ON THE EVENING OF MARCH 5 Michael Bromwich, the Justice Department’s inspector general, tuned into C-SPAN in his Washington, D.C., living room to catch a replay of the testimony that Federal Bureau of Investigation director Louis Freeh had given earlier that day before a House of Representatives subcommittee. It was tepid stuff. But then came a moment when Freeh was tossed a hot potato relating to Bromwich’s much-publicized investigation into claims of bad science, pro-prosecution slanting, and even fabrication of evidence at the FBI’s vaunted crime laboratory. Why, asked subcommittee chairman Harold Rogers (R-Kentucky), had the bureau suspended Dr. Frederic Whitehurst? He’s the FBI scientist turned whistle-blower whose sweeping charges against colleagues in the crime lab had spurred the inspector general’s investigation, and had proved accurate in all too many cases.

"The action that was taken against Mr. Whitehurst,’ Freeh responded, "was taken solely and directly on the basis of the recommendation [and report] of the inspector general."

The FBI director’s implication: It wasn’t our idea.

This was wrong. And the smart, intense, 43-year-old Bromwich was deeply disturbed by what he saw as an effort by the FBI to put a self-serving slant on the situation, deflecting the blame (or what many in Congress saw as a retaliation against the whistle-blower. The next day Bromwich fired off a letter to Freeh, his fellow Clinton appointee and former colleague at the elite U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan, where both had been highly regarded prosecutors in the mid-1980s. It was-at least by Washington standards-strikingly blunt.

"I am writing to urge you to correct the testimony you gave during your appearance yesterday," the inspector general wrote, adding that this should be done by letter, to chairman Rogers, "as promptly as possible." Bromwich stressed that his draft report had not recommended that Whitehurst be suspended. Indeed, Bromwich added, "I expressed my opposition … over the course of more than a year when FBI representatives had repeatedly proposed firing Whitehurst or placing him on some sort of administrative leave." The FBI had gone ahead and done so not only because of the inspector general’s draft report-which balanced criticism of Whitehurst for making many "incendiary," unsubstantiated charges of perjury and fabrication with praise of his exposing of "extremely serious" deficiencies-but also because of the whistle-blower’s refusal to answer questions about whether he had leaked FBI secrets to the media. Freeh responded by acknowledging, five days later, in letters to Bromwich and Rogers, that his testimony had been "incomplete," though not deliberately so. Freeh also added a little potshot at Bromwich, implying that the inspector general’s own prior testimony had understated the problems with the credibility of Whitehurst, who is derided by many at the FBI as a nut.

While Bromwich had his facts right, his letter’s tough tone left many at the FBI smoldering. Some of his Justice Department colleagues believed-as one put it- that "he could have gotten that same retraction with a phone call, rather than a nasty letter." The letter surely gave Freeh a headache that he didn’t need, beleaguered as he had recently been by bad publicity about the crime lab, the Clinton White House’s obtaining of confidential FBI background files on leading Republicans, and other messes. And even worse, the Bromwich-Freeh correspondence predictably became public within days, generating media reports suggesting that Freeh’s acknowledgment of error was "a startling admission that deals yet another setback to the bureau’s increasingly tarnished image," in the words of the Los Angeles Times. Indeed, The Washington Times’s on-line edition headlined its story (inaccurately): "1G says Freeh lied to Congress." It quoted Senator Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), an outspoken FBI critic, accusing Freeh of "an effort to mislead" and "a damage control operation."

The public release on April 15 of Bromwich’s impressive, 517-page crime lab report generated an even bigger batch of bad headlines for the FBI. Then came his report in April faulting the FBI (and the Central Intelligence Agency) for missing opportunities to catch Soviet spy Aldrich Ames for years while Ames was betraying U.S. intelligence agents in Russia. These and other episodes over the past year have helped create a climate that prompts Bromwich to muse-with a rueful laugh-that he seems to be "the most hated man at the FBI."

They haven’t put him on the Ten Most Wanted list yet. Freeh and his top aides avoid sharp public criticism of Bromwich, and say they have "good rapport" with the former prosecutor, in the words of retiring deputy FBI director William Esposito. But John Sennett, president of the FBI Agents Association, says that Bromwich’s publicizing of his criticisms has been "unfairly harmful lo the FBI." And the FBI seems determined to fight off an aggressive bid by the inspector general for broader power to "walk over here anytime he wants, as Esposito puts it, to investigate cases of alleged misconduct by officials of the FBI. Bromwich argues that giving his 400-person office an unrestricted hunting license at the Drug Enforcement Administration and the bureau-which much prefers hunting to being hunt-ed-is essential to ensure that the powerful bureau be held to the same system of oversight to which most of the department and the government are subjected. Inspectors general are presidentially appointed, congressionally confirmed, quasi-independent watchdogs over waste, fraud, abuse, misconduct, and mismanagement at federal departments and agencies; they have a statutory obligation to report to Congress, and are to some extent seen as instruments of Congress planted in the executive branch. Bromwich claims that the current oversight system at the FBI is ineffective, citing as evidence the years during which the problems with the crime lab and the counterintelligence failures in the Ames case had festered without effective action by anyone. "The work we did on Ames and the FBI laboratory could not and would not have been done by anybody else," says Bromwich. "In both cases, the FBI’s reaction at the outset to our reviewing these matters was, in effect, ‘We don’t have a problem, and if we do, we’ll be the ones to review it.’"

FBI officials including Michael DeFeo-a respected career Justice Department prosecutor who became head of the bureau’s own, recently expanded internal watchdog unit in March-firmly reject Bromwich’s suggestions that the bureau cannot police itself and gets a free pass from Justice. And nobody bristles more at Bromwich’s dissing of "nominal DOJ supervision of the FBI" than Michael Shaheen, Jr., the proud, soft-spoken, but fiercely independent career Justice Department lawyer who started the department’s Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) in 1975, when Bromwich was a college kid. For 22 years OPR has been the official in-house ethics watchdog over the entire department, with jurisdiction over its FBI component as well. Any extension of the jurisdiction of the 43-year-old inspector general would come at the expense of OPR and the 57-year-old Shaheen-whom Freeh went out of his way to praise, at another recent congressional hearing, at which they testified side by side, as "one of the most respected attorneys in the department and in the government."

Good Mike, Bad Mike, and Big Mike: Those are the monikers half-jokingly used by some top FBI officials to distinguish, respectively, Shabeen, Bromwich, and the (very tall) DeFeo. While Bromwich has clashed with the FBI, Shaheen is widely liked and admired there. Bromwich implies that this goes to show that Shaheen and OPR are too cozy with Freeh-and for two decades have been too cozy with the FBI-to provide the kind of tough, independent oversight necessary to ferret out misconduct and keep the bureau honest. The redoubtable Shaheen, for his part, complains that the inspector general seeks "to create the perception that there is something wrong with oversight of the FBI, when I have been doing historic, precedent-setting investigations at the FBI since he was an infant.

"It’s unfortunate," Shaheen adds in a Mississippi drawl that is softer than his carefully chosen words, "that a person who accepts an appointment with a finite jurisdiction is not satisfied with the job he agreed to. I think this confirms the view of many that he is self-aggrandizing and a self-promoter."

At one level this is a classic Washington turf war between strong-willed men-each of whom greatly underestimates the other-spiced by elements of intergenerational combat: Young, ambitious, idealistic Harvard hotshot seeks to build empire by pushing aside veteran bureaucratic survivor, who wont give up an inch of ground without a fight, and whose reputation for integrity and independence, legendary skills at self-preservation, and cultivation of allies like Freeh have helped win him protectors in Congress and outlast antagonists more powerful than Bromwich. At another level, these men and the institutions they head represent two distinct models of oversight: Bromwich’s is proactive, aggressive, exhaustive, itching to get things done, relatively responsive to Congress, relatively ready to trumpet its mission and accomplishments in the media, and relatively independent of his titular boss, the attorney general, as offices of inspector general throughout government were designed by Congress to be. Shaheen, who calls his office "the eyes and ears of the attorney general"-but who has battled at least four of the eight attorneys general at whose pleasure he has served-is more reactive. He is responsive to the attorney general’s priorities, deferential to the career bureaucracy, secretive, slow-moving, and remote from Congress and the media, excepting a handful of reporters and congressional staffers whom he knows and trusts.

