Clinton, the Khobar Towers attack and Iran.

Tim Russert, MSNBC: Transcript for October 16 - Louis Freeh

Welcome back to MEET THE PRESS.

MR. LOUIS FREEH: Morning, Tim.

MR. RUSSERT: Your new book, "My FBI," has created a lot of debate with some of the comments you've made about the investigation regarding Khobar Towers. Let me remind our viewers, Khobar Towers, June 25, 1996, tragic scene, 19 Americans killed when car bombers blew up a facility where American servicemen were staying.

On September 24, President Clinton met with then Crown Prince, now King Abdullah--there there are in the Rose Garden--and at that meeting, President Clinton insists that he asked the crown prince for cooperation in terms of the investigation you were conducting on who did Khobar Towers and why. And you write: "The story that came back to me from `usually reliable sources'"--in quotes--"as they say in Washington, was that Bill Clinton briefly raised the subject only to tell the crown prince that he certainly understood the Saudis' reluctance to cooperate. Then, according to my sources, he hit Abdullah up for a contribution to the still-to-be-built Clinton presidential library." READ MORE

You were not in the room.

MR. FREEH: I was not in the room.

MR. RUSSERT: Who are these "usually reliable sources"?

MR. FREEH: Well, the usually reliable sources in this case, Tim, are very senior people who had firsthand knowledge of the meeting, who have identity with the principals at the meeting. They're not second-hand sources. They're not hearsay people. I did confirm it with them after the book came out because of some of the questions, and I feel very confident on their information.

MR. RUSSERT: Were they in the meeting?

MR. FREEH: I'm not going to identify my sources, obviously, but I think you have to look beyond that September 24 meeting and put the whole Khobar investigation into context. The New Yorker magazine article, which was in the spring of 2001, actually corroborates the one part of the story which is that the president didn't seriously or vigorously persecute the request, the request being to get FBI agents into the prison in Saudi Arabia to talk to detainees who would ultimately tell us that the Iranian government was responsible for this attack.

MR. RUSSERT: Now, the president, former President Clinton, has issued to NBC News a statement through his spokesman, and I'll read it for you: "It is disappointing the level to which Freeh will stoop to sell books -- among many other untruths, he invents baseless claims about the Khobar Towers investigation. Despite Freeh's claims about a meeting he did not attend, President Clinton pushed firmly and successfully for Saudi cooperation with the investigation, which led to the eventual indictments of the criminals, and he never asked for library funds."

I've also spoken to a National Security official--National Security Council official who says he debriefed both President Clinton and the translator, and he can confirm the president did push for cooperation and there was no mention of library funds.

MR. FREEH: Look, the president's entitled to his denials. This is a president that makes public denials from time to time. We know that. Let me just give you what we would call corroborating evidence, which is what investigators and prosecutors talk about.

For over two years--over two years--I pressed the president, his national security advisor, to pursue one simple request with the crown prince. And the request was to get FBI agents into prison cells in Saudi Arabia, where three of the detainees who had actually performed the bombing--these are members of the Saudi Hezbollah, which is an agent of the Iranian government. An extraordinary request. FBI agents had never been in Saudi Arabia, Tim, let alone in a prison debriefing Saudi nationals. For two and a half years, we got no movement on that request. We would write the talking points for the president. The Saudis would tell us they didn't raise it. They didn't raise it seriously. And nothing happened for two and a half years.

Then on September 26, at my request, former President Bush, with the same set of talking points, met with the crown prince in the Saudi residence out in McLean, Virginia, and made the simple request. FBI agents need to get into that prison. President Bush called me after the meeting, and he said, "I think you'll be hearing from the Saudis." The following Tuesday at 1:00, myself, our ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Wyche Fowler, and Dale Watson, the head of my counterterrorism division, who, by the way, will confirm the information about the source, were summoned out to the crown prince's residence. And the crown prince, referencing his meeting with President Bush, not with President Clinton, said, "I approve your request." Turned to his ambassador and said, "Direct my brother, the interior minister, to get the FBI agents in there." Within four weeks...

MR. RUSSERT: But...

