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May have obtained a sweetheart deal from a Washington bank on a $375,000 home mortgage.
Sessions denies any wrongdoing and has offered to compensate the FBI for some of the disputed travel expenses. Vice President Gore said last week that Sessions may have been targeted by Barr because of Sessions' plan to probe charges that the Justice Department was involved in a cover-up of the Iraqgate scandal. "We owe him a fair review of the allegations," said Gore. But agents who feel that Sessions has brought shame on the FBI have breached the bureau's traditional code of secrecy. Agents openly refer to Sessions as "Director Concessions," "the empty suit" and "Chauncey Gardiner," after the simpleminded hero of the Jerzy Kosinski novel Being There. "The vast majority of agents are embarrassed by him," says Francis Mullen Jr., who served as the FBI's No. 2 official under William Webster, Sessions' predecessor.
Many G-men disparagingly compare the FBI director's wife to the eccentric Martha Mitchell, who while her husband John was Attorney General was resented for getting entangled in Justice Department politics during the Watergate scandal. According to the ethics report, Mrs. Sessions used bureau cars as transportation to get her hair and nails done. She also barged into official business in an unhelpful way, agents say. An FBI official describes her coming into a confidential meeting in Sessions' office at the FBI "in a housecoat and slippers," turning on the TV and thereby ending the briefing. Mrs. Sessions has responded that "the old-boy network" at the FBI can't accept strong-minded women. "They've never really had a director with a wife," she complained to the Washington Post this month. "They've never had a woman executive there."
When they get to talking, G-men gripe about a certain goofiness in Sessions' demeanor. Gary Penrith, former chief of the FBI's Newark, New Jersey, office, remembers briefing Sessions on a major racketeering case. Suddenly, Penrith says, Sessions burst into song, chirping the lyrics of an old advertising jingle: "Brylcreem, a little dab will do ya." Penrith, who quit last year, regards his former boss with contempt. "He loses it," said Penrith.
The Sessionses have not been been shy about taking their case to the press. In late January, after the Justice Department report was issued, Sessions invited a dozen reporters to his office. He engaged in a bitter soliloquy in which he asserted that his nemesis Barr "was in league with others" to do him in. Although Sessions declined to be interviewed for this story, his wife told TIME, "All I have done is stand by my honest man. I know what Bill Sessions is, and I know what he does and doesn't do. We were raised middle- class Midwest and that makes us pioneer people, with values that we still have."
To pull him through the crisis, Sessions has pinned his hopes on his allies on Capitol Hill. He is still well liked by some key Democrats on the Judiciary and Intelligence committees, who view him as a forthright man. Congressman Don Edwards of California, a frequent critic of the bureau, calls Sessions the best director ever. But the FBI's internal revolt is well under way. The ethics charges against Sessions have led to intense resentment of a double standard in the tightly disciplined agency, where agents are routinely punished for minor infractions.