Search for New FBI Head Focuses on Judge

The search for a successor for embattled FBI Director William S. Sessions is focusing on federal Judge Louis J. Freeh of New York, who as a prosecutor led the effort to convict the mail bomb killer of a federal appellate judge and a civil rights attorney, it was learned Thursday.

With the decision on whether to remove Sessions delayed until President Clinton returns from the Far East in two weeks, sources said that a background investigation has begun on Freeh, who served as an FBI agent before becoming a federal prosecutor.

Sessions, who was found last January to have abused his office by a Justice Department watchdog unit, is scheduled to leave Tuesday for Paris and a meeting of Interpol and to return July 10, four days before Clinton.

The White House has delayed resolving the future of Sessions, apparently because it prefers to have a successor ready to take office rather than to fill the post with an acting director.

Freeh, 43, became one of the nation’s youngest federal judges when former President George Bush appointed him to the bench in Manhattan in 1991.

A year earlier, as a specially selected federal prosecutor, Freeh (pronounced free) headed the successful effort to manage the complex investigation and court case that led to the conviction of Walter Leroy Moody Jr. in the 1989 mail-bomb murders of a federal appeals court judge in Alabama and a civil rights lawyer in Georgia.