White House FBI files controversy

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White House FBI files controversy
DateOriginating events 1993–1994; investigations 1996–2000
LocationWashington, D.C., United States
Also known asFilegate
OutcomeClinton, Nussbaum, and other White House officials exonerated by Independent Counsel;
Head of White House Office of Personnel Security resigned
AccusedFirst Lady
Hillary Rodham Clinton
White House counsel Bernard Nussbaum

several other White House officials
ChargesImproper use of confidential information;
Testifying falsely about White House hiring

The White House FBI files controversy of the

Hillary Rodham Clinton
, may have requested and read the files for political purposes, and that the First Lady had authorized the hiring of the underqualified Livingstone.

The matter was investigated by the

watchdog group
, lingered on for years and was dismissed by a federal judge in 2010.

Improper use of files issue

Improper use of Federal Bureau of Investigation background reports was at the heart of the "Filegate" affair.

"Filegate" began on June 5, 1996, when Republican

George H. W. Bush Administration,[2] for which Craig Livingstone, director of the White House's Office of Personnel Security,[3] had improperly requested and received background reports from the FBI in 1993 and 1994, without asking permission of the subject individuals.[4]
Estimates ranged from 400 to 700 to 900 unauthorized file disclosures.[5][6][7][8] 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.[6]

Initial White House explanations for what had happened varied,

Nixon administration.[10] Republicans made other charges, including that the White House was trying to dig up damaging information about Republicans in general[11] and that the file transfer was motivated by a desire to slander Dale and other White House Travel Office officials in order to justify their dismissal.[12]

On June 18, 1996, Attorney General

Kenneth Starr.[2][7] In any case, Starr had already begun looking into it.[11]

House Government Reform and Oversight Committee
discovered Filegate in 1996 and held hearings on it.

On June 26, 1996, Clinger's Government Reform and Oversight Committee held hearings on the matter.[14] 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.[14] 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.[3] 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.[14] Lisa Wetzl, another assistant, testified that she discovered the mistake in mid-1994 and destroyed the request list.[14]

Also called to testify were former

White House counsel Bernard Nussbaum and former associate counsel William H. Kennedy III.[14] Livingstone, Nussbaum, and Kennedy all offered apologies to those whose files had been obtained.[12] 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 saying 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."[9][15] The Committee does not seem to have ever issued a final report.[16]

The

fingerprint analysis of them.[18] 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.[18]

Who hired Livingstone issue

Hillary Rodham Clinton came under examination regarding whether she had had any role in hiring for the White House's Office of Personnel Security (photo taken at the Jacqueline Kennedy Garden
).

A secondary question of the Filegate controversy revolved around what the Office of Personnel Security was, who had authorized the hiring of Livingstone, and whether he was qualified for the job. The Office was not responsible for actual White House security, as that was the charge of the United States Secret Service,[3] nor did it perform background checks on potential White House employees, a task done by the FBI,[19] nor did it keep the regular personnel files of employees, which were held in a different office within the White House.[9] Rather, its role was to keep track of who was employed by the White House, make sure their security clearances were up to date, and give security briefings to new hires.[20]

Nevertheless, Livingstone seemed to lack qualifications for even this position; he had worked on a number of

night club. (At the congressional hearings, Livingstone objected to "false and unfair caricatures of who I am. [...] I have worked hard for little or no pay in political campaigns for candidates who I felt would make this country a better place to live."[19]) Initially, White House officials could not explain why Livingstone was hired, nor who had hired him.[14] After a week of uncertainty, Clinton aide George Stephanopoulos told ABC News that White House deputy counsel Vince Foster had initially hired Livingstone on a temporary basis, and that after Foster's death, associate counsel Kennedy had taken Livingstone on.[21]

An FBI document suggested that Livingstone had been given his position because First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton was a friend of Livingstone's mother and recommended him. Hillary Clinton stated that while she was once photographed with the mother in a large group, she did not know her.

Lewinsky scandal was soon to break.[22]) In 1999, Clinton gave a sworn statement that she had nothing to do with Livingstone's hiring.[8] Livingstone also stated under oath there was no truth to the supposed hiring relationship.[8] Hillary Clinton would later refer to the whole files matter as a "pseudoscandal".[20]

Official findings

Kenneth Starr
exonerated both the President and the First Lady with respect to the FBI files matter in 1998.