MR. FREEH: ...excuse me, within eight weeks, FBI agents were in that prison.

MR. RUSSERT: But President Clinton met with the crown prince on the 24th. Vice President Gore met with him on the 24th. Former President Bush on the 26th. They all could have been effective in help bringing about that result.

MR. FREEH: Well, look, it's what we would call circumstantial evidence. I think it's very powerful circumstantial evidence. But there are a lot of other things going on here, too. What do you say about a president and a national security advisor who, for two and a half years while the Khobar investigation is going on, which the president tells the American people is a critical investigation, no stone will be left unturned. What do you say about a president who never asked me for a status on the case? They never asked me, "Louis, what's going on? Any progress by the FBI?" Absolutely no interest in the case.

When I finally came back to Sandy Berger and told him we now had evidence that the Iranian government had murdered 19 Americans--killed, wounded over 300, his first reaction was, "Who knows about this?" And his second reaction was "Well, that's hearsay." This was an administration that was not interested in finding out that the Iranian government had blowed up--had blown up Khobar Towers.

MR. RUSSERT: Mr. Berger said they did, in fact, act on information and that you later acknowledged you withheld indicting Iranians until President Clinton left office, that you slow-rolled the investigation and that was not responsible.

MR. FREEH: Yeah, well, that's nonsense. We presented the case to the U.S. attorney in the District of Columbia who, by the way, had never prosecuted a criminal case. And she looked at it and she said, "Louis, I don't think you have a case here." I said, "With all due respect, I used to do this for a living. We have a case." And James called me when he was appointed as a prosecutor by John Ashcroft. He indicted the case in eight weeks with the same evidence.

Now, to your other point, we prosecuted this case very hard. We couldn't get an indictment during the Clinton administration. And in terms of Sandy Berger's work, let me tell what you he did. Talk about ineptness and compromising an investigation, he writes a letter--the president of the United States writes a letter to the Iranian president in 1999, a letter that says, "We think you may be involved in the murder of our 19 Americans at Khobar. Please help us or you won't get better trade assistance or foreign relations by the United States." They never told me they were writing that letter, Tim. The president of the United States never told the attorney general and the chief investigator that they were writing that letter.

To make it worse, and to show the ineptness, the letter was supposed to be delivered to President Khatami. They gave it to the Omanis to deliver it. It was misdelivered. It was delivered to the spiritual leader, who went berserk. It compromised the Saudis, because it was clear from the letter that the Saudis had told us about the Iranians. The Saudis were never told about the letter. This is how they prosecute the case. It would be the equivalent of the attorney general writing John Gotti a letter and saying, "Mr. Gotti, we know a couple of your capos are involved in major racketeering cases. Could you please cooperate with us" but not telling the U.S. attorney and the FBI that was investigating the case that such a letter was being sent.

MR. RUSSERT: Would you be willing to debate Sandy Berger about this issue?

MR. FREEH: Absolutely.

MR. RUSSERT: On this program?

MR. FREEH: Absolutely.

MR. RUSSERT: Elsa Walsh in today's Washington Post writes a review of your book, and she says that you referred the alleged library request that you suggest President Clinton made to the Saudis to a grand jury for investigation. Is that true?

MR. FREEH: I spoke about it with a U.S. attorney, not for investigation.

MR. RUSSERT: And what happened?

MR. FREEH: Oh, I can't go into that.

MR. RUSSERT: Was it investigated?

MR. FREEH: I don't think it was investigated, no.

MR. RUSSERT: Why not?

MR. FREEH: There's a long history there that I can't go into.

MR. RUSSERT: Newt Gingrich, Republican, former speaker of the House, said, "If the former director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation is prepared to swear that the president of the United States, Bill Clinton, while in office, was asking for money from a foreign leader, I think that is a criminal offense of the first order and threatens the very nature of the American system."

Would you go under oath and say that you know for certain that Bill Clinton made this request to the Saudis?

MR. FREEH: Well, Tim, I say what I said in my book on page 25. It's reporting information from a source. I wasn't at the meeting. I'm not making the allegation myself. I'm repeating it because I think it's very significant. It's also absolutely consistent with all the other evidence with respect to Khobar. I don't think it is a criminal offense, by the way. It may be an ethics offense. I do not think is it a criminal offense.

