White House FBI Files Controversy - Improper Use of Files Issue

Improper Use of Files Issue

"Filegate" began on June 5, 1996, when Republican Pennsylvania Congressman William F. Clinger, Jr., chair of the House Committee on Government Reform and Oversight, announced that the committee had found during their ongoing "Travelgate" investigations, that FBI background reports on Travelgate figure Billy Dale had been delivered to the White House. The following day, the White House delivered to the committee hundreds of other such files related to White House employees of the Reagan Administration and George H. W. Bush Administration for which Craig Livingstone, director of the White House's Office of Personnel Security, had improperly requested, and received from the FBI in 1993 and 1994, background reports without asking permission of the subject individuals. Estimates ranged from 400 to 700 to 900 unauthorized file disclosures. The incident caused an intense burst of criticism because many of the files covered White House employees from previous Republican administrations, including top figures such as James Baker, Brent Scowcroft, and Marlin Fitzwater.

Initial White House explanations for what had happened varied, but generally characterized it as a series of mistakes made without bad intent and offered apologies to those affected. President Clinton said that, "It appears to have been a completely honest bureaucratic snafu." But his Republican opponent in the ongoing 1996 presidential election, Senator Bob Dole, compared it the enemies list kept by the Nixon administration. Republicans made other charges, including that the White House was trying to dig up damaging information about Republicans in general and that the file transfer was motivated by a desire to slander Dale and other White House Travel Office officials and thereby justify their dismissal.

On June 18, 1996, Attorney General Janet Reno asked the FBI to look into it; FBI Director Louis Freeh acknowledged that both the FBI and especially the White House had committed "egregious violations of privacy" (in some cases the background reports contained information about extramarital affairs, trangressions with the law, and medical issues). On June 21 Reno decided it was a conflict of interest for the U.S. Department of Justice to further investigate the matter, and thus recommended that it be folded into the overall umbrella of the Whitewater investigations, under charge of Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr. In any case, Starr had already begun looking into it.

On June 26, 1996, Clinger's Government Reform and Oversight Committee held hearings on the matter. Livingstone, who announced his resignation at the start of his testimony that day, and his assistant, Anthony Marceca, insisted during the committee's hearings that the mishandled files were a result of a bureaucratic mixup and that no improper motivations were behind it. They said that when the George H. W. Bush administrative staff left the White House in January 1993, they had taken all the files of the Office of Personnel Security with them for use in the Bush Library, as they were permitted to do under law. The OPS staff were trying to rebuild these records to include those of permanent White House employees who remained to work in the Clinton administration; Marceca, a civilian investigator for the Army, had been hired for this task. In doing so, they received an outdated list from the Secret Service of White House employees, which included many names who were no longer employees. This list was then given to the FBI and the personnel background files returned as a result. Lisa Wetzl, another assistant, testified that she discovered the mistake in mid-1994 and destroyed the request list.

Also called to testify were former White House counsel Bernard Nussbaum and former associate counsel William Kennedy III. Livingstone, Nussbaum, and Kennedy all offered apologies to those whose files had been obtained. On September 24, 1996, the Government Reform and Oversight Committee approved, on party lines, an interim report on the affair, blasting the Clinton Administration for a "cavalier approach" towards sensitive security procedures and saving that further investigation was necessary to determine if the events surrounding the files handling were "a blunder, the result of colossal incompetence, or whether they are established to be more serious or even criminal." The Committee does not seem to have ever issued a final report.

The Senate Judiciary Committee was also involved in investigating the matter, holding hearings beginning June 29, 1996, and focussing on allegations that White House was engaged in a "dirty tricks" operation reminiscent of the Nixon administration. Looking into accusations that senior White House officials or First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton may have inappropriately perused the files, in October 1996 Republican committee chair Orrin Hatch requested that the FBI do a fingerprint analysis of them. On November 3, 1996, the FBI informed the committee that no fingerprints of either the First Lady or any other named senior official were on the files.