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FBI Director Louis Freeh leaving in June

Louis Freeh
Freeh has been the director of the FBI since 1993.  

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- FBI Director Louis Freeh announced Tuesday that he will resign his post in June.

Freeh, appointed by President Clinton in 1993, had been asked to stay by President-elect Bush during the transition between the Clinton and Bush administrations.

Sources close to Freeh said at the time he intended to remain on the job for at least a few months while the administration developed its budget and policy initiatives.

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    CNN's John King reports that Freeh met with White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card on Monday to inform the administration of his decision. Card then brought Freeh to meet with Bush, who thanked the director for his service.

    Freeh has often discussed his desire to support his growing family. Freeh had four children -- all boys -- when he took the helm of the FBI in 1993, and now has six sons.

    "After 27 years, I have decided to retire from federal service and step down as FBI director by the end of the school year in June," Freeh said in a statement released by the FBI.

    "When I became FBI director on September 1, 1993, I came back to an organization that I first joined at age 25, when I became an FBI agent after graduating from law school. The statement I made at the time of my nomination remains true today: The FBI is the greatest organization for law enforcement ever created by democratic society.

    I am pleased with our many accomplishments during the almost eight years that I have served as director," he said.

    Freeh's tenure at the FBI encompassed almost all of the legal controversies of the Clinton administration, and he occasionally clashed with Clinton's attorney general, Janet Reno, on issues -- particularly when Reno chose in 1997 not to appoint an independent counsel to investigate the Democratic Party's 1996 fund-raising practices.

    But the two always insisted that their disagreements were not personal.

    "I think the world of Louis Freeh," Reno told reporters in January, shortly before the end of the Clinton administration. "We've had discussions, disagreements and arguments. Some people equivocate about what they really think. Louis Freeh is a person I could count on to tell me exactly what he thought."

    CNN's John King and Terry Frieden contributed to this article.



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    December 15, 1997

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