With the Wall Street Journal calling for FBI director Robert Mueller to resign over pre-9/11 intelligence failures, the hypocrisy again comes to the surface: almost all of the FBI problems happened during the reign of former director Louis Freeh, a man the conservative papers have refused to criticize because he wanted more Clinton investigations.

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It's no secret the FBI suffered a series of embarrassments during Freeh's tenure, some of them deadly. They include the botched handling of the investigations into Waco and Ruby Ridge; the bombing at the Atlanta Olympic Village and the heavy-handed tactics used against Richard Jewell; the breakdown of the FBI crime labs; the inept pursuit of suspected atomic spy Wen Ho Lee; the belated discovery of turncoat agent Richard Hanssen; and the failure to deliver thousands of documents to defense attorneys during the trial of Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh.

The FBI fiascoes seemed to come like clockwork under Freeh, and they continue to roll out to this day. A recently uncovered March 2000 memo reveals that agents mistakenly destroyed evidence gathered in an investigation involving Osama bin Laden.

Yet Freeh has remained largely unscathed.

[...] The New York Times editorial page, which applauded Freeh as he pushed for additional Clinton investigations, is suffering from similar amnesia. It has not mentioned Freeh by name once since Sept. 11, despite having published several editorials documenting the FBI's shortcomings.

"There's an unholy trinity of Democrats, Republicans and the press that wants to forget Louis Freeh ever existed and screwed all of this up," explains the former Clinton aide. "We could have fired him. But we kept an incompetent man in charge of the most important agency in the world and we did it out of political fear. That's the reality. It's not pretty, but it's the truth. Republicans have to admit they helped Freeh keep his job. And the New York Times [has] to understand its complacency for what passed [at the time] as news coverage of Louis Freeh."

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