So it was just a little bit unnerving for many former Republican appointees to learn that their raw files had been pulled by the likes of Democratic operatives Craig Livingstone and Anthony Marceca. Further, while these files were in Livingstone’s possession, they were handled quite casually, with no controls on how often they were copied, to whom they were faxed, or who took copies away.
Simply obtaining an FBI file without a proper purpose could be a violation of the Privacy Act. Giving information from the files to someone else with intent to silence or embarrass someone would be a clear-cut crime.
According to testimony by the elusive Mari Anderson, Livingstone’s secretary, someone in the White House wanted to see Billy Dale’s file around the time of the Travel Office firings. However, it was more than seven months after Dale and the others were fired, and their security clearances revoked, that Livingstone’s office filled out a request for Dale’s FBI file.
The nominal sender of the request was then-White House Counsel Bernard Nussbaum. Nussbaum has maintained that such forms, with his typed signature on the “from” line, were produced in bulk for the use of Counsel Office staffers. The person filling out the form used one word, ACCESS, to describe the reason for the request.
It has never been suggested that Billy Dale was being considered for any kind of return engagement at the White House that would have justified a review of his file; nor is there any apparent reason why, if Dale had been under consideration for a new White House role requiring clearance, the bureau’s normal vetting process would not have been sufficient, especially given Dale’s more than three decades of uncontroversial government service. Under the circumstances, the inference that the White House was seeking derogatory information for an after-the-fact justification of the firing is hard to repress.
THE MYSTERIOUS CRAIG LIVINGSTONE
Who is Craig Livingstone? What may loosely be called his political career goes back at least to 1984, when he worked on Senator Gary Hart’s presidential campaign. Livingstone was in charge of spreading dirt for what must be a very bitter Gary Hart. Dennis Casey, a Pennsylvania political consultant who met Livingstone on that campaign, told the Washington Post in 1996 that Livingstone had urged the use of information about sexual peccadilloes of labor bigwigs who supported Walter Mondale to help persuade them to switch to Hart. “I just got a very bad taste in my mouth” about Livingstone, Casey said. “He felt it was my duty to go to these people and try to coerce them into supporting Senator Hart.”9 For the record, Livingstone disputes Casey’s account. (For the record, Livingstone also doesn’t know who hired him at the Clinton White House.) In 1988 Livingstone was a paid advance man for then-Senator Al Gore’s presidential campaign.
Between working on losing Democratic campaigns, Livingstone worked at Washington, D.C., bars, including J. Paul’s and Annie’s in Georgetown, which would later earn him the omnipresent appellation “former bar bouncer.” Livingstone was fired from two jobs for misconduct.10
When Livingstone signed up with the 1992 Clinton-Gore campaign, he had finally found an employer who would hang onto him. He was “senior consultant for counter-events”—in his own words—for the campaign.11 This entailed dressing up as Pinocchio and “Chicken George” to disrupt Bush-Quayle events. Livingstone moved from his job with the Clinton-Gore campaign, to director of security for the Clinton-Gore inaugural committee, to security director at the Clinton-Gore White House.
Indeed, two years before the files story broke, Senator Dennis DeConcini (D-AZ), then chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, warned the White House about security problems at the White House and recommended appointing a “non-partisan individual responsible for overseeing all security-related functions within the office of administration.”12 The White House ignored DeConcini’s advice, preferring to keep Craig Livingstone in charge.
Someone must have wanted him badly, because he beat out a better-qualified competitor. (Not that dressing up as a chicken wasn’t apparently a strong qualification for the Clinton administration.) Of course, anyone who had formal security experience of any sort would be better qualified to head White House security than Craig Livingstone. Livingstone was chosen over Jacquelyn Dinwiddie,13 who had held the White House security job during the Carter administration, had worked on the Clinton campaign, and had applied for the job in the Clinton White House.
