ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Thursday, June 20, 1996 TAG: 9606200048
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-10 EDITION: METRO
THE CONGRESSIONAL probe into the Clinton administration's handling of sensitive FBI files is sure to feature, as Whitewater hearings did, an unfair and unseemly pursuit of partisan points.
So be it. A probe is needed anyway, both to get to the bottom of the scandal and to help safeguard the rights of all Americans by preventing the future misuse of FBI files.
This affair probably is, as the administration insists, more error than abuse. Yet it resonates with two discreditable traditions: (1) the modus operandi of the Clintons' handling of mistakes and misdeeds, and (2) an older, more menacing tradition from the recesses of American history, which has seen individual rights sacrificed at times to the power of the security