Top Justice Dept. Watchdog Leaving Post

Michael E. Shaheen Jr. is a walking contradiction in Washington, a city where obscurity rarely rooms with power.

From his super-sensitive post in modest quarters on the Justice Department’s fourth floor, Shaheen has quietly investigated the ethics of attorneys general, prosecutors and FBI agents dating back to the post-Watergate reform era.

His voluminous report on the ethical missteps of former FBI Director William S. Sessions led to the first firing of an FBI director in history.

Shaheen has blown the ethical whistle on many of the attorneys general who retained him in office. Examples range from his challenge of oil and gas tax shelters held by the late William French Smith to his rebuke of Benjamin R. Civiletti for denying having discussed with President Carter the investigation of his brother, Billy Carter.

Monday, the only person ever to serve as the Justice Department’s top watchdog--euphemistically named counsel for the office of professional responsibility when it was created 22 years ago--told Atty. Gen. Janet Reno he was stepping down at the end of the year.

Reno, described by a department official as “stunned” by Shaheen’s decision, said he had “carried out a sensitive job with skill and integrity” and had “worked hard to insure that attorney misconduct was investigated as thoroughly, fairly and openly as possible.”

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The onetime mayor of Como, Miss., little known to almost everyone except those whose shoulders he made a practice of peering over, has told friends and family that he finds “demeaning” the expectation of having to wage turf wars over conducting internal probes, and that at age 57 he wants to take advantage of the opportunity for early retirement.

Shaheen told reporters Monday that “the time was right” for his departure, noting that he had taken the job “for a year or two” and now 22 years later he “didn’t plan to die in place.”

But he also allowed that the preference of the department’s management for maintaining two internal inspection units, with Inspector General Michael Bromwich’s jurisdiction including some operations of the FBI, was a factor in his departure.

Shaheen’s job was created by Atty. Gen. Edward H. Levi in December 1975, as one of the reform steps the former dean of the University of Chicago Law School took to restore integrity in the wake of Watergate and intelligence agency abuses.

A graduate of Yale University and Vanderbilt Law School, Shaheen had joined the Justice Department’s civil rights division in 1973. He caught Levi’s attention by serving as special counsel for intelligence coordination, which included the delicate task of unearthing information sought by the original Senate and House Intelligence committees.

Early in his watchdog tenure, Shaheen documented self-dealing between FBI officials and the bureau’s exclusive supplier of electronic equipment, as well as misuse of resources and personnel by longtime FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, who had died in 1972, and some of his top aides.

From the day his office was created, it was clear that Shaheen was to serve as the attorney general’s eyes and ears on matters of possible misconduct or law violations by Justice Department employees. His focus on ethical lapses by attorneys general themselves helped establish Shaheen’s credibility and reputation for independence.

At times, this criticism of superiors has extended to the White House. Shaheen was blunt, for example, in branding as “unprecedented” the lack of White House cooperation in turning over papers from the office of Deputy White House Counsel Vincent Foster after he committed suicide.

Shaheen, who had sought the papers in connection with his investigation of firings at the White House travel office, said White House officials “managed to convince all of us there was something they didn’t want us to come across.”

Testifying in 1995 before the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee, Shaheen said he had been “stunned and shocked” to learn from a magazine that Foster had compulsively maintained a daily log.

He said his office had requested such information both orally and in writing for two years but that it had not been turned over until he learned of the log’s existence through the magazine article.

Shaheen has survived attempts to abolish his office, the most recent a plan by former Deputy Atty. Gen. Philip B. Heymann to merge the office of professional responsibility into that of the Justice Department’s inspector general. The IG post was created by Congress in 1988 over the objection of department officials, who viewed it as a way for Congress to get access to matters that should be the responsibility of the executive branch.

But Heymann gave up the No. 2 post at the department after concluding that he and Reno did not work well together. The impetus for the merger plan departed with him.

Shaheen said he is confident that as long as Reno is attorney general, the merger will not take place.