Agent Sculimbrene said of Dinwiddie, “She had integrity, she was competent, and she ran a good shop.” Another FBI agent, Robert Cronin, told Investor’s Business Daily, “She had common sense combined with political sense that would have kept her out of a lot of these troubles.” Dinwiddie remarked without irony, “Obviously I was not the best person for the job, or I would have gotten it.”
“HILLARY WANTS HIM”
Who hired Livingstone remains one of Washington’s great mysteries. No one who could have hired him will admit to so much as knowing Livingstone prior to his showing up as White House security director. As far as the Clinton administration is concerned, Livingstone’s tenure in that job was part of the Lockean state of nature, or the Rawlsian original position. Or perhaps an effect of El Niño.
In 1994 George Stephanopoulos said of Livingstone, “He does a terrific job. All I know is that anything that has anything to do with security or logistics—Craig’s going to take care of it. You don’t have to tell him how to do it, when to do it. Just that it needs to be done, and he does it. And he knows how to cut through the bureaucracy and get things done.”14 After Livingstone’s demonstrated bureaucracy-busting skills came to light in the Filegate matter, Stephanopoulos said, “I don’t know him that well. He’s a guy that was around.”15
The president and the president’s men—including former White House Counsel Bernard Nussbaum, who was nominally responsible for the office Livingstone headed—have all taken the position that none of them hired Livingstone, and none of them knows who did. Apparently no one is capable of finding out who did either, so could we all please drop the subject? Such claims are, according to the Rodino Report, the reason for the constitutional impeachment power: [U]nder the… Constitution, the President “is of a very different nature from a monarch. He is to be… personally responsible for any abuse of the great trust reposed in him.”… [T]he predominant principle on which the Convention had provided for a single executive was “the more obvious responsibility of one person.” When there was but one man… “the public were never at a loss” to fix the blame.16
What can be pieced together about Livingstone’s hiring, despite the best efforts of the president and his men, is this: One former FBI agent says Nussbaum told him—in an official interview, in which lying would be a federal felony—that Hillary Clinton had recommended Livingstone’s hire.
FBI Special Agent Dennis Sculimbrene took notes of the background check that he conducted on Livingstone as part of his routine examination of all new White House employees. Sculimbrene interviewed Bernard Nussbaum on March 13, 1993. According to Sculimbrene’s contemporaneous notes of the meeting:Mr. Nussbaum advised… that he has known the appointee, Mr. Livingstone, for the period of time he has been in the new administration. Mr. Livingstone came highly recommended to him by Hillary Clinton, who has known his mother for a longer period of time.17
Nussbaum has denied making such a statement, and Mrs. Clinton has denied ever knowing Livingstone before he came to the White House, for what that’s worth.
Before producing Sculimbrene’s notes to a House investigating committee, the FBI warned the White House about the revelation in the notes and sent two FBI agents to Sculimbrene’s home to have a little chat with him about how unhappy the White House was with the notes taken years before. Sculimbrene was then pressured out of the bureau, after serving in its White House detail for almost twenty years. Then-FBI General Counsel Howard Shapiro sent the agents, and he also warned the White House. Incidentally, Shapiro left the FBI in June 1996 under heavy GOP fire from the Hill because of his always-at-your-service posture towa
rd the Clinton White House. He surfaced in the news again in March 1998, as attorney for private investigator Terry Lenzner, who, the White House admitted, is paid to gather dirt on perceived enemies of the Clinton White House.
(Noting that the White House’s earlier denial that “any private investigator” had been hired to “look into the background of… prosecutors or reporters” seemed to conflict with the eventual admission that Lenzner had been paid since 1994 to do just that—by collecting “public information” on the backgrounds of Starr’s prosecutors—journalist Stuart Taylor explained that the “Clintonian reasoning was that looking into public information about a person’s background was entirely different from looking into his background.”18)
Absurdly, the White House responded to Shapiro’s warnings about Sculimbrene’s notes by issuing a letter from White House Counsel Jack Quinn informing FBI Director Louis Freeh that the White House was “troubled” by Sculimbrene’s “false report.”