MR. RUSSERT: But we live in an era now where, if you are reporting this and there was, in fact, an investigation and you were subpoenaed, you would have to give up the information as to who your source was.

MR. FREEH: I'm sure I would.

MR. RUSSERT: And you would?

MR. FREEH: I would.

MR. RUSSERT: Bill Clinton wrote a book in 2004 called "My Life." And let me read it for you. It says, "I was getting concerned about the FBI, for reasons far more important than the bureau's sex inquiries for Ken Starr. There had been a whole series of missteps on Louis Freeh's watch: botched reports from the FBI forensic laboratory that threatened several pending criminal cases; large cost overruns in two computer systems designed to upgrade the National Crime Information Center and to provide quick fingerprint checks to police officers all across the country; the release of FBI files on Republican officials to the White House; and the naming and apparent attempted entrapment of Richard Jewell, a suspect in the Olympic bombing case who was subsequently cleared. ... Freeh had been criticized by the press and by Republicans in Congress, who cited the FBI missteps as the reason for their refusal to pass the provision in my anti-terrorism legislation that would have given the agency wiretap authority to track down suspected terrorists as they moved from place to place. There was one sure way for Freeh to please the Republicans in Congress and get the press off his back: he could assume an adversarial position toward the White House. Whether out of conviction or necessity, Freeh had begun to do just that."

MR. FREEH: You want me to comment on that?

MR. RUSSERT: Please.

MR. FREEH: Well, it's interesting; you know, if he felt that way, he should have fired me, first of all. He never did that. And, you know, he didn't wait till his book to attack the FBI or try to undermine me. It was sort of a regular routine, if you remember, at the White House, after a while. His press spokesman would get up and they would say, "What does the president think of the director?" And the press spokesman, using some of those same bullets and talking points, would say, "Well, the president thinks the FBI director is doing the best he can," which was a direct attack on a sitting FBI director. I never commented on the president of the United States while I was in office, despite being attacked, being undermined. He didn't like the FBI. He thought the FBI and the FBI director, you know, had a personal animus against him because they were always investigating him.

Well, you know what? We were always investigating him because there were always Bill Clinton allegations. And independent counsels were investigating him. Ultimately, the Congress of the United States was investigating him. He didn't get it that this wasn't personal, that the FBI director has the responsibility of conducting those investigations. And the fact that he didn't like it, I understand it. I wouldn't like being investigated by the FBI for seven years, either. But the fact of the matter is, we didn't come up with the allegations. We didn't look for things to do. We had a lot of serious work we'd like to do besides the nonsense that preoccupied us with the president.

MR. RUSSERT: But there was bad blood?

MR. FREEH: Well, you'd have to ask him about that. I didn't have any bad blood. I didn't have any animus towards him. I have great respect for him, anybody that holds that office. I think, you know, he turned the office into a personal disgrace. That was his own business. But that didn't have anything to do with what I was doing as the FBI director.

MR. RUSSERT: Richard Clarke, President Clinton's head of counterterrorism, said that you should have been spending your time fixing the mess at the FBI and pursuing terrorists rather than some of the other efforts that you were undertaking.

MR. FREEH: Well, you know, we were pursuing terrorists. We didn't get the funding that we wanted. I talk about that in my book. We asked in terms of new counterterrorism resources for 1998, '99 and 2000, 1,900 positions. We got 76. I asked for $381 million in 2000 for new counterterrorism resources, I got $17 million, etc, etc. But that's not because the FBI wasn't focused on terrorism. And Bill Clinton and the whole administration was focused on terrorism. The problem with what we were doing, which became very apparent on September 11, and one of the best conclusions of the 9/11 Commission: Neither President Bush nor President Clinton had put the country or their National Security Councils on a war footing before September 11.

