FBI Nominee Freeh Draws Senate Panel Acclaim

Winning praise from the Senate panel considering his nomination, FBI Director-designate Louis J. Freeh Thursday advocated anti-crime programs aimed at children--in line with a central theme espoused by Atty. Gen. Janet Reno.

“Crime prevention is like health prevention,” he said. “If we don’t inoculate children against diseases, we have epidemics that take a terrible toll. Prevention is one of the most valuable tools in the anti-crime arsenal, and we must use it to help reduce the pandemic of crime that now exists.”

Freeh, a federal judge from New York, told of a defendant who came before him earlier this week and pleaded guilty to a series of drug-related homicides “in a monotone and emotionless state which had an absolutely frightening impact on me.”

He described the young man as an individual who grew up without a home, any love or direction, starting from the age of 3, and noted that there is “a distinct class of defendants who reach a certain point in their life where nothing can be done but to incarcerate them for the rest of their lives.”

While acknowledging that the FBI does not deal with the root causes of crime, Freeh said that, “as an FBI agent and prosecutor, I have seen firsthand the terrible poverty and hopelessness in our major urban areas. As a high school student, I spent a summer working in a health care and literacy program in a rural area where the grinding poverty was just as bad as in our cities.

“Such conditions are intolerable and if we do not attack the root causes of crime and save our children, conditions will be even worse 10 years from now, and we will again have lost much of a new generation,” Freeh said.

The only note of disharmony at the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing came when the ranking Republican, Sen. Orrin G. Hatch of Utah, accused the Clinton Administration of violating FBI independence “in its desperate effort to cover up cronyism and legitimize the dismissal of the entire White House travel office staff.”

Freeh did not comment on the travel office case, in which the White House directly contacted the FBI to investigate the unit and then called in the FBI’s chief spokesman when drafting an unusual press release on the sensitive inquiry.

But Freeh said that he had been “assured completely and without reservation” by both President Clinton and Reno that he would be able to run the bureau free of political influence.

“If that changes, somebody will hear about it,” Freeh told Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa.).

The 43-year-old Freeh, a former federal prosecutor and FBI agent, was named to succeed William S. Sessions--who was fired by Clinton after refusing to resign in the wake of a Justice Department ethics report which found that he had abused his office. Freeh’s approval by the committee and confirmation by the full Senate seems likely next week.

Freeh, in other comments:

* Noted that 25% to 40% of the FBI’s 10,000 special agents are eligible to retire over the next several years, which while it could sap the bureau of expertise will present the opportunity to recruit more agents of diverse ethnic backgrounds and more women.

* Pointed to the proliferation of weapons technology and arsenals in the hands of “clearly terrorist nations” and cited “the possibility that some terrorist nation may one day acquire nuclear weapons.”