Sculimbrene could have had no imaginable reason to falsify notes taken in 1993 about who hired Craig Livingstone. There was no possible way of predicting that the question of Livingstone’s sponsor would ever become an issue—much less a matter of considerable embarrassment. Back in March 1993 Livingstone hadn’t done anything wrong yet. He might have gone on to perform heroic feats for the White House, leaving his superiors vying for the claim of having discovered young Craig. Indeed, over a year after Sculimbrene dutifully recorded in his notes that Nussbaum said Hillary was responsible for hiring Livingstone, George Stephanopoulos would still be telling the press what a “terrific job” Livingstone was doing.
Even before Sculimbrene’s notes became public in July 1996, another FBI agent, Gary Aldrich, had already written in his book Unlimited Access—released the previous month—that Associate White House Counsel William Kennedy told him the same thing. According to Aldrich’s book, Kennedy told him it was Mrs. Clinton who had Livingstone hired. “It’s a done deal,” said Kennedy according to Aldrich’s account. “Hillary wants him.”
ANTHONY MARCECA: DIGGING IN LOW-GRADE DIRT
At least we know who hired Livingstone’s file-gathering colleague, Anthony Marceca: Craig Livingstone. Marceca was an army investigator when Livingstone arranged for him to be detailed to the White House. Army Criminal Investigation Command spokesman Paul Boyce said the request from the White House was for Marceca by name, not simply for any staffer.19 Livingstone had gotten to know Marceca on the 1984 Hart campaign. Marceca had also worked on the presidential campaigns of Edmund Muskie and George McGovern (1972), Ted Kennedy (1980), John Glenn (1984), and Al Gore (1988), and had volunteered on Clinton’s inaugural staff (perhaps figuring his only way to work for a winning candidate was to wait until after the election).
Robert Smith, a primary challenger to Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter in 1986, recalls that Marceca approached him during the campaign, offering derogatory material on Specter. He had basically just low-grade dirt, Smith told the Associated Press: “A lot of it dealt with Arlen’s personal life and his family. I found it deplorable.”20
One can only hope Marceca had the foresight to preserve his personal letter from President Clinton, praising him for contributing to “the dedicated efforts of our great security team,” and concluding, “Without your help, Craig might have been buried under the paperwork required to ensure White House personnel security…. Hillary joins me in wishing you every future success.”21
SHAKY WHITE HOUSE EXCUSES
When all is said and done, we know this: two Democratic operatives with shady backgrounds—according to the various Democratic campaign officials who have employed the duo—were working for the president, on the White House payroll, in a chain of command that had them reporting to the president through the White House Counsel’s Office. They collected files teeming with derogatory information on hundreds of former—and possibly future—Republican appointees. Given the record of these custodians, and the White House’s laughably lax security around the files (Marceca even took some home with him), the nine hundred Americans whose raw files were obtained by the Clinton White House have little reason to suppose that their private file folders are not now swelling the cabinets of Democraticaligned activist groups, awaiting confirmation hearings in future Republican administrations.
The New York Times editorialized in June 1996:While it remains unclear whether White House aides were pursuing a political agenda in rummaging through the files, it is now apparent that there was a great potential for mischief. Both the White House and the FBI showed remarkably little regard for the privacy rights of Americans in their cavalier treatment of background files on more than 400 men and women who worked in recent Republican administrations…. [The White House’s] explanation has not been discredited, but it is looking shakier.22
“Shakier” indeed.
Recall that throughout Travelgate and Filegate, the FBI was remarkably compliant with the White House: it investigated the Travel Office, sent over the files, cut its own White House detail out of the file-retrieval process, leaked to the White House an advance copy of Agent Gary Aldrich’s book Unlimited Access, shook down Agent Sculimbrene, and so on. As noted, the general counsel of the FBI at the time, Howard Shapiro, ultimately left the FBI due to the heavy flak he received for his compliant attitude toward the Clinton White House.
