disoriented — to reauthorize a warrantless eavesdropping program.

Mr. Comey, who was serving as the acting attorney general and had been tipped off that Mr. Gonzales and Mr. Card were trying to go around him, rushed to Mr. Aschroft’s hospital room to thwart them. With Mr. Comey in the room, Mr. Ashcroft refused to reauthorize the program. After the  episode, Mr. Bush agreed to make changes in the program, and Mr. Comey was widely praised for putting the law over politics.

The Obama administration had initially hoped to announce the nomination several weeks ago, but delayed it after the Boston Marathon bombings. Senior F.B.I. officials believed that if a candidate had not been nominated by the end of May, there may not have been enough time to confirm the candidate before the departure of Mr. Mueller, 68. He is mandated by law to leave his post by Sept. 4.

The bombings, which marked the worst attacks on United States soil since Sept. 11, 2001, have raised questions about Mr. Mueller’s legacy and the bureau’s counterterrorism efforts. While the F.B.I. has been praised for helping to catch one of the suspected bombers, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, Congressional Republicans have raised questions about whether the bureau missed a chance to avert the attack. In 2011, it closed a file it had opened on the other suspected bomber, Tamerlan Tsarnaev. who was killed in a shootout with police that ended with his being run over by a vehicle driven by his escaping brother.

Mr. Comey will inherit a bureau that is far different than the one Mr. Mueller took over a week before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. In the aftermath, Mr. Mueller undertook the task of remaking the bureau into an intelligence and counterterrorism agency from one that had concentrated on white-collar crime and drugs. The number of agents has grown from 11,500 to roughly 14,000 under Mr. Mueller and the bureau has drastically invested in its facilities and capabilities, improving its computer systems, forensics analysis and intelligence sharing.

In the year to come, Mr. Comey, who most recently served as the general counsel for the large Connecticut hedge fund Bridgewater Associates, will be confronted by the bureau’s budgetary shortfalls created by across-the-board budget cuts. He will also be forced to expand his knowledge of cybersecurity, which Mr. Mueller made one of the bureau’s chief priorities after counterterrorism.

Mr. Comey graduated from the University of Chicago Law School in 1985, then had a meteoric rise at the Justice Department, culminating in his service as the department’s second-ranking official from 2003 to 2005.

His first job was as an assistant United States attorney in Manhattan trying criminal cases. He worked briefly in private practice and went on to oversee the United States attorney’s office in Richmond, Va., where he made a name for himself as he pioneered Project Exile, a program that effectively cut the high homicide rate in the city by shifting firearm prosecutions from state court to federal court, where there were stiffer sentences.

While working in Richmond, Mr. Ashcroft asked Mr. Comey in 2001 to take over the government’s floundering investigation of the 1996 terrorist bombing at Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia that killed 19 American service members.

The F.B.I. director at the time, Louis J. Freeh, had urged Mr. Ashcroft to take the case away from federal prosecutors in Washington who had been investigating for five years but had not brought charges.

With a legal deadline looming over them, Mr. Comey and a colleague feverishly moved forward with the case and within three months indicted 14 men.

Mr. Comey’s work on that case caught the attention of the White House, which two months after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, nominated him to become the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York, one of the highest profile jobs in the Department of Justice. In that position, Mr. Comey oversaw the prosecutions of Martha Stewart, WorldCom executives and international drug dealers.

In the 2004 hospital room episode, Mr. Gonzales and Mr. Card were trying to get Mr. Ashcroft to sign a presidential order reauthorizing the eavesdropping program. Mr. Comey, who was the acting attorney general because Mr. Ashcroft had to have emergency gall bladder surgery, had refused to reauthorize it.

According to testimony Mr. Comey provided to Congress in 2007, Mr. Ashcroft rose weakly from his hospital bed when Mr. Gonzales and Mr. Card approached and refused to approve the program.

“I was angry,” Mr. Comey said in his testiomony. “I had just witnessed an effort to take advantage of a very sick man, who did not have the powers of the attorney general because they had been transferred to me. I thought he had conducted himself in a way that demonstrated a strength I had never seen before, but still I thought it was improper.”

Mr. Mueller had been required to leave his job in 2011 because of a 10-year term limit that was imposed by Congress in 1976. That measure had been implemented in an effort to prevent directors from amassing the power J. Edgar Hoover had during his nearly 40-year tenure leading the bureau.

But in 2011, Mr. Obama asked Mr. Mueller to remain in his post. His administration had considered candidates like Raymond W. Kelly, New York City’s police commissioner; Patrick J. Fitzgerald, the United States attorney in Chicago; Kenneth L. Wainstein, a former assistant attorney general for national security; and Mr. Comey. But administration officials did not think they were good fits and they wanted to keep Mr. Mueller on because the Defense Department and Central Intelligence Agency were getting new leaders.

The president asked the Senate to extend Mr. Mueller’s tenure by two years, and the measure was unanimously approved in July 2011.


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