The reality is that policing the FBI (and federal prosecutors) is a devilishly complicated and delicate business, especially at a time when-with more money, agents, and power than ever before, conferred over the past 15 years by a Congress bent on fighting crime and terrorism-the bureau has been buffeted by a rapid succession of front-page scandals: Ruby Ridge, Waco, "Filegate," Aldrich Ames, the crime lab mess, the botched interrogation of innocent suspect Richard Jewell in the July 1996 bombing at the Olympic Games in Atlanta, and more.

The issues of how to deal with such problems are both institutional and personal, with Good Mike and Bad Mike waging an intermittent guerrilla war so hitter as to roil the top tiers of the sprawling, 100,000-employcc Justice Department. They even argue (in separate interviews) about what the argument is about: Bromwich, frustrated by media accounts focusing less on the merits of his proposal than on his rivalry with Shaheen, claims that Shaheen is in fact "peripheral" to the inspector general’s bid for more jurisdiction over the FBI, because in Bromwich’s view, OPR-which now spends much of its time investigating alleged misconduct by Justice Department prosecutors-has not been proactive in digging for evidence of FBI malfeasance.

"They are like children getting out of the playpen," grouses one recently departed, high-level Justice Department official. "The two of them are both very frustrated over this, and it’s kind of sad to watch. When you stand back from it, this is serious business. They’ve both personalized this to the point that it’s not productive, the stir and the fuss they’ve created around this department. There’s annoyance with both of them."

Whatever virtue there may be in the Justice Department’s having two internal watchdogs, it is clearly a formula for dogfights. Is the place big enough for both of them?

IN THE BEGINNING

The history of oversight of misconduct at the Justice Department until about 1975 goes something like this: In the beginning there was nothing, and then there was Mike Shaheen. And since then, eight attorneys general have come and seven have gone, and still there is Mike Shaheen, now in an unhappy state of jurisdictional cohabitation with Mike Bromwich. "For better or worse, no other department lawyer [has] had more impact on how the institution viewed its ethical and professional obligations," wrote Jim McGee and Brian Duffy in Main Justice: The Men and Women Who Enforce the Nation’s Criminal Laws and Guard Its Liberties, a 1996 book that took a serious but refreshingly benign view of the Justice Department. Over the years, the authors pointed out, "Shaheen and his staff [had become known] as dragon slayers"; in particular, by spearheading several tough investigations of various attorneys general, Shaheen has burnished his reputation as "the in-house guarantor of the Justice Department’s integrity."

Shaheen came to the Justice Department in 1973, at the age of 32, from the improbable position of mayor of Como, Mississippi, where he was elected on a liberal, pro-civil rights platform featuring a promise to desegregate the all-white police force. He’d grown up in the same small town before leaving for Taft (a New England boarding school), Yale University, and Van-derbilt Law School; his father was a wealthy, politically influential doctor and an early advocate of desegregation. Shaheen’s first jobs at Justice were as a lawyer in the civil rights division, and then as deputy special counsel on intelligence matters. In the latter position, he helped dig up files for Senate investigators-including the "do-not-file files," from places including the basement of J. Edgar Hoover’s house-on the abuses of dirty tricks programs and FBI domestic surveillance. This experience prompted a Shaheen memo in December 1975 to attorney general Edward Levi-the former University of Chicago Law School dean whom President Ford had appointed to restore the Justice Department’s tattered reputation after the Watergate scandal-that urged tighter supervision of FBI bugging and other counterintelligence operations, which had operated virtually independent of Main Justice.

Soon thereafter, Levi presented some paperwork of his own to Shaheen. In response to concerns in Congress and elsewhere about misconduct at the Justice Department and (especially) the FBI, Levi had decided to create a new unit called the Office of Professional Responsibility, to serve as in-house ethics adviser and investigator of misconduct charges against Justice and FBI officials. Levi said he wanted Shaheen to run OPR, an idea that Shaheen initially found unappealing. "The name made it sound like a namby-pamby, cosmetic, nonsubstan-tive entity," he recalls. Still, he took the job at Levi’s insistence. "I was handed this assignment and told to do it," recalls Shaheen. "I had no prototype to work from."

Much of OPR’s early work focused on misconduct at the bureau. That included a few cases of criminal misconduct that led to the first-ever indictments of FBI officials, as well as investigations into abuses resulting from FBI agents’ getting in bed with corrupt informants, which Shaheen says has been a recurring problem over the years. About a week after Shaheen took the job, Levi assigned OPR to review allegations that some FBI officials were benefiting from the bureau’s exclusive deal with the U.S. Recording Company, its sole supplier of electronic including eavesdropping-equipment. An initial investigation by the FBI inspections division had been a whitewash. But Shaheen’s office, using carefully chosen FBI agents as investigators, uncovered sweetheart contracts and mutual back-scratching between the FBI and private companies and gross misuse of FBI resources and personnel by Hoover and other top FBI officials. Shaheen also uncovered evidence of extensive improvements to Hoover’s home at government expense, by FBI employees who were, he says, "on call day and night for this work."

In the years thereafter, big assignments came Shaheen’s way in waves. There was the 1976 probe into the FBI’s harassment of Martin Luther King, Jr., and the bureau’s investigation of his assassination. That produced a report that praised the bureau’s detective work while blasting its "disdain for the supervisory responsibilities" of the attorney general, and that faulted Main justice for its inadequate supervision of the FBI and its whistle-blower policies. Later came investigations of attorneys general Griffin Bell (ending in a clean exculpation); Benjamin Civiletti (who was sharply criticized for falsely denying that he had discussed Billy Carter’s actions on behalf of the Libyan government with President Jimmy Carter); William French Smith (who was forced to give up some questionable tax shelters, to return a $50,000 severance payment from a corporate board, and to reimburse the government $ 11,200 for giving his wife full-time personal use of a Justice Department car and driver for over a year); Edwin Meese 3d (who was faulted for various ethical lapses); and Dick Thornburgh (whose refusal to allow full OPR scrutiny of alleged misconduct of two of Thornburgh’s personal aides during a 1990 investigation prompted Shaheen to complain to Congress). Then there was Shaheen’s blistering, 161 -page 1993 report that savaged then-FBI director William Sessions for a parade of ethical violations large and small. Sessions held on to his job tenaciously in the several months thereafter, until the new president, Bill Clinton, dismissed him and replaced him with Louis Freeh in July 1993.

Taking on such high-profile targets has bolstered Shaheen’s reputation for fearlessness and independence. (Critics say that his tangles with bosses and big shots actually represent a cunning job insurance strategy, see "A Bureaucratic Power Player?" page 66.) But his office’s record of policing the Justice Department’s corps of line prosecutors-and alleged abuses of power in the pursuit of suspected criminals by rank-and-file FBI agents-is harder to gauge. That difficulty reflects the secrecy in which most of OPR’s thousands of investigations have been cloaked, in part because of the requirements of the Privacy Act, and in part because of Shaheen’s personal preference for keeping such sensitive work behind closed doors. In addition, OPR’s function has been limited to investigating, making factual findings, and assessing whether those investigated were guilty of misconduct or bad judgment; final decisions on those issues, and whether to discipline or dismiss those faulted by OPR, have always been made by other offices.

Critics, including defense lawyers-who increasingly use allegations of prosecutorial misconduct as litigating tactics-complain that there have never been effective checks on prosecutorial (or agent) misconduct, and that OPR has long been a paper tiger because it has been too small, too slow-moving, too weak in relevant expertise, and too forgiving of abuses of power by crime-fighting career law enforcement officials, who could usually avoid any discipline, even for gross misconduct, simply by retiring early. In addition, a 1992 General Accounting Office report faulted OPR for grossly inadequate documentation of its investigations and for "nor pursuing all investigative leads" in many cases, "even when little added time or effort might have been needed."

