White House FBI files controversy

background reports was at the heart of the "Filegate" affair. "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, had improperly requested and received background reports from the FBI in 1993 and 1994, 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. but generally characterized it as a series of mistakes made without bad intent and offered apologies to those affected. However, his Republican opponent in the ongoing 1996 presidential election, Senator Bob Dole, compared it to the enemies list kept by the Nixon administration. On June 18, 1996, Attorney General Janet Reno asked the FBI to look into it; 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. 's 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. 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. 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. 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. ==Who hired Livingstone issue==

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, nor did it keep the regular personnel files of employees, which were held in a different office within the White House. Nevertheless, Livingstone seemed to lack qualifications for even this position; he had worked on a number of Democratic Party campaigns and transitions, 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. (That same day, the same Office of the Independent Counsel staff were listening to taped conversations of Linda Tripp and Monica Lewinsky; the Lewinsky scandal was soon to break.) In 1999, Clinton gave a sworn statement that she had nothing to do with Livingstone's hiring. Livingstone also stated under oath there was no truth to the supposed hiring relationship. Hillary Clinton would later refer to the whole files matter as a "pseudoscandal". ==Official findings==

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 House Judiciary Committee in connection with the Impeachment of Bill Clinton over charges related to the Lewinsky scandal. Here, for the first time, Starr exonerated both President Clinton and the First Lady of complicity in the FBI files matter, saying "while there are outstanding issues that we are attempting to resolve with respect to one individual [we] found no evidence that anyone higher [than Livingstone or Marceca] was in any way involved in ordering the files from the FBI. Second, we have found no evidence that information contained in the files of former officials was used for an improper purpose." (Starr also chose this occasion to clear President Clinton in the Travelgate matter, and to say that he had not committed impeachable wrongdoing in the Whitewater matter; Democrats on the committee immediately criticized Starr for withholding all these findings until after the 1998 Congressional elections.) 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. 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. It stated that even though Marceca's statements were sometimes "contradictory and misleading", they were "sufficiently transparent" and there was insufficient evidence to prove that Anthony Marceca had made false statements to Congress during his testimony. 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, 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." Based on an investigation that included the prior fingerprint analysis, the report further stated that: 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. ==Judicial Watch lawsuit==

presided over a civil lawsuit emanating from the Filegate matter. Separately from the Independent Counsel investigation, Judicial Watch, a conservative watchdog group, engaged in long-running litigation over the White House personnel file controversy. It was initially filed in September 1996 and sought $90 million in damages. Judicial Watch's Cara Leslie Alexander et al. vs. Federal Bureau of Investigation et al. class action lawsuit, filed on behalf of five low-level former members alleged that Livingstone, along with Anthony Marceca and William Kennedy, obtained the files and then rifled through them. Judicial Watch in particular alleged that Kennedy had abused the FBI background report process. Judicial Watch founder and Clintons antagonist suprême Larry Klayman attracted enough attention with the case to have the recurring Larry Claypool character modeled after him on the television series The West Wing. In December 2002 Judicial Watch obtained a ruling from Judge Lamberth that recently uncovered White House e-mails be searched for possible evidence in the lawsuit. Klayman said, "Hillary Clinton was the mastermind of Filegate. She will not escape justice." however, and several years went by with little or nothing happening in the lawsuit. 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. Media reports concluded that, fourteen years after the initial events were set in motion, Filegate was finally over. but the Court of Appeals affirmed the dismissal on November 14, 2011, thereby bringing the case to an end. ==References==