William Sessions, FBI chief fired by Clinton, dies at 90
William Sessions, a U.S. judge from Texas who served as director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and was its first leader ever fired from the post, has died. He was 90.
Sessions died of natural causes on Friday at his home in San Antonio, his daughter, Sara Sessions Naughton, told the Associated Press.
A Republican, Sessions was tapped to lead the agency in 1987 by President Ronald Reagan. He replaced William Webster, who stepped down after nearly a decade to serve as director of the Central Intelligence Agency.
Sessions served through the term of George H.W. Bush. Shortly before President Bill Clinton took office in 1993, allegations of ethical violations by Sessions, including misuse of agency transportation, emerged.
When Clinton requested his resignation, Sessions refused, saying that to do so would compromise the FBI’s independence. His obstinacy prompted Clinton to fire him in July 1993, a bit more than halfway through his 10-year tenure. The only other fired FBI director is James Comey, who was removed from his post by President Donald Trump in May 2017.
Under Sessions, the FBI expedited the adoption of DNA testing as a crime-detection tool and computerized its collection of fingerprints, comprising some 90 million cards at the time he took office.
“Today we can do in a matter of seconds what might have taken weeks, or months, or never,” Sessions said in a 2006 interview with the Houston Chronicle.
He led the FBI during the 1992 confrontation at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, during which a bureau agent killed an unarmed woman, as well as the 1993 siege of the Branch Davidian compound near Waco, Texas, in which about 80 cult members died.
Sessions garnered national press coverage in 1982 when he presided over the trials of four individuals charged in the 1979 assassination of his predecessor as chief judge for the Western District of Texas, John H. Wood Jr. Defense lawyers sought to have him removed from the case, but the Supreme Court upheld Sessions’ decision not to recuse himself. All four were convicted and sentenced to lengthy prison terms.