Such criticisms (hotly contested by Shaheen) were aired, though not entirely embraced, in a Washington Post series in January 1993- by the same Jim McGee who would later lionize Shaheen in Main Justice-focusing on an increasing problem of misconduct by the Justice Department’s rapidly growing corps of prosecutors around the country, as evidenced in formal opinions by federal trial judges and otherwise. One who read such criticisms of Shaheen with particular interest was Harvard law professor Philip Heymann, who was soon to become Attorney General Janet Reno’s first deputy attorney general. A criminal law specialist, he had clashed with Shaheen on various matters when Heymann was head of the Justice Department’s criminal division. In Heymann’s view, "a lack of trust-justified or not-in criminal investigators and prosecutors may be the single biggest problem of law enforcement." He did no…

ON THE EVENING OF MARCH 5 Michael Bromwich, the Justice Department’s inspector general, tuned into C-SPAN in his Washington, D.C., living room to catch a replay of the testimony that Federal Bureau of Investigation director Louis Freeh had given earlier that day before a House of Representatives subcommittee. It was tepid stuff. But then came a moment when Freeh was tossed a hot potato relating to Bromwich’s much-publicized investigation into claims of bad science, pro-prosecution slanting, and even fabrication of evidence at the FBI’s vaunted crime laboratory. Why, asked subcommittee chairman Harold Rogers (R-Kentucky), had the bureau suspended Dr. Frederic Whitehurst? He’s the FBI scientist turned whistle-blower whose sweeping charges against colleagues in the crime lab had spurred the inspector general’s investigation, and had proved accurate in all too many cases.

"The action that was taken against Mr. Whitehurst,’ Freeh responded, "was taken solely and directly on the basis of the recommendation [and report] of the inspector general."

The FBI director’s implication: It wasn’t our idea.

This was wrong. And the smart, intense, 43-year-old Bromwich was deeply disturbed by what he saw as an effort by the FBI to put a self-serving slant on the situation, deflecting the blame (or what many in Congress saw as a retaliation against the whistle-blower. The next day Bromwich fired off a letter to Freeh, his fellow Clinton appointee and former colleague at the elite U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan, where both had been highly regarded prosecutors in the mid-1980s. It was-at least by Washington standards-strikingly blunt.

"I am writing to urge you to correct the testimony you gave during your appearance yesterday," the inspector general wrote, adding that this should be done by letter, to chairman Rogers, "as promptly as possible." Bromwich stressed that his draft report had not recommended that Whitehurst be suspended. Indeed, Bromwich added, "I expressed my opposition … over the course of more than a year when FBI representatives had repeatedly proposed firing Whitehurst or placing him on some sort of administrative leave." The FBI had gone ahead and done so not only because of the inspector general’s draft report-which balanced criticism of Whitehurst for making many "incendiary," unsubstantiated charges of perjury and fabrication with praise of his exposing of "extremely serious" deficiencies-but also because of the whistle-blower’s refusal to answer questions about whether he had leaked FBI secrets to the media. Freeh responded by acknowledging, five days later, in letters to Bromwich and Rogers, that his testimony had been "incomplete," though not deliberately so. Freeh also added a little potshot at Bromwich, implying that the inspector general’s own prior testimony had understated the problems with the credibility of Whitehurst, who is derided by many at the FBI as a nut.

While Bromwich had his facts right, his letter’s tough tone left many at the FBI smoldering. Some of his Justice Department colleagues believed-as one put it- that "he could have gotten that same retraction with a phone call, rather than a nasty letter." The letter surely gave Freeh a headache that he didn’t need, beleaguered as he had recently been by bad publicity about the crime lab, the Clinton White House’s obtaining of confidential FBI background files on leading Republicans, and other messes. And even worse, the Bromwich-Freeh correspondence predictably became public within days, generating media reports suggesting that Freeh’s acknowledgment of error was "a startling admission that deals yet another setback to the bureau’s increasingly tarnished image," in the words of the Los Angeles Times. Indeed, The Washington Times’s on-line edition headlined its story (inaccurately): "1G says Freeh lied to Congress." It quoted Senator Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), an outspoken FBI critic, accusing Freeh of "an effort to mislead" and "a damage control operation."

The public release on April 15 of Bromwich’s impressive, 517-page crime lab report generated an even bigger batch of bad headlines for the FBI. Then came his report in April faulting the FBI (and the Central Intelligence Agency) for missing opportunities to catch Soviet spy Aldrich Ames for years while Ames was betraying U.S. intelligence agents in Russia. These and other episodes over the past year have helped create a climate that prompts Bromwich to muse-with a rueful laugh-that he seems to be "the most hated man at the FBI."

They haven’t put him on the Ten Most Wanted list yet. Freeh and his top aides avoid sharp public criticism of Bromwich, and say they have "good rapport" with the former prosecutor, in the words of retiring deputy FBI director William Esposito. But John Sennett, president of the FBI Agents Association, says that Bromwich’s publicizing of his criticisms has been "unfairly harmful lo the FBI." And the FBI seems determined to fight off an aggressive bid by the inspector general for broader power to "walk over here anytime he wants, as Esposito puts it, to investigate cases of alleged misconduct by officials of the FBI. Bromwich argues that giving his 400-person office an unrestricted hunting license at the Drug Enforcement Administration and the bureau-which much prefers hunting to being hunt-ed-is essential to ensure that the powerful bureau be held to the same system of oversight to which most of the department and the government are subjected. Inspectors general are presidentially appointed, congressionally confirmed, quasi-independent watchdogs over waste, fraud, abuse, misconduct, and mismanagement at federal departments and agencies; they have a statutory obligation to report to Congress, and are to some extent seen as instruments of Congress planted in the executive branch. Bromwich claims that the current oversight system at the FBI is ineffective, citing as evidence the years during which the problems with the crime lab and the counterintelligence failures in the Ames case had festered without effective action by anyone. "The work we did on Ames and the FBI laboratory could not and would not have been done by anybody else," says Bromwich. "In both cases, the FBI’s reaction at the outset to our reviewing these matters was, in effect, ‘We don’t have a problem, and if we do, we’ll be the ones to review it.’"

FBI officials including Michael DeFeo-a respected career Justice Department prosecutor who became head of the bureau’s own, recently expanded internal watchdog unit in March-firmly reject Bromwich’s suggestions that the bureau cannot police itself and gets a free pass from Justice. And nobody bristles more at Bromwich’s dissing of "nominal DOJ supervision of the FBI" than Michael Shaheen, Jr., the proud, soft-spoken, but fiercely independent career Justice Department lawyer who started the department’s Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) in 1975, when Bromwich was a college kid. For 22 years OPR has been the official in-house ethics watchdog over the entire department, with jurisdiction over its FBI component as well. Any extension of the jurisdiction of the 43-year-old inspector general would come at the expense of OPR and the 57-year-old Shaheen-whom Freeh went out of his way to praise, at another recent congressional hearing, at which they testified side by side, as "one of the most respected attorneys in the department and in the government."

Good Mike, Bad Mike, and Big Mike: Those are the monikers half-jokingly used by some top FBI officials to distinguish, respectively, Shabeen, Bromwich, and the (very tall) DeFeo. While Bromwich has clashed with the FBI, Shaheen is widely liked and admired there. Bromwich implies that this goes to show that Shaheen and OPR are too cozy with Freeh-and for two decades have been too cozy with the FBI-to provide the kind of tough, independent oversight necessary to ferret out misconduct and keep the bureau honest. The redoubtable Shaheen, for his part, complains that the inspector general seeks "to create the perception that there is something wrong with oversight of the FBI, when I have been doing historic, precedent-setting investigations at the FBI since he was an infant.

"It’s unfortunate," Shaheen adds in a Mississippi drawl that is softer than his carefully chosen words, "that a person who accepts an appointment with a finite jurisdiction is not satisfied with the job he agreed to. I think this confirms the view of many that he is self-aggrandizing and a self-promoter."

At one level this is a classic Washington turf war between strong-willed men-each of whom greatly underestimates the other-spiced by elements of intergenerational combat: Young, ambitious, idealistic Harvard hotshot seeks to build empire by pushing aside veteran bureaucratic survivor, who wont give up an inch of ground without a fight, and whose reputation for integrity and independence, legendary skills at self-preservation, and cultivation of allies like Freeh have helped win him protectors in Congress and outlast antagonists more powerful than Bromwich. At another level, these men and the institutions they head represent two distinct models of oversight: Bromwich’s is proactive, aggressive, exhaustive, itching to get things done, relatively responsive to Congress, relatively ready to trumpet its mission and accomplishments in the media, and relatively independent of his titular boss, the attorney general, as offices of inspector general throughout government were designed by Congress to be. Shaheen, who calls his office "the eyes and ears of the attorney general"-but who has battled at least four of the eight attorneys general at whose pleasure he has served-is more reactive. He is responsive to the attorney general’s priorities, deferential to the career bureaucracy, secretive, slow-moving, and remote from Congress and the media, excepting a handful of reporters and congressional staffers whom he knows and trusts.