What were we doing before September 11? We indicted bin Laden twice in the southern district of New York. I put him on the FBI's top 10 list. In the spring of 2000, I went over to Lahore and met with President Musharraf, who was of no help, by the way. I wanted to get custody and access to bin Laden so we could bring him back to the United States and prosecute him. And Musharraf told me that he had spoken to Omar Mullah, who had assured me there was no terrorism going on with respect to bin Laden. In other words, we were doing this while they were blowing up embassies, while they were blowing up warships. They had declared and were waging war against the United States, and we didn't declare war back until September 11. That's what was going on in the country before September 11.

MR. RUSSERT: Senator Charles Grassley, Republican, said you had plenty of money and he cites the comments you made before Congress in May of 2001, where you say, "We received the human, technical and financial resources needed to keep the FBI at the cutting edge of investigations. ...Over the nearly eight years that I have been Director, Congress has increased the FBI's budget by more than $1.27 billion...That is a 58% increase ..."

You could have asked Congress to redeploy people to cover terrorism rather than some other areas, but you didn't.

MR. FREEH: Well, look, on the budget--and the budget is a very interesting and a very arcane process, as you know, here in Washington--I doubled the number of agents that were working in counterterrorism in my period. I tripled our resources. I was very thankful for those resources; I still am. But that wasn't any way to fight a war. The FBI today has 1,400 more agents than it had when I left office, 1,400 more agents. And the priority that counterterrorism has taken on for the FBI, which is appropriate, takes resources from civil rights cases, from white collar crime cases, from public corruption cases. And I couldn't move people around as I wanted to.

When Congress appropriates resources, it tells us "OK, you've got 100 new agents for health care. You've got 25 new agents for deadbeat dads cases," believe it or not. It's very programmed and we have very, very little discretion. One of the recommendations I made to the 9/11 Commission, give the FBI director and the attorney general the discretion to move resources around as necessary. We've never had that.

MR. RUSSERT: The inspector general of the Justice Department, however, said that the FBI was a significant failure, widespread long-standing deficiencies, that two of the hijackers had stayed with an FBI informant but no one ever found out about it. Fifteen of the hijackers came to the United States, in effect, on your watch. The chairman of the 9/11 Commission, Tom Kean, said that the report is an indictment of the FBI because it failed and failed and failed. And here's the actual language from the September 11th commission, page 76: "Freeh recognized terrorism as a major threat. Freeh's efforts did not, however, translate into a significant shift of resources to counter terrorism. FBI, Justice, Office of Management and Budget officials said that the FBI leadership seemed unwilling to shift resources to terrorism from other areas such as violent crime and drug enforcement."

Fair enough?

MR. FREEH: No, I disagree with. And you know, while we're on the subject of the 9/11 Commission, I'm very interested, I know the country is, in the Able Danger report. You know, we have now very honorable military officers telling the United States, Tim, that in 2000, not only had Mohamed Atta had been identified by photo and name but was earmarked as an al-Qaeda operative in the United States. Apparently this information was brought to the 9/11 Commission prior to their report. There's no reference to it. That's the kind of tactical intelligence that would make a difference in stopping a hijacking. It's not the strategic intelligence, the stuff that comes out of--like water out of a fire hydrant and then in hindsight you say "Well, you missed these three molecules of water." We're very interested in what the 9/11 Commission didn't do with respect to Able Danger.

MR. RUSSERT: There has been a lot of criticism of the information systems at the FBI. The 9/11 Commission said "The FBI's information systems were woefully inadequate. The FBI lacked the ability to know what it knew. There was no effective mechanism for capturing or sharing its institutional knowledge."

U.S. News & World Report wrote this, and this is chilling: "Before the September 11th attacks FBI agents were still using old `386' and `486' computers and had no Internet access or FBI e-mail. After the attacks, FBI headquarters staff had to send photographs of the 19 hijackers to the 56 field offices by FedEx because they lacked scanners. `Top managers, including [former director] Louis Freeh, didn't use computers and weren't chagrinned about it,' says the Justice Department's inspector general, Glenn Fine."

Ron Kessler in this book "The Bureau" said that you had the computer removed from your office.

MR. FREEH: Well, that's ridiculous. First of all, he was never in my office. The computer was behind my desk. We had an abysmal information technology system and I take a lot of responsibility for that. I asked beginning in 1993 for millions and millions of dollars, hundreds of millions of dollars, which we never got. They got $1 billion after 9/11. It's a testament to the FBI men and women who made cases with a technology that was completely inferior.