Neither the press nor the Republican Congress has shown as much indignation about the files as have the citizens whose files were illegally obtained. No impeachment hearings were initiated—even to demand simple answers to the continuing Filegate mysteries. And the press has moved on.
FIGHTING BACK
Still haunted by the Ghost of Leaks Yet to Come are the citizens whose files were pulled. Many of these may be future Republican leaders. Or perhaps even present ones: nearly a dozen former Reagan/Bush White House staffers currently working on Capitol Hill were among those whose files were pulled.23
The citizens whose rights have been so egregiously violated brought a class action suit under the Privacy Act against President Clinton, Hillary Rodham Clinton, and former White House aides Bernard Nussbaum, Craig Livingstone, and Anthony Marceca.
U.S. District Judge Royce C. Lamberth has denied the defendants’ motions to dismiss, holding that the Privacy Act, 5 U.S.C. 552, provides a basis for a civil suit against the defendants by Republicans whose files were pulled, noting that “[t]he Privacy Act was passed by Congress to prevent exactly this kind of behavior.” The act was passed in 1974 following revelations about political spying by the FBI and other government intelligence agencies.
Lawyers for Mrs. Clinton had argued that “there is simply no precedent” for alleging an invasion of privacy for transferring personal data from the FBI to the White House. No controlling legal authority. Judge Lamberth rejected the first lady’s arguments, curtly noting that “despite the characterization of Mrs. Clinton, this is not a case concerning the transfer of information from one part of government to another.”
THE PRESIDENT’S RESPONSIBILITY
Can no one higher than Craig Livingstone, a.k.a. Chicken George, be held accountable for Filegate? Richard Nixon’s men illegally obtained one person’s security file; Chuck Colson did seven months as a result. Nixon—who did not know about the Daniel Ellsberg or Watergate break-ins beforehand—was forced out of office for creating an environment that encouraged such adventures.
A president whose aides pull such stunts can escape responsibility only by coming clean, as President Reagan did in the Iran-Contra matter. Reagan had his own attorney general break the news to the public; in the months that followed, he and his aides cooperated with Congress and the independent counsel, and he waived executive privilege for all Iran-Contra communications.
In contrast, the various Clinton White House players have denied, evaded, stonewalled, fled, taken the Fifth (in Livingstone’s case), and made claims of ignorance. Claiming ignorance isn’t enough.
In the 1974 Rodino report, the House Judiciary Com
mittee made a persuasive case for impeaching President Nixon for having people like Craig Livingstone around him. The report noted that, following the end of the Commonwealth and the Restoration of Charles II (1660-1685), “a more powerful Parliament [than had existed under the Commonwealth] expanded somewhat the scope of ‘high Crimes and Misdemeanors’ by impeaching officers of the Crown for such things as negligent discharge of duties and improprieties in office” (emphasis added).
The second article of impeachment against Nixon charged that he had “misused” the FBI in violation of “the constitutional rights of citizens” by “directing” the FBI to wiretap or investigate individuals “for purposes unrelated to national security.” At that time, it was not illegal for a president to authorize wiretaps without a court order—even “for purposes unrelated to national security.” FDR had begun the practice of using the FBI to wiretap the press and investigate his enemies. This political skullduggery was expanded upon by Presidents Kennedy and Johnson.24
By contrast, Nixon had authorized FBI wiretaps exclusively for national security purposes. The FBI had installed a grand total of seventeen wiretaps, thirteen of which tapped the phone lines of government officials and four of which tapped reporters who had published classified national security information.25 Several of the bugged government employees had been designated for wiretaps by their boss, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who had authorized wiretaps on all his aides “who had seen or handled various documents which had been leaked.”26 In neither intent nor execution were the wiretaps used against Nixon’s “enemies.” They were going after leaks of potentially damaging national security information.