THE APPOINTMENT OF Larry Potts as deputy director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation is a serious mistake.
It is the kind of insensitive government decision that feeds the frenzy of those who see our federal law enforcement agencies as enemies of the people.Potts was the FBI supervisor directly responsible for the two largest disasters in bureau history - the Waco solution and the killing of an unarmed woman at a place called Ruby Ridge in Idaho. For the former, he was completely exonerated and for the latter he was censured.
There is a direct causal relationship between the conflagration of the Branch Davidian compound at Waco and the horror of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in downtown Oklahoma City.
While the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) was held responsible for what happened at Waco, it actually was the FBI's crisis team under Potts that ignored warnings of the FBI's own psychologists that Davidian messiah David Koresh wanted an Armageddon and should not be pushed. The FBI pushed, with approval of an an extremely green attorney general, Janet Reno, and Koresh killed himself and 73 others.
A Justice Department inquiry resulted only in a typical whitewash with the FBI absolved of even an error in judgment for its part in the debacle.
Ruby Ridge was a different story. A federal task force found that the response team - again, under Potts' supervision - not only had violated all its own rules but probably abandoned the U.S. Constitution in the siege of survivalist Randy Weaver's mountain retreat. The agents in charge had ordered their men to shoot any armed adult male outside the cabin without warning. One bullet killed Vicki Weaver, who was holding a baby inside the cabin.
The federal task force recommended the Justice Department consider criminal charges against members of the squad. Reno declined, and FBI Director Louis Freeh, an old friend of Potts, merely slapped him on the wrist and then appointed him as second in command.
Ironically, it is Potts who is now in charge of the investigation of the bombing in Oklahoma City.
What is needed at the top of the FBI or any such organization in these turbulent times is someone with an utterly unblemished record, someone with a spotless reputation for good judgment. Potts doesn't qualify, and it is becoming clear that Freeh and Reno don't either.