Claims Doubted In Fbi Files Fiasco Previous Managers Portrayed As Reckless Amateurs
The White House named a career security specialist Wednesday to take over the office blamed for the FBI files fiasco, while a House hearing portrayed the previous managers as reckless amateurs.
A former aide in the personnel security office raised new doubts about claims that an Army civilian employee at the Clinton White House, Anthony Marceca, simply was misled by an outdated Secret Service list in gathering 408 confidential FBI reports on mainly Republican exemployees.
The White House says the files were obtained mistakenly while trying to clear a security-check backlog on current employees; Republicans, however, charge the White House workers were trying to dig up dirt.
Meanwhile, GOP lawmakers are investigating a possible link to a records rifling case that occurred at the State Department early in the Clinton administration.
Two State Department employees, Mark Schulhof and Joseph Tarver, were fired in 1993 for searching 160 personnel files of Bush administration appointees at the department. The aides both were Democratic activists.
The two men under GOP scrutiny in the FBI files case Craig Livingstone and Marceca - had worked in Democratic campaigns.
A predecessor of Marceca’s, Nancy Gemmell, said Marceca could not have worked directly from a list she had left behind in a vault because it named current pass holders rather than past GOP employees.
Testifying before the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee, Gemmell said she is convinced her successors first used a “gigantic” list from the Secret Service containing “thousands of names” and then perhaps winnowed it themselves.
Gemmell and a parade of former White House chief lawyers drew a portrait of recklessness by stressing the tight procedures they had followed in the past.
Gemmell said, with some amazement, that a rotating pool of college-age interns helped staff the office in the early days of the Clinton administration without undergoing security clearances.