On November 19, 1998, Independent Counsel Starr testified before the

1998 Congressional elections.[24]
)

In March 2000, Independent Counsel Robert Ray, Starr's successor, issued the office's final report on the matter, as part of a concerted effort to wrap up all Whitewater-related cases before the end of Bill Clinton's term.[22] Ray determined that there was no credible evidence of any criminal activity by any individual in the matter.[25] It attributed the improper collection of the files by Marceca due to his having an outdated Secret Service list of White House passes, as Marceca had originally claimed.[25] It stated that even though Marceca's statements were sometimes "contradictory and misleading",[2] they were "sufficiently transparent"[2] and there was insufficient evidence to prove that Anthony Marceca had made false statements to Congress during his testimony.[8] The report ascribed the FBI files matter to "a failure of process at many levels," saying that the Secret Service had provided critically erroneous data,[2] and that this was compounded by the White House's informal process of requesting sensitive information by "inexperienced, untrained, and unsupervised personnel with backgrounds as political operatives."[2]

Based on an investigation that included the prior fingerprint analysis,[25] the report further stated that:

there was no substantial and credible evidence that any senior White House official, or First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, was involved in seeking confidential Federal Bureau of Investigation background reports of former White House staff from prior administrations of President Bush and President Reagan.

— Independent Counsel Robert Ray, [8]

Ray's report also concluded that there was no credible evidence that Bernard Nussbaum testified falsely about not having discussed Livingstone's hiring with the First Lady, and found as well that there was no personal relationship between the First Lady and Livingstone that had formed the basis for his hiring.[8]

Judicial Watch lawsuit

Royce C. Lamberth
presided over a civil lawsuit emanating from the Filegate matter.

Separately from the Independent Counsel investigation,

e-mails be searched for possible evidence in the lawsuit.[33] Klayman said, "Hillary Clinton was the mastermind of Filegate. She will not escape justice."[33] Klayman and Judicial Watch had a severe falling out in 2003,[34] however, and several years went by with little or nothing happening in the lawsuit.[28][35]

On March 9, 2010, Judge Lamberth dismissed the case.[36] The judge asserted that the plaintiffs, despite years of opportunity, had failed to provide any evidence that the affair was a grand conspiracy rather than a bureaucratic mistake, and said that "this court is left to conclude that with the lawsuit, to quote Gertrude Stein, 'there's no there there.'"[36] Nussbaum, one of the defendants, derisively said "No kidding" when informed of the dismissal.[35] Media reports concluded that, fourteen years after the initial events were set in motion, Filegate was finally over.[31][35][36] In May 2010, Judicial Watch filed an appeal of the dismissal with the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit,[37] but the Court of Appeals affirmed the dismissal on November 14, 2011,[38] thereby bringing the case to an end.

