By ERIC LICHTBLAU, The New York Times
A number of F.B.I. supervisors recently engaged in lewd conduct and improper sexual activity, and a senior official resigned after he was found to have had affairs with two subordinates, according to a Justice Department report released on Thursday.
The report, from the Justice Department inspector general, said the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s handling of several of the cases was troubling and raised questions of preferential treatment. In the case of the senior official who had sex with the two employees, officials reversed a recommendation that he be discharged and instead decided to suspend and demote him. The unidentified official, a deputy assistant director who also faced other accusations of sexual improprieties, resigned in September.
In general, the inspector general’s office said that although it remained concerned about the appearance of a double standard in the disciplining of some bureau employees, it found no conclusive pattern of lenient treatment for senior officials.
The director of the bureau, Robert S. Mueller III, said after reviewing the report that “I am gratified that accusations of a double standard were not substantiated” and that investigators found no evidence that the bureau had allowed disciplinary cases to simply “disappear,” as one agent said last year in an interview on “60 Minutes” on CBS-TV.
The bureau has been dogged for years by accusations from some rank-and-file agents that senior officials received kid-glove treatment for misconduct. Mr. Mueller, acknowledging an “erosion of trust” in the in-house disciplinary process, appointed an outside commission in May to study the problem. He said on Thursday that he expected to receive the panel’s recommendation for reforms in a few weeks.
Bureau employees have faced accusations of sexual misconduct before, most recently this year, when two supervisors in California were found to have had long-term affairs with an informant accused of being a Chinese double agent.
But the new report was unusual for the number of misconduct cases that it documented.
In one case, a supervisor and another agent were suspended for failing to report that another agent was having an affair with the wife of an organized-crime figure. That failure “potentially had very serious consequences” because of the risky nature of the affair, the report said.
In another case, the report said, an agent leading a seminar on evidence gathering made a graphic joke that was sexually and racially tinged about an airport search of Oprah Winfrey, the talk-show host. The agent received a letter of censure for subjecting his listeners — about half of them women — to “sexual coarseness,” the report said.
The bureau said in its reprimand that “crude, sexual humor has no place in any bureau activity.”
In yet another instance, a senior official and other employees went to a “Chili Cook-Off” on F.B.I. grounds dressed in drag as the Spice Girls, the British musical group. Before an audience that included numerous people from the bureau and several federal judges, the employees put on a comic skit that included numerous sex jokes, an apparent reference to oral sex and a lap dance, the inspector general said.
The senior official involved in the skit, who was also accused of making off-color remarks at other bureau and public events, was ordered to undergo nondisciplinary counseling as a result of the incidents.
In the case of the former deputy assistant director who had affairs with subordinates, the bureau found that he also demonstrated favoritism toward an employee he had sex with by submitting her name for cash awards. She received twice as much in award money as three other employees combined, the report said.
The senior official also had sex with another employee on government property, and he created “the appearance of impropriety” by letting a prostitute accompany him to a hotel on an out-of-town training trip, the report found. When the bureau began investigating his activities, he also misled investigators about the affairs and contacted two witnesses in an effort to obstruct the investigation, the report said.
The inspector general’s office said it was particularly troubled by the bureau’s handling of this case, and it said that the decision to suspend the official, rather than dismiss him, as originally recommended, suggested “preferential treatment.”
The inspector general also detailed misconduct of a nonsexual nature.
In one case, the report said, a supervisor was fired in 2001 after he had directed employees to file false reports about why the bureau had failed to spend $10 million appropriated by Congress for local police equipment. The supervisor reportedly told employees to declare that states that were to receive the money had failed to complete their law enforcement plans, the report said, when in fact F.B.I. officials never realized that the appropriation existed in the first place.