But it wasn't just the technology. Let's look at the attorney general guidelines before September 11th. And this is my point before, Tim, and I think the commission's point, that we weren't at war. We weren't taking this serious before September 11th. If on September 10, bin Laden was going to hold a rally in the Sheep Meadow of Central Park an FBI agent couldn't go and stand in the crowd and listen to him, OK? Because attorney general guidelines, which were put in place actually appropriately many years ago because the FBI did illegal things that it shouldn't have done, those guidelines would have prevented an FBI agent, Louis Freeh, from standing there and listening to a fatwa about killing Americans anywhere.

So that's where we were, and I think, you know, hindsight is great. We certainly have plenty of it and we can learn from hindsight. We certainly made a lot of mistakes and I made mistakes there that I'm responsible for. But the reality of it is we treated terrorism like a crime before September 11th. And when in Khobar we didn't prosecute that case. We didn't vigorously prosecute that case. The reason I think that's so important is this wasn't a Hezbollah group. This was the Iranian government that did this. And we reached the point, Tim, where the Iranians knew that we knew they had murdered those young men and we did nothing.

MR. RUSSERT: John Podesta, President Clinton's former chief of staff, has an op-ed piece in The Washington Post today called "Freeh's Self-Whitewash," and he says that in your book you "distinguished by shameless buck-passing. Nothing, it seems, was ever Louis Freeh's fault." You write in your book, "I still fault myself for many shortcomings during my tenure as director. ...You can always do the job better in hindsight, and if nothing else, 9/11 gave us all cause for that. ...I should have done better on my watch."

What could you have done better?

MR. FREEH: I think what I could have done better is I could have prepared the FBI better for September 11. And I would take that right back to information technology. And did I a bad job there. I didn't get the funding we needed. But it's not that I didn't know we had a problem. It's not that I didn't understand and we didn't have people there that were conscious of it. But I didn't succeed that, and I'm very, very sorry I didn't do that.

Meanwhile, the FBI agents, the men and women of the FBI, who the American people can be so proud of, made incredible counterterrorism cases during that period. Kansi was brought back to the United States. He had murdered CIA people outside of Langdon. He was arrested in Pakistan. Ramzi Yousef was arrested by FBI agents in Pakistan, brought back to the United States for the 1993 World Trade Tower and a plan to blow up 11 airliners over the United States. They made incredible cases. The embassy bombing cases. We brought people back to New York and prosecuted. The problem was bin Laden was not going to be afraid of a marshal showing up with an arrest warrant.

MR. RUSSERT: If there are indictments of White House officials for leaking CIA identity, should they resign?

MR. FREEH: Sure.

MR. RUSSERT: Mark Felt, former deputy director of the FBI, Deep Throat, what did you think of his behavior?

MR. FREEH: You know, I don't think--I don't think he had, as some people have in those positions, no access and no ability to tell his story. This was a very powerful member of the FBI. This wasn't, you know, an agent locked away as a whistleblower some place. He had plenty of access if he wanted to do what he said he wanted to do, which was to protect the country and bring that information out. I think he should have done it at the time.

MR. RUSSERT: So you don't think he acted appropriately?

MR. FREEH: If it was me, I would have acted at the time. I would have had the power and the ability to act.

MR. RUSSERT: What were his motivations?

MR. FREEH: I don't know.

MR. RUSSERT: But you as Louis Freeh would have never spoken to the press as freely as he did?

MR. FREEH: Absolutely not.

MR. RUSSERT: But you have in this book, "My FBI."

MR. FREEH: Well, you know, Tim, it's my story. I didn't write my story and you can't tell your story when you're a public official. I wanted to tell the story about the FBI because I'm so proud of them. And I actually--to be honest with you, I got tired reading other people's books. You know, they've got you at meetings you never attended. They've got you saying things you never said. This is my story and I'm very proud of it.

MR. RUSSERT: Louis Freeh, we thank you for joining us. To be continued.

And we'll be right back.

An amazing interview.