References

  1. ^ "'Filegate' Depositions Sought From White House Aides", CNN, April 1, 1998. Accessed June 5, 2007.
  2. ^
    United States Government Printing Office
    , March 16, 2000.
  3. ^ a b c d e Eric Pooley, "Man Behind the Mess", Time, June 24, 1996. Accessed June 5, 2007.
  4. ^ "Untangling Whitewater", The Washington Post special report, 2000. Accessed June 5, 2007.
  5. ^ a b Christopher Lee, "Flops Are No Fluke in the Annals of Political Payback", The Washington Post, September 19, 2005. Accessed June 7, 2007.
  6. ^ a b "FBI Files Fiasco", CNN, 1997. Accessed June 5, 2007.
  7. ^ a b "Documents Suggest Hillary Knew Craig Livingstone", CNN, July 25, 1997. Accessed June 5, 2007.
  8. ^ a b c d e f "Independent counsel: No evidence to warrant prosecution against first lady in 'filegate'" Archived 2010-05-29 at the Wayback Machine, CNN, June 3, 2000. Accessed June 5, 2007.
  9. ^
    United States House Committee on Government Reform and Oversight
    , September 24, 1996.
  10. ^ a b c Brian Knowlton, "White House Apologizes For Collecting FBI Reports: But Dole Cries Foul, And Republicans Call for Hearings", The New York Times, June 10, 1996. Accessed June 12, 2011.
  11. ^ a b c Neil A. Lewis, "Whitewater Counsel Examining Use of F.B.I. to Get G.O.P. Files", The New York Times, June 11, 1996. Accessed June 12, 2011.
  12. ^
    ISBN 0-313-30735-0
    . pp 124-125.
  13. ^ a b David Stout, "Starr Questions Hillary Clinton on F.B.I. Files", The New York Times, January 15, 1998. Accessed June 16, 2007.
  14. ^ a b c d e f George Lardner Jr., Susan Schmidt, "Livingstone Resigns, Denying Ill Intent", The Washington Post, June 27, 1996. Accessed June 7, 2007.
  15. ^ George Lardner Jr., "GOP Slams White House in FBI Files Report", The Washington Post, September 25, 1996. Accessed June 9, 2007.
  16. United States Government Printing Office
    . Accessed June 9, 2007. A search of reports, prints, etc. turns up nothing further related to the Security of FBI Background Files matter.
  17. ^ a b Francis X. Clines, " Key Witness Asserts His Right to Silence In Inquiry on Files", The New York Times, June 29, 1996. Accessed April 6, 2008.
  18. ^ a b David Johnston, " Tests Find No Proof First Lady or Top Aides Touched F.B.I. Files", The New York Times, November 3, 1996. Accessed July 15, 2007.
  19. ^
    PBS
    , June 26, 1996. Accessed June 7, 2007.
  20. ^
    ISBN 0-7432-2224-5
    , pp. 371–372.
  21. ^ "Vincent Foster Hired Livingstone, Stephanopoulos Says", Los Angeles Times, July 1, 1996. Accessed October 9, 2021.
  22. ^
    ISBN 978-0-307-40944-7
    . pp. 324–325, 658.
  23. ^ Ruth Marcus, Peter Baker, "Clinton 'Thwarted' Probe, Starr to Say", The Washington Post, November 19, 1998. Accessed June 12, 2007.
  24. Don Van Natta, Jr., "Democrats Challenge Starr on Delayed Exoneration", The New York Times
    , November 20, 1998. Accessed June 12, 2007.
  25. ^ a b c Neil A. Lewis, "Report Clears White House In Inquiry Over F.B.I. Files", The New York Times, March 17, 2000. Accessed June 9, 2007.
  26. ^ "Alexander, et al. v. FBI, et al.", Judicial Watch. Accessed June 8, 2011.
  27. ^ a b "Ex-White House Employees Sue Hillary Clinton, FBI Over Files", Associated Press, Los Angeles Times, September 14, 1996. Accessed September 7, 2019.
  28. ^ a b "Alexander et al. v. FBI, et al.", Judicial Watch. Accessed June 9, 2007. Archived August 30, 2010 and accessed there June 12, 2011.
  29. Forbes
    , November 7, 2000. Accessed July 2, 2022.
  30. ^ "Key Player: Larry Klayman", The Washington Post, October 2, 1998. Accessed January 30, 2010.
  31. ^
    The Politico
    , March 9, 2010. Accessed March 13, 2010.
  32. ^ Robert Novak, "Clintons Still Haunted by FBI Files Scandal", Chicago Sun-Times, January 20, 2000. Accessed June 5, 2007.
  33. ^ a b "Clinton-Gore White House E-mail Ordered Searched by Federal Judge", Judicial Watch, December 16, 2002. Accessed June 9, 2007. Archived August 30, 2010 and accessed there June 12, 2011.
  34. ^ "Saving Judicial Watch" home page. Accessed June 9, 2007.
  35. ^
    Legal Times
    , March 9, 2010. Accessed March 13, 2010.
  36. ^ a b c Al Kamen, "Clinton-era 'Filegate' case tossed out", The Washington Post, March 9, 2010. Accessed March 9, 2010.
  37. ^ "Alexander v. FBI Notice of Appeal", Judicial Watch, May 7, 2010. Accessed June 8, 2011.
  38. ^ "Alexander v. Federal Bureau of Investigation, 10-5140 (D.C. CIR. 11-14-2011)", Casetext. November 14, 2011. Accessed May 31, 2016.

External links

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