White House Studies Way for Sessions to Exit Gracefully : FBI: Officials say strategy could delay the director’s leaving for months. He is under fire for alleged abuses of office.

The Clinton Administration is exploring ways to allow embattled FBI Director William S. Sessions to resign from office gracefully, a strategy that could delay his departure for months, senior officials said Tuesday.

Although the Justice Department issued a searing ethics report in the waning days of the George Bush Administration, concluding that Sessions had abused his office, senior Clinton Administration officials are known to regard his conduct as “foolish, not corrupt.”

Even so, the report by the department’s internal watchdog unit triggered “a series of events” that have made his position untenable, officials acknowledged. The report prompted Sessions to question the loyalty of the FBI’s No. 2 official, they noted, and agents began complaining of a double standard protecting the FBI director.

Earlier, Administration officials had said they expected Sessions to be out of office within weeks. The extended timetable for his departure has been addressed in “preliminary, tentative discussions”--one source described them as “feelers”--with Sessions’ lawyers. But the consensus could change if Atty. Gen. Janet Reno reaches a different conclusion about his conduct in a separate review that she is conducting at the request of President Clinton.

The attorney general “plans to thoroughly review the (earlier) report, and she may want to meet with individuals, including Sessions himself,” said Caroline Aronovitz, who is serving as Reno’s chief spokeswoman. Although Reno has made the Sessions matter a high priority, Aronovitz could give no timetable.

Thomas M. Susman, one of Sessions’ lawyers, declined to comment on the matter.

Clinton, in remarks at a Gridiron Club dinner Saturday night, quipped about Sessions’ difficulties. “I might have to pick an FBI director, and it’s going to be hard to fill J. Edgar Hoover’s pumps,” he said, referring to a recent book that contends that the longtime FBI director engaged in cross-dressing.

Administration officials later insisted that Clinton was not attempting to send a signal to Sessions, who was in the audience.

In describing Sessions’ conduct, one Administration official said: “We don’t think he’s a bad man or an evil man or a corrupt man. We do think he did some foolish things.”

This is a markedly softer view than was expressed by former Atty. Gen. William P. Barr in accepting the earlier report by the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility. The document found that Sessions had abused his position by chauffeuring family members with FBI planes and cars, engaging in a “sham” to avoid taxes on his use of an FBI limousine and refusing to cooperate in an inquiry into whether his home mortgage was a “sweetheart” deal.

In a Jan. 15 letter to Sessions, Barr wrote: “The evidence supporting the report’s conclusions is overwhelming and your explanations, where provided, are wholly unpersuasive.”

Besides the controversy over Sessions’ actions, “there’s also a burnout factor” supporting the desire to replace the 62-year-old director, one Administration official said. “He’s been there quite a while; he’s of a certain age; it’s a difficult job.”

In stating that the Administration would like to handle Sessions’ departure in a dignified manner, an official said: “He’s done some good things, maybe a lot of good things.”

“If this was a President like Lyndon Johnson, maybe we’d say, ‘This isn’t the guy we want, just get rid of him,’ ” an official said. “But Bill Clinton does not work that way.”

Session’s problems remain a key issue at FBI headquarters and in field offices across the country.

Before Sessions revived the issue in a conversation with reporters last week, headquarters officials had been hopeful that the matter had moved to the back burner until Reno makes her recommendation to Clinton.

But in a meeting with reporters on Capitol Hill, Sessions contended that his difficulties stemmed from a “cabal” of disloyal aides and that he was “optimistic” that he could keep his job. Officials at FBI headquarters expressed dismay over Sessions’ accusation, contending that they had remained loyal to the beleaguered director.