PAYDIRT: CONGRESSIONAL INVESTIGATORS CLOSING IN ON THE ESSENCE OF ‘FILEGATE’ SCANDAL: JEOPARDIZING NATIONAL SECURITY

(Washington, D.C.): Yesterday’s congressional hearings into
the Clinton Administration’s improper requisitioning of secret
FBI personnel files on at least 900 Reagan and Bush
Administration appointees promise a needed shift in focus for
this investigation: The real scandal to be investigated
involves the purposeful dumbing-down of the personnel
screening process used to protect national security secrets at
the White House from access by those who might compromise them.

In the ‘Line of Fire’

In testimony before the House Government Reform and Oversight
Committee yesterday, officials of the United States Secret
Service — the agency responsible for determining which potential
White House staffers might constitute security risks — provided
shocking details about what they had found as they looked into
the backgrounds of Clinton Administration appointees.

A delicious case in point is the Clinton appointee who was
supposed to oversee such matters as director of the
White House Personnel Security Office — and who is now at the
heart of the Filegate controversy: D. Craig Livingstone. It
turns out that Livingstone himself was judged to be a security
risk and got his job over the objections of the Secret
Service. As the Washington Times reported
today:

“Mr. Livingstone was hired anyway despite
‘derogatory’ findings of a security nature that indicated
he might pose an immediate or projected threat,
Arnold A. Cole, assistant special agent in charge of the
White House access control branch [of the U.S. Secret
Service] told the House Government Reform and Oversight
Committee.” (Emphasis added.)

‘Nobody Here But Us Drug-Abusers‘

A sworn deposition by Secret Service agent Jeffrey Undercoffer
released by the Committee yesterday identifies one source of
concern: Many White House staffers had a record of
illegal drug use. According to Agent Undercoffer:

“I have reviewed literally hundreds of background
investigations…I would say more than 30, more than 40,
perhaps, had drug usage….There was some where the drug
use was recent….I have seen cocaine
usage, I have seen hallucinogenic usages, crack
usages.” (Emphasis added.)

Representatives of the Secret Service told the Congress
yesterday that their concerns about granting such individuals
permanent White House passes had been “mitigated” by
the Administration’s implementation of a random-drug testing
program for personnel in the Executive complex. Such an
arrangement may minimize the chances that a White House staffer
will pass along to a foreign intelligence agent a classified
document while in an LSD-induced stupor. It does not,
however, alter the fact that even former drug-abusers
still can present a grave security threat. Illegal drug
use — whether engaged in exclusively in the past or on a
continuing basis — leaves an individual susceptible to
blackmail, intimidation or coercion. In short, it is precisely
the sort of behavior that hostile espionage services seek out for
recruitment or suborning.

What About the Other Background Problems?

Unfortunately, there is reason to believe that the
Clinton White House has also allowed people with exploitable
background problems other than drug abuse to obtain
security clearances. These evidently include:
bankruptcy, failure to pay taxes and other financial misconduct;
serious alcohol abuse; and “non-traditional” sexual
proclivities. According to the Times:

“Drug use, nonpayment of taxes and other problems
prevented several hundred top Clinton officials and staff
from receiving Secret Service and FBI clearance for
permanent White House passes throughout 1993 and beyond,
according to documents released with the Secret Service
depositions today. White House senior advisors
George Stephanopoulos, Ira Magaziner and Robert Boorstin
were among those denied permanent passes, the documents
show.” (Emphasis added.)

An Impetus for Filegate?

In decrying the sorry state of the White House personnel
security system under President Clinton, former FBI agent Gary
Aldrich has written: “At the time the White House
requested the files on previous administrations’ appointees —
one full year into the Clinton Administration — more than 100
Clinton staffers, including then-Press Secretary Dee Dee Myers,
still had not been investigated by the FBI for passes or
clearances.”

This chronology raises tantalizing questions: Could the
Clinton White House’s intense interest in privileged information
contained in the background files of at least 900 former Reagan
and Bush appointees have been inspired by more than a base desire
to find politically useful dirt? Could it, at least in part, have
been motivated by a felt need to establish that senior members of
previous administrations had pasts nearly as checkered as those
of the successors in the Clinton government?

The Bottom Line

It is incumbent upon the United States Congress to
hold hearings on the extent to which current White House staffers
may, in fact, pose serious risks to the national security.
At a minimum, the legislative branch must — as part of its
oversight function — establish the basis upon which the Clinton
Administration overruled the professional objections of the
Secret Service to giving access to sensitive information to
people deemed to be potential threats to the President and to the
Nation’s interests.

The Center urges the House Government Reform and Oversight
Committee which has already begun hearings into this affair —
and the Treasury, Postal Service and General Government
Subcommittee of the Senate Appropriations Committee, chaired by
Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL), which will shortly do so — to make
these questions centerpieces of their upcoming investigations.

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