The reality is that policing the FBI (and federal prosecutors) is a devilishly complicated and delicate business, especially at a time when-with more money, agents, and power than ever before, conferred over the past 15 years by a Congress bent on fighting crime and terrorism-the bureau has been buffeted by a rapid succession of front-page scandals: Ruby Ridge, Waco, "Filegate," Aldrich Ames, the crime lab mess, the botched interrogation of innocent suspect Richard Jewell in the July 1996 bombing at the Olympic Games in Atlanta, and more.

The issues of how to deal with such problems are both institutional and personal, with Good Mike and Bad Mike waging an intermittent guerrilla war so hitter as to roil the top tiers of the sprawling, 100,000-employcc Justice Department. They even argue (in separate interviews) about what the argument is about: Bromwich, frustrated by media accounts focusing less on the merits of his proposal than on his rivalry with Shaheen, claims that Shaheen is in fact "peripheral" to the inspector general’s bid for more jurisdiction over the FBI, because in Bromwich’s view, OPR-which now spends much of its time investigating alleged misconduct by Justice Department prosecutors-has not been proactive in digging for evidence of FBI malfeasance.

"They are like children getting out of the playpen," grouses one recently departed, high-level Justice Department official. "The two of them are both very frustrated over this, and it’s kind of sad to watch. When you stand back from it, this is serious business. They’ve both personalized this to the point that it’s not productive, the stir and the fuss they’ve created around this department. There’s annoyance with both of them."

Whatever virtue there may be in the Justice Department’s having two internal watchdogs, it is clearly a formula for dogfights. Is the place big enough for both of them?

IN THE BEGINNING

The history of oversight of misconduct at the Justice Department until about 1975 goes something like this: In the beginning there was nothing, and then there was Mike Shaheen. And since then, eight attorneys general have come and seven have gone, and still there is Mike Shaheen, now in an unhappy state of jurisdictional cohabitation with Mike Bromwich. "For better or worse, no other department lawyer [has] had more impact on how the institution viewed its ethical and professional obligations," wrote Jim McGee and Brian Duffy in Main Justice: The Men and Women Who Enforce the Nation’s Criminal Laws and Guard Its Liberties, a 1996 book that took a serious but refreshingly benign view of the Justice Department. Over the years, the authors pointed out, "Shaheen and his staff [had become known] as dragon slayers"; in particular, by spearheading several tough investigations of various attorneys general, Shaheen has burnished his reputation as "the in-house guarantor of the Justice Department’s integrity."

Shaheen came to the Justice Department in 1973, at the age of 32, from the improbable position of mayor of Como, Mississippi, where he was elected on a liberal, pro-civil rights platform featuring a promise to desegregate the all-white police force. He’d grown up in the same small town before leaving for Taft (a New England boarding school), Yale University, and Van-derbilt Law School; his father was a wealthy, politically influential doctor and an early advocate of desegregation. Shaheen’s first jobs at Justice were as a lawyer in the civil rights division, and then as deputy special counsel on intelligence matters. In the latter position, he helped dig up files for Senate investigators-including the "do-not-file files," from places including the basement of J. Edgar Hoover’s house-on the abuses of dirty tricks programs and FBI domestic surveillance. This experience prompted a Shaheen memo in December 1975 to attorney general Edward Levi-the former University of Chicago Law School dean whom President Ford had appointed to restore the Justice Department’s tattered reputation after the Watergate scandal-that urged tighter supervision of FBI bugging and other counterintelligence operations, which had operated virtually independent of Main Justice.

Soon thereafter, Levi presented some paperwork of his own to Shaheen. In response to concerns in Congress and elsewhere about misconduct at the Justice Department and (especially) the FBI, Levi had decided to create a new unit called the Office of Professional Responsibility, to serve as in-house ethics adviser and investigator of misconduct charges against Justice and FBI officials. Levi said he wanted Shaheen to run OPR, an idea that Shaheen initially found unappealing. "The name made it sound like a namby-pamby, cosmetic, nonsubstan-tive entity," he recalls. Still, he took the job at Levi’s insistence. "I was handed this assignment and told to do it," recalls Shaheen. "I had no prototype to work from."

Much of OPR’s early work focused on misconduct at the bureau. That included a few cases of criminal misconduct that led to the first-ever indictments of FBI officials, as well as investigations into abuses resulting from FBI agents’ getting in bed with corrupt informants, which Shaheen says has been a recurring problem over the years. About a week after Shaheen took the job, Levi assigned OPR to review allegations that some FBI officials were benefiting from the bureau’s exclusive deal with the U.S. Recording Company, its sole supplier of electronic including eavesdropping-equipment. An initial investigation by the FBI inspections division had been a whitewash. But Shaheen’s office, using carefully chosen FBI agents as investigators, uncovered sweetheart contracts and mutual back-scratching between the FBI and private companies and gross misuse of FBI resources and personnel by Hoover and other top FBI officials. Shaheen also uncovered evidence of extensive improvements to Hoover’s home at government expense, by FBI employees who were, he says, "on call day and night for this work."

In the years thereafter, big assignments came Shaheen’s way in waves. There was the 1976 probe into the FBI’s harassment of Martin Luther King, Jr., and the bureau’s investigation of his assassination. That produced a report that praised the bureau’s detective work while blasting its "disdain for the supervisory responsibilities" of the attorney general, and that faulted Main justice for its inadequate supervision of the FBI and its whistle-blower policies. Later came investigations of attorneys general Griffin Bell (ending in a clean exculpation); Benjamin Civiletti (who was sharply criticized for falsely denying that he had discussed Billy Carter’s actions on behalf of the Libyan government with President Jimmy Carter); William French Smith (who was forced to give up some questionable tax shelters, to return a $50,000 severance payment from a corporate board, and to reimburse the government $ 11,200 for giving his wife full-time personal use of a Justice Department car and driver for over a year); Edwin Meese 3d (who was faulted for various ethical lapses); and Dick Thornburgh (whose refusal to allow full OPR scrutiny of alleged misconduct of two of Thornburgh’s personal aides during a 1990 investigation prompted Shaheen to complain to Congress). Then there was Shaheen’s blistering, 161 -page 1993 report that savaged then-FBI director William Sessions for a parade of ethical violations large and small. Sessions held on to his job tenaciously in the several months thereafter, until the new president, Bill Clinton, dismissed him and replaced him with Louis Freeh in July 1993.

Taking on such high-profile targets has bolstered Shaheen’s reputation for fearlessness and independence. (Critics say that his tangles with bosses and big shots actually represent a cunning job insurance strategy, see "A Bureaucratic Power Player?" page 66.) But his office’s record of policing the Justice Department’s corps of line prosecutors-and alleged abuses of power in the pursuit of suspected criminals by rank-and-file FBI agents-is harder to gauge. That difficulty reflects the secrecy in which most of OPR’s thousands of investigations have been cloaked, in part because of the requirements of the Privacy Act, and in part because of Shaheen’s personal preference for keeping such sensitive work behind closed doors. In addition, OPR’s function has been limited to investigating, making factual findings, and assessing whether those investigated were guilty of misconduct or bad judgment; final decisions on those issues, and whether to discipline or dismiss those faulted by OPR, have always been made by other offices.

Critics, including defense lawyers-who increasingly use allegations of prosecutorial misconduct as litigating tactics-complain that there have never been effective checks on prosecutorial (or agent) misconduct, and that OPR has long been a paper tiger because it has been too small, too slow-moving, too weak in relevant expertise, and too forgiving of abuses of power by crime-fighting career law enforcement officials, who could usually avoid any discipline, even for gross misconduct, simply by retiring early. In addition, a 1992 General Accounting Office report faulted OPR for grossly inadequate documentation of its investigations and for "nor pursuing all investigative leads" in many cases, "even when little added time or effort might have been needed."

Such criticisms (hotly contested by Shaheen) were aired, though not entirely embraced, in a Washington Post series in January 1993- by the same Jim McGee who would later lionize Shaheen in Main Justice-focusing on an increasing problem of misconduct by the Justice Department’s rapidly growing corps of prosecutors around the country, as evidenced in formal opinions by federal trial judges and otherwise. One who read such criticisms of Shaheen with particular interest was Harvard law professor Philip Heymann, who was soon to become Attorney General Janet Reno’s first deputy attorney general. A criminal law specialist, he had clashed with Shaheen on various matters when Heymann was head of the Justice Department’s criminal division. In Heymann’s view, "a lack of trust-justified or not-in criminal investigators and prosecutors may be the single biggest problem of law enforcement." He did not consider Shaheen to be much of a solution.

