Ashcroft On The Spot

I'm not really a good person to be asking 'How do you feel' questions of," John Ashcroft said with an uneasy chuckle. "I feel like...doing my job."

Maybe he's better off that way. If he were given to emoting, the Attorney General might be sounding low, if only because his 15 weeks in office have seen two colossal FBI embarrassments: the revelation that accused Russian spy Robert Hanssen operated inside the bureau for 15 years; and the discovery of thousands of pages of undisclosed documents in the case of Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, which rescued the convict at the brink of execution, at least for now. Neither mess was Ashcroft's fault, of course, but he has to clean both up.

This wasn't how he'd planned it. Ashcroft's year began with a carefully managed p.r. campaign that seemed designed to erase the memory of his stormy confirmation hearings. A parade of press releases announced one minority appointment after another, along with actions to fight worker exploitation, protect children and fight domestic abuse.

Welcome to the NFL. Just as Ashcroft's predecessor, Janet Reno, grappled with the Waco disaster a month after taking the reins, Ashcroft so far has been involved mostly with crisis control. Hanssen was indicted last week after plea negotiations between the feds and his lawyers broke down. The impasse, sources told TIME, was over Ashcroft's insistence on preserving the option to seek the death penalty in the case. That's against the advice of many in the FBI and the intelligence community--among them, the sources say, CIA Director George Tenet, who has personally lobbied Ashcroft several times, including in a conversation last week. Tenet's argument: the national interest is better served by a plea, a full debriefing and, as an intelligence official put it, "an arrangement so we can have access to Hanssen should questions arise down the road."

Hard-liners maintain that the depth of Hanssen's betrayal demands the ultimate penalty. According to the indictment, Hanssen compromised the identity of nine Russians secretly working for the U.S., undermined America's ability to intercept Soviet military communications near the end of the cold war and sold highly classified data about U.S. early-warning systems and other plans for defense and retaliation in the face of nuclear attack. In an interview with TIME last week, Ashcroft said only that "we need to see to it that justice is done."

The Hanssen indictment came the same day that outgoing FBI Director Louis Freeh admitted on Capitol Hill that bureau archivists had discovered still more stray papers in the McVeigh case--after Freeh's 16th document request to FBI field offices. Ashcroft pushed back McVeigh's execution until June 11. McVeigh's lawyers may seek more time, and attorneys for accomplice Terry Nichols have already asked for a new trial. At first, bureau officials blamed the snafu on an outdated computer system, but last week Freeh pointed the finger at his own hand-picked field commanders and middle managers. "I think there is a cultural problem here in not taking seriously the very clear and explicit commands that were given," he told a Senate subcommittee.

All of which makes the search for a new FBI director even more urgent. "We were looking for a cleaning," says a Bush Administration official. "Now it's more so."

Though there's no shortlist yet, names under review by the White House counsel's office include U.S. Attorney Robert Mueller of San Francisco, who assisted Ashcroft until Deputy Attorney General Larry Thompson was sworn in last week; George Terwilliger, No. 2 at Justice in the first Bush Administration and a lawyer for W. during the Florida recount; Stephen Trott, a federal appellate judge and former Reagan Administration Justice Department official; and Ronald Noble, who currently leads Interpol. Choosing Noble, an African American, would help silence criticism that the bureau remains a conservative-white-male bastion.

Ashcroft's problems aren't only of the big, public variety. Inside the department his controlled and uncommunicative style hasn't served him well. After an initial round of handshaking, he and his close aides disappeared from view, at least in the opinion of many department lawyers. The news, leaked by a top DOJ official, that Ashcroft thought attorneys in charge of the government's massive pending case against the tobacco industry had performed poorly won him no friends among his foot soldiers, all of whom took note. Ashcroft also lost points among FBI field agents after reports circulated that he repeatedly snapped at his security detail.