Thus began Heymann’s recruitment of Michael Bromwich, in the summer of 1993, to be Justice Department inspector general. Heymann’s plan was for OPR, which then consisted of eight lawyers and two secretaries, to be merged into the 400-person inspector general’s office; for Shaheen to be put out to pasture; and for Bromwich to take over the merged office. Bromwich wanted at least this much, if not more. Fulfillment of Bromwich’s ambitions would therefore mean ending Shaheen’s long reign.

PURVIEW AND POLITICS

The Justice Department inspector general’s office had been created by Congress in 1988, over the objections of most Justice Department officials, who did not think the department needed such a beast and considered the legislation to be, in Shaheen’s words, "the Hill’s attempt to get their foot in the door to oversee the core functions of the department, which are uniquely, constitutionally protected and within the powers of the president." As a compromise, the legislation allowed for the attorney general to preserve OPR’s role in handling the biggest matters-including alleged misconduct by prosecutors, other Justice Department lawyers, and officials of the FBI and DEA-while confining the IG and his 400 employees to auditing and policing waste, fraud, and abuse, mainly in places like the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS). While the IG’s office had more than 100 gun-carrying, badge-carrying agents, it was initially staffed largely by people (from INS and other agencies) who got little respect from their colleagues at Main Justice and the FBI.

The first, Bush-appointed inspector general Richard Hankinson and Shaheen engaged each other in jurisdictional "blood warfare," in the words of a former Hankinson aide. Shaheen won, and remained top watchdog, thanks to rulings by then-attorney general William Barr. Shaheen did nor disguise his contempt for the new office, the very existence of which he saw as a "misapplication of resources and duplication of effort." He also saw the IG’s agents as second-raters who could not get jobs at the FBI.

But Heymann had plans to change that-in part by bringing in top talent to upgrade the place. And his intention to merge OPR into the inspector general’s office would make it easier both to ease out Shaheen and to recruit someone of Bromwich’s caliber for what would be a bigger, better, sexier job. Heymann reasoned that it made little sense to have two competing ethics watchdogs with overlapping jurisdictions. And some congressional Democrats-including Senator John Glenn (D-Ohio), a booster of inspectors general-were pressing for a merger.

By July 1993 Heymann had sold Reno-or thought he had sold her-on a plan to merge OPR into the inspector general’s office. This could theoretically he done by a stroke of the pen, without new legislation, but would in practice be of interest to various congressional barons. Bromwich, at Heymann’s urging, would become the new inspector general, a presidential appointment requiring Senate confirmation. This was a logical choice: Bromwich was a rising star, a summa cum laude graduate of Harvard College who had combined Harvard Law School with a master’s in public policy at the Kennedy School of Government (where he had been Heymann’s student years before), and who had excelled as a federal prosecutor in Manhattan, as an assistant to Iran-contra independent counsel Lawrence Walsh, and as a criminal defense lawyer and partner at the Washington office of Mayer, Brown & Platt.

Bromwich initially said no. He had aspired to be head of the criminal division, while serving on the newly elected Clinton administration’s Justice Department transition team, in 1992. He didn’t get that, and the inspector general’s office-even with OPR thrown in-seemed a lesser job. Heymann told him that he could play an important role in major internal investigations, as well as the more routine fare of the OPR and IG offices. Bromwich made a long-shot pitch for still more: He wanted to be a sort of government-wide ethics czar, picking up some or all of the functions that have been assigned to court-appointed special prosecutors by the independent counsel statute, which had lapsed in late 1992. That would have been a position with truly enormous power, and Heymann says he never considered it a serious possibility. But after meeting with Reno in July 1993, Bromwich agreed to accept nomination as inspector general. "Then they had me," he recalls with a wry grin.

Unbeknownst to Heymann and Bromwich, however, Reno harbored some doubts about the merger plan, and sent an aide to ask Shaheen in September 1993 whether he had anything to say against it. He sure did, and he detailed his arguments against the plan in a memo to Reno. One point, he recalls, was that an OPR/IG merger "would be an abdication of her prerogatives as head of the law enforcement branch of the executive," cramping the attorney general’s ability to set priorities in internal investigations; an inspector general, which Shaheen saw as "an instrument of Congress," could set his own priorities, and would not necessarily drop everything and hop to it when the attorney general wanted something investigated fast. Reno, for her part, says that "I was impressed by the argument-and I forget who made the argument first to me-that it was important that you have an entity [like OPR] that could focus on the disciplinary rules and on the ethical standards of lawyers, [which] required a specialization and a thoughtfulness." She also says that she saw merit in the argument "that you needed to separate an investigative agency [like the IG’s office] that investigated violations of the law and waste and abuse and fraud [from] somebody who said, ‘Was this prosecutorial comment made in closing argument so egregious as to amount to misconduct?’"

Then some politics intervened, spurred by some seemingly inconsequential news reports that made trouble for the Bromwich nomination on the Republican right. One identified him, misleadingly, as having been "a volunteer" in the Clinton campaign. (In fact, says Bromwich, he has never worked in any political campaign, "unless you count about six hours sitting in a room with other Clinton types brainstorming on criminal justice issues.") Other articles, in the conservative Washington Times, tagged Bromwich for his work as a prosecutor under Iran-contra independent counsel Walsh, which alone sufficed to make him suspect in the eyes of some Republicans.

Former colleagues, adversaries, and other admirers of Bromwich-including prominent Republicans like New York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani and Iran-contra defense lawyer Leonard Garment- sought to counteract this by sending letters of reference heaping praise on Bromwich as an apolitical, supremely ethical, and talented lawyer who would make an ideal inspector general. But the damage was done. Some Republicans say that they saw Bromwich at the time as a Clintonite politico, being sent to take over the critical Justice Department watchdog function from a career appointee of proven independence and integrity (Shaheen), and at a time of intense partisan dispute over Clinton’s alleged politicization of Justice. Meanwhile, Heymann, Bromwich’s sponsor, resigned in January 1994 because of difficulties working with Reno.

The hammer blow came when Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah-then the senior Republican and now the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee-went to bat to save Shaheen and OPR, and to clip Bromwich’s budding wings. In a February 1, 1994, letter, Hatch served notice on Reno that he would block the Bromwich nomination unless and until he got some assurance that OPR would not be put under the inspector general. Other Republicans sent me-too letters. Hatch recalls now that while he considered Bromwich "an ethical and able lawyer," he had been concerned that Heymann "was trying to help his former student and Iran-contra prosecutor Bromwich at the expense of the department’s ability independently to review conduct free from interference by political appointees. … We were one year into the administration which had fired all ninety-four United States attorneys … which had abused the FBI in the travel office investigation. All that did not speak well of [the Clintonites], and I wanted to be sure that there would be someone other than a political appointee and a Clinton campaign worker reviewing these allegations of misconduct…. Shaheen has been the only independent voice in a department which seemed at the time, and has been proven to be, essentially political."

The already scandal-plagued Clinton White House had no appetite to take on Hatch about a matter so peripheral to us major goals. And in part on the advice of Jamie Gorelick, who had by then succeeded Philip Heymann, Reno told Hatch that she would drop the merger idea. With that, the controversy over Bromwich’s nomination evaporated, and he was confirmed as inspector general without further ado, in June 1994. But "he ended up with half the job he had been hoping for," recalls a former colleague-indeed, with half the job he had initially turned down.

And still there was Shaheen, firmly entrenched at OPR and-claims one acquaintance with a critical view-gloating that he had outlasted Heymann. Reno pushed Shaheen to change some things: to start misconduct investigations without awaiting the last appeal, to finish them up even if the targets resigned, to clear up his backlog, to speed up his case processing, and to make his conclusions public more readily-all of which Shaheen has done, thanks in part to a tripling in the size of OPR since 1993, to 23 lawyers and 12 support staffers.

TURF WARS

Bromwich, meanwhile, made the most of what he calls "a real challenge in institution-building." He-spent his first two years quietly upgrading the quality of the inspector general’s office. He promoted the best people he had inherited, pushed out the worst, produced more sharply written reports on the myriad important but obscure matters that the office routinely investigates, and brought in crackerjack federal prosecutors and others from the outside for temporary stints, both to spearhead especially important investigations and to serve as his counselor-a sort of right-hand man (or woman).

Bromwich also threw himself info misconduct investigations with the passion of an ethical purist, albeit one whose ready wit dispels any aura of self-righteousness. "Mike is an incredible, by-the-book, do-the-right-thing, wear-the-white-hat sort of guy, and the idea that anybody might fall short of that standard really does outrage him, "says his former counselor John Barrett, a colleague on the Iran-contra prosecution team who is now an assistant professor at St. John’s Law School, in Queens, New York. Barrett says they spent much of their first year trying to break down the vast department’s institutional resistance to the very idea of an inspector general.

By mid-1996 some major investigations had come to impressive fruition under Bromwich’s leadership, and began making headlines. The first of these grew out of allegations that a congressional delegation had been deceived by high-ranking INS officials when it visited Miami in June 1995. In a 200-page report a year later, the inspector general found that large numbers of illegal aliens had been shipped out of the Krome Detention Facility in the Everglades just before the delegation’s visit; a smoking-gun e-mail uncovered by the investigative team described the purpose as stashing them "out of sight for cosmetic purposes." With the approval of Gore-lick and Reno, the inspector general also began to sink his teeth in 1995 into two major investigations of problems at the FBI: the alleged misconduct and mismanagement at the crime lab and the handling of the Aldrich Ames spy case. "We were trying very hard to sort of lean into the department-the FBI and everywhere else," recalls Barrett.

And then came Bromwich’s crime lab report, which he calls "good government and important government at good prices." (The cost was about $1.5 million.) The inspector general has been credited by Reno and most other Justice Department officials familiar with the report for creatively and skillfully handling a matter of enormous importance and sensitivity by detailing the problems in a way both devastating and judicious. FBI officials use conspicuously fainter praise. Deputy director William Esposito, for example, says in an interview: "I’m not saying it’s a good report or a bad report…. A lot of good things came out of it, let’s put it that way." In fact, Louis Freeh has adopted all 40 of its recommendations.

Bromwich has, in short, made the IG’s office a major player in investigating misconduct and other problems at the FBI. "Under a situation that’s not designed to make him very popular," observes Heymann, "Bromwich is producing high-quality work for the U.S. government in large amounts, investigations of whole agencies, like the crime lab investigation, which was so devastating, and so important." While Bromwich has been busy putting the inspector general’s office on the map for three years, he has also spent two of those years butting heads with OPR’s Shaheen, and with FBI officials as well, over jurisdictional issues. "He struck me as a guy on the make," recalls Shaheen when asked about their first meeting, a courtesy call by Bromwich to Shaheen’s office shortly after his confirmation in 1994. ("I don’t know what he’s talking about," responds Bromwich.)

It was a cordial meeting, according to both men, and they undertook to cooperate with each other in their shared mission. There followed a period of "peaceful co-existence" from mid-1994 into 1995, according to Barrett, Bromwich’s first counselor, who respected and worked well with OPR’s lawyers. But over time the OPR-IG relationship dissolved into a succession of increasingly bitter disagreements-and sometimes "open warfare," in the view of one of the principals-over who would get to investigate what, especially involving the succession of big, headline-making problems at the FBI. "There’s been a fight about every one of them-not just some, every one," recalls a lawyer who was close to the matter. While the IG’s and OPR’s fourth-floor offices at Main Justice are only about 100 paces apart, they seem more remote from each other than either of them (especially OPR) is from the FBI’s leadership across Pennsylvania Avenue in the J. Edgar Hoover Building.

Bromwich took some turf in November 1994, after Gorelick and Reno approved an order opening up the FBI and DEA for the first time to scrutiny by the inspector general, while limiting Shaheen’s exclusive jurisdiction to cases of alleged misconduct by Justice Department lawyers involving "their authority to investigate, litigate, or provide legal advice." The FBI and DEA were told to keep the inspector general (as well as OPR) informed of important internal investigations; Bromwich could request authority from then-deputy attorney general Gorelick’s office to take over any investigation that he thought could more credibly be done by his office. The deputy’s office was to resolve any conflicts. "It’s fair to say," says Barrett, "that everybody understood that this significantly expanded the IG office’s authority, which had always been somewhat unclear, and [which had been] very seriously resisted throughout the department." One case that would have previously gone to OPR but went to the IG under the new rules was that of Kendall Coffey, the respected U.S. attorney in Miami, who lost some of that respect when he had too much to drink one night at a strip joint and bit one of the performers on the arm. The inspector general’s office did a fast report, and Coffey resigned.

Other turf wars were fought over far larger scandals, such as the reinvestigation of the Ruby Ridge shootings; the botched interrogation of suspect Richard Jewell in the Atlanta bombing and press leaks portraying him as a weirdo who probably did it (he didn’t); and the controversy over the role of Freeh’s friend Howard Shapiro, then the FBI’s general counsel, in dealing with the Clinton White House in matters touching on various Clinton scandals. Shaheen won all three battles-in part, Bromwich complains, by preemptively taking the ball and heading downfield with it before Bromwich had had a chance to make his case for jurisdiction to the deputy’s office.

According to a former high-level Justice Department official, however, the FBI had "completely stiffed Bromwich at the outset" of the new regime supposedly created by the 1994 jurisdictional order, by telling him as little as possible about its own internal investigations. Recalls Barrett: "A seam that runs through this is the specter of the next inspector general. FBI officials would say, ‘We know that Bromwich was a prosecutor, was in federal law enforcement, but what if the next person isn’t our kind of person? What if it is a media hound or someone who’s beholden to Congress or someone who’s just not competent? What do we do if we get that kind of a bozo?’" FBI officials, too, voiced concern that inspectors general, with their reporting responsibilities to Congress, were by nature more likely to have political agendas than career officials like Shaheen. Gorelick finally had to issue a detailed supplemental order in January 1996 to force the FBI to keep the inspector general adequately informed.

Bromwich’s boldness in complaining about such matters, and in promoting his agenda in Congress and the media-not to mention his blunt correction of Freeh’s March 5 testimony about crime lab whistle- blower Whitehurst-has rankled top brass at Main Justice as well as the FBI. Indeed, Janet Reno has manifested discomfort with some of the publicity about the inspector general’s investigations. Another official faults Bromwich for "grandstanding." Suggesting that Bromwich might be motivated in part by frustration over his lack of success so far in getting larger appropriations from Congress for his office, this official says: "When you try to make the case to Congress by talking about how you need to provide more oversight over the FBI, as though it’s this can of worms, the people who live in the can are not likely to think kindly of you."

Bromwich concedes that there is "inherent tension" between his quasi-independent role as inspector general and the roles of all other top officials: "I cannot be a team player in the way others in the department can; I am not an ordinary member of the team. This is what people in the department have trouble understanding in practice if not in theory. I have a mission that requires me at times to air problems that others would prefer to pretend didn’t exist or to sweep under the rug." Noting that other Justice Department and FBI officials seek publicity for their "successes against bad guys" without being condemned as press hounds, Bromwich suggests that his modest efforts to publicize his office’s successes exposing problems at the FBI are in principle no less appropriate. And stressing that he has no press aide and seeks publicity about few matters, he adds: "When I do it, it’s because I’m proud of what we do, because I think our accomplishments are worthy of public note, and because it makes people in our organization feel good to see their hard work recognized. And I really do feel that the public has a right to know this stuff."

"THIS IS NOT PERSONAL"

Bromwich also feels that Congress has a right to know how strongly he disagrees with FBI director Freeh’s suggestion, in testimony to the House crime subcommittee in early June, that the system for policing misconduct at the FBI works pretty well. Asked about his seeming penchant for picking public arguments with Freeh, Bromwich says: "This is not personal. It’s institutional." He says that he likes and admires Freeh, who "has been a good FBI director," and that Freeh "has taken a lot of heat, much of it unfairly targeted at him, for problems that grew and festered under his predecessors, like those at the crime lab. He should be credited with stepping up to the plate and not making excuses. "The FBI, adds Bromwich, "is the premier law enforcement agency in the world, but its not perfect; it’s got problems."

He detailed how to target some of those problems in a June 10 letter to the House crime subcommittee, urging that the IG’s office should have "more broad-ranging authority to conduct investigations into allegations of misconduct lodged against FBI personnel." The 1994 Reno-Gorelick jurisdictional order was "flawed," he wrote, because it requires him to "obtain the explicit approval of the deputy attorney general to initiate any investigation" of alleged misconduct at the FBI.

This June 10 letter caused as much grousing about Bromwich at high levels of Main Justice-especially among aides to the recently departed Gorelick, who were still running the deputy’s office-as Bromwich’s March 6 letter correcting Freeh had caused at the FBI. Officials were especially peeved that Bromwich had not consulted Janet Reno or anyone else in the chain of command before going to Congress and attacking Reno’s own 1994 jurisdictional order as falling short of allowing "meaningful executive branch oversight" of FBI misconduct matters. Even the rather detached Reno says, "I’m not quite sure what Bromwich [was] doing with this letter." Asked if she was upset with him, she says no, and stresses that Bromwich "is thoughtful and objective and independent … and his thoughts are very helpful." But, she adds, "I think he could be more effective if he wanted to achieve his goal [of increased jurisdiction.]" One Reno subordinate says that "it’s kind of odd to go first to the Hill when the attorney general could do it with one pass of the pen." Another lawyer close to the matter says: "He did a good and correct job on the lab, and instead of just doing that, he tried to use it to leverage more resources…. This is about enlarging his fiefdom and reducing somebody else’s."

Bromwich says that after careful reflection he had decided that "I did not want to negotiate this letter," because Congress should have the undiluted views of the congressionally accountable inspector general: "I was concerned that if I began discussions about the letter, I would end up with people telling me not to send it, which would have created a dilemma for me. Given my institutional position, I thought it was cleaner and simpler for everyone concerned for me to send the letter without prior consultation." He adds that an effort to spur reasoned debate over how to oversee the FBI is no mere turf war, and that the merits of his argument should not be eclipsed by criticisms of his unvarnished presentation. And indeed, even Freeh himself has called the FBI "potentially the most dangerous agency in the country if we are not scrutinized carefully." The issue Bromwich wants to debate is who should be doing the scrutinizing, given what he calls "a history in the department of going easy on itself and on its own people… striving primarily to protect their own."

He is not alone in arguing that FBI officials and agents cannot always be trusted to police one another, either in internal investigations or in those run by OPR’s Shaheen. It is a sign of the times, observes Heymann, that even Reader’s Digest published an article in August with the headline, "Can We Trust the FBI?" Heymann adds, "I am sixty-four years old, and I can’t remember a time when law enforcement was more questioned and less trusted."

And while a crime-obsessed Congress continues to increase the law enforcement budget, the FBI has been taking heat across the political spectrum, from conservative Republicans as well as liberal Democrats, for alleged abuses of its vast power. Senator Grassley told Freeh at a June 4 hearing: "I came to Washington with a great deal of respect for the FBI…. And most Americans have the image of the FBI as very good, beyond reproach, the untouchables. The FBI has cultivated that image…. But serious problems with the crime lab punctured that image, also Ruby Ridge and Waco have. Beyond the veneer is an ugly culture of arrogance that uses disinformation, intimidation, empire building to get what it wants…. It resists oversight by an independent body."

History shows that there is a whole class of cases in which FBI agents might be deterred by loyalty or fear or institutional bias from doing an objective job, and in which external oversight is also critical. The aftermath of the August 1992 Ruby Ridge shootings-including the killing by an FBI sharpshooter of a housewife with her baby in her arms-is a prime example. According to a Senate Judiciary subcommittee’s report, after extensive hearings in late 1995, the five successive FBI reports of internal investigations of the episode "are variously contradictory, inaccurate, and biased. They demonstrate a reluctance on the part of the FBI initially to take the incidents at Ruby Ridge seriously, and to investigate itself with the same degree of thoroughness and skepticism that the FBI brings to its other investigations…. The FBI accorded its own agents undue deference. Their stories were accepted at face value and were only rarely the subject of probing inquiry. FBI agents conducting the reviews vigorously pursued exculpatory leads while passing over inculpatory evidence…. Rather than attempting to uncover and resolve any discrepancies, FBI agents avoided uncomfortable facts [and] coddled [their own people]."

Aside from this "institutional bias," the report pointed out that FBI agents conducting the internal reviews were not properly insulated from the subjects of the review. Friends had reviewed friends’ conduct; subjects of the reviews had ended up sitting on the promotion boards of the same agents who had reviewed their conduct.

Amid such criticisms, Freeh has doubled the size of the FBI’s internal OPR (not to be confused with Shaheen’s Justice Department OPR), from 30 to 60, and brought in highly regarded career Justice Department prosecutor Michael DeFeo to run it. Bromwich sees this both as an implicit admission that FBI/OPR was broken before and as an effort to preempt independent oversight by the inspector general’s office by suggesting that it is unnecessary now. But external oversight will be necessary no matter how good DeFeo is, according to Bromwich, because it is FBI agents who staff DeFeo’s (and Shaheen’s) investigations of their colleagues’ alleged misconduct. "There is the inherent tendency and inclination to go easy on your own, particularly if they are your friends and colleagues, or friends of your colleagues," says Bromwich. "I think that is simply human nature and the nature of an institution like the FBI. The inspector general’s office has its own gun-carrying, badge carrying agents…. And we can give FBI agents who have despaired of having their allegations investigated a glimmer of hope that someone outside the FBI might be interested in taking a look at it."

Such arguments, asserts FBI deputy director Bill Esposito, are "basically impugning the integrity of the bureau," which, he says, "I equate with motherhood and apple pie." FBI agents "are all above-average people," Esposito says, and they begin hearing lectures on the importance of integrity the day they arrive for their 16 weeks of training. Others officials, like Shaheen and former attorney general William Barr, suggest that FBI agents are the best in the business and should not be subjected to possibly overzealous oversight by second-rate gumshoes from any inspector general’s office. (Responds Bromwich: "Our best agents stack up well against the best in the FBI." He says he is able to attract first-rate agents because the IG’s office "offers the chance to do a steady diet of challenging public corruption/misconduct cases and doesn’t require the constant geographical moves that are so unpopular in the FBI and elsewhere.")

DeFeo adds that, in any event, since Bromwich would take over a small fraction of FBI misconduct cases and leave most to be investigated by FBI/OPR, "we’re just talking about the margins of who exercises which part of which oversight." True, But margins are important. As the Senate subcommittee said in its report on the Ruby Ridge shootings: "The problem of institutional bias is particularly acute in cases like Ruby Ridge which involve deep-rooted and systemic problems and large numbers of agents drawn from the highest to the lowest echelons of the FBI-rather than cases which involve isolated agents violating discrete laws."

In other words, FBI agents can be trusted in most cases, perhaps-but not in all of them.

SOME INSIGHT ON OVERSIGHT

External oversight has its problems too. Former attorney general Barr says that inspectors general typically "have constituencies outside the department, particularly on the Hill, and they also tend to get a chip on their shoulder, and tend to want to make a name for themselves by finding and ballyhooing alleged misdeeds within the department. And it’s untenable to have the inspector general’s personnel second-guess what FBI agents do; in the law enforcement community there has long been antipathy for the FBI because its general jurisdiction invites lots of turf fights with other agencies." (Not to mention its we’re-die-best brand of arrogance.)

Shaheen is plausible when he says: "I don’t think you can successfully investigate a law enforcement component in this federal government without the help of people in that component." Such help will be more forthcoming if the good people in the FBI trust you, he says, and many of them will never trust a politically appointed inspector general. "The bureau views with suspicion political appointees who are in the revolving door, who are here to make a big splash, have a big press conference, and then return to the private sector," he maintains. "The bureau trusts our motives, and trusts us to treat them fairly and dispassionately. … I don’t think there’s a contest in terms of which entity gets better cooperation. They [at the FBI] view Mike [Bromwich] as a self-promoter."

On the other hand, FBI agents might be most trusting of overseers-internal or external-who tend to be biased in the FBI’s favor, or forgiving of its mistakes. And some might sense a leaning toward lenity in Shaheen’s assertion that "we can ill afford to be constantly the subject of complaints that we’re abusive." The Bromwich view is that "in an oversight agency, you have to be willing to be disliked; tough oversight doesn’t win you any friends."

Then there is the matter of appearances. Bromwich stresses that his office’s FBI crime lab report, and especially "our rejection of many of Dr. Whitehurst’s most incendiary allegations, was far more credible [with Congress and the public] coming from the OIG than it would have been coming from the FBI." That’s true. A different sort of appearance problem might be presented, however, if an investigation of great political importance to the incumbent administration were conducted by that administration’s appointee. A Senate Judiciary staffer suggests, for example, that the Shaheen report persuasively clearing former FBI general counsel Howard Shapiro of serious misconduct in his contacts with the Clinton White House was easier for Republicans to credit than the same report would have been if Bromwich’s name had been on it.

Bromwich-his heart is in law enforcement, not politics-is understandably frustrated at being tarred with such a broad "political appointee" brush, but his Senate confirmation experience shows that the absence of any valid reason to suspect that he would take a dive will not stop some Republicans from mistrusting him. And that’s a problem for people like Orrin Hatch: Even if he trusts Bromwich, he has to worry about colleagues on his right flank for whom Bromwich’s status as a Clinton appointee ends the analysis.

The tricky question is how to strike the optimal balance between internal oversight abetted by trust and outside oversight emphasizing tough skepticism. And maybe the answer is a combination, with Good Mike, Bad Mike, and Big Mike each performing his (and his agency’s) own distinctive brand of oversight, each of which has its strengths.

Bromwich’s strengths include being "a hard-driving character who decides what has to be done and just drives in that direction," in Heymann’s words. Adds Carl Stern, formerly the department’s public affiars director: "He’s got ants in his pants. He really itches to act. He has a high indignation level, and he’s high-energy, high-voltage…. Shaheen’s not so driven. He’s been at it so long, he doesn’t itch to get things done and get his work recognized. He’s more career civil service. … There wasn’t that churning in the pit of the stomach to get the damn thing out there and get it done."

Bromwich’s strengths are complemented by those of the inspector general’s office as an institution with a broad mandate to find things that aren’t working well and figure out why, rather than simply reacting to any complaints that rise to the level of criminal or unethical conduct. While the bureau’s internal ethics unit, run by DeFeo, tends to take a narrow view of its responsibility, according to David Fred-crick, a former Bromwich counselor who is now an assistant solicitor general, "the IG is well positioned to take allegations which could have been characterized as criminal or administrative misconduct or just bad performance, and do it all in one big report, rather than slice the baloney so thin … that you miss the bigger picture." Adds Heymann: "Every organization needs somebody to review what it’s doing and how it’s doing it, to review its systems. I’ve never met a Cabinet head who had time to do that; that’s what you want from an inspector general."

Shaheen’s strengths are no less valuable, just different. Being the Justice Department official most trusted and respected by the FBI and the Senate Judiciary Committee chairman-including not only Hatch but his Democratic predecessor, Joseph Biden, Jr., of Delaware-is no small asset. And Shaheen’s record shows he didn’t get that reputation by being a patsy. In addition, in Shaheen’s words, "having been here for a long time, I know exactly where the departmental pressure points are, and can cut through the bureaucratic red tape and get results quickly." Any good attorney general would want to have someone like that, and an institution like Shaheen’s office, at her beck and call.

As for DeFeo, one of the few things on which Good Mike and Bad Mike agree is that Big Mike has a good reputation. DeFeo’s former colleague David Margolis says that Freeh made a "brilliant" choice by bringing in a very tough career prosecutor who knows FBI work but has the perspective of an outsider, and who is at the peak of his career rather than looking ahead to his next job.

IF IT AIN’T BROKE…

DeFeo’s comment on Bromwich’s hopes of changing the system to give him an unrestricted hunting license at the FBI is: "If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it." That logic may well prove persuasive to the powers that be, in the department and in Congress. While Bromwich has some support in both places, Janet Reno is decidedly noncommittal, declining to express any view on Bromwich’s bid for more turf or on the relative merits of Bromwich and Shaheen, both of whom she praises as "vigorous and dedicated to getting at the truth." If Reno remains above the Bromwich-Shaheen-FBI fray, that would leave the issue in the lap of Eric Holder, who was sworn in as deputy attorney general in September.

And Holder, like Jamie Gorelick before him, may find little reason to take on Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Hatch. More concerned now than ever about Clintonite politicization of the Justice Department, Hatch suggests it would be "asking for trouble" to shift one inch of turf from OPR’s Shaheen to any political appointee. "Bromwich is an ethical, able lawyer who has shown himself to be willing to critique DOJ member agencies," says Hatch, "but he’s kidding himself if he thinks the Senate’s going to support him as a political appointee to be in a position to investigate misconduct by lawyers and or other professional employees at this Department of Justice."

So with Hatch barring the door to Bromwich’s expansionism, what is to be done about the Bromwich-Shaheen feud? Docs one of them have to go? Some high-level officials express consternation at all the sturm and drang about who gets to investigate what. But associate deputy attorney general Margolis-a 32-year veteran who is the initial referee of such disputes and the decision maker on disciplinary decisions, and who happens to be one of the most respected career lawyers in the department-says he can handle it.

"When you have two proud, competent, determined people with overlapping jurisdiction, there’s bound to be disputes," says Margolis. "Obviously, you don’t want it to go overboard, but if there weren’t a certain amount of tension between the two offices, I’d worry about them…. To those people who ate complaining and whining anonymously about Bromwich-I’m the one in the middle of it, and I can live with it. Are there times when I wish he’d said things differently? Sure, but I think that about a lot of people." Margolis credits Bromwich with "doing a splendid job." He adds that "I have known Shaheen for probably over twenty years, because I’ve been the subject of his investigations as well as the consumer of his reports, and he’s done a good job. And that’s easy for me to say because I’ve always been acquitted. I’ve challenged him to name anybody he’s investigated as many times as me."

A good deputy attorney general-which Jamie Gorelick was and (judging by his record) Eric Holder should prove to be-would divvy up the big internal investigations with the strengths of both Shaheen and Bromwich in mind. Worried that Republicans will scream "political fix" if a political appointee like Bromwich were to find no misconduct in a politically charged matter involving (lie Clinton White House? Give it to Shaheen. Worried that the FBI agents who staff Shaheen s investigations might have blind spots or be too inclined to protect their own in a case involving deep, systemic problems in the bureau’s culture (like Ames or the crime lab)? Let Bromwich handle it. "Now," says associate deputy attorney general Margolis, "we can have an FBI internal investigation, give it to our OPR, or give it to the IG. We have all these great options, and we can tailor who’s going to run the investigation to suit the particular facts. I like the flexibility, I really do."

Bromwich dismisses this all-for-the-best analysis by jokingly calling Margolis "Dr. Pangloss." But Margolis has a point. So does Jamie Gorelick, who notes that Bromwich has not been blocked from investigating any matter at the FBI excepting the ones that- like the Ruby Ridge, Jewell, and Shapiro matters-were handled (quite professionally) by Shaheen’s OPR. "I think IG oversight of the FBI is good," says a former Gorelick subordinate, "but I don’t think the status quo imposes any real constraint."

Indeed, in a world of fallible mortals in which good government requires elaborate checks and balances, one could scarcely devise a more ingenious plan for improving external oversight of the FBI than to set up a rivalry between Good Mike and Bad Mike and their respective offices, with each trying to outshine the other. Says Hatch: "I don’t see anything wrong with having two watchdogs inside this Justice Department, or any other for that matter." Nor does Margolis. Nor do I-even if it does make an awful clamor now and then.

Of course, the current system would not work so well if the jurisdictional referees at the top were corrupt, cowardly, politically biased, stupid, or just allergic to bad headlines about internal problems. But no system is immune to that sort of risk. And Margolis says the risk is mitigated by the influence of the career professionals. "I can’t think of a time," he adds, "when there’s been both a turkey as AG and a turkey as deputy at the same time." Besides, says the former Gorelick subordinate, "if the IG comes to the deputy and says, ‘I want to look into allegations of corruption at the FBI, and the deputy says no, Bromwich can just go to the Hill and say the deputy’s covering up for the FBI."

Unless, perhaps, Shaheen gets there first. Is the Justice Department big enough for both of them? It ought to be. Whatever Good Mike and Bad Mike may think of each other-and I’ve noticed that neither seems amused when the other’s witticisms are repeated to him-the country needs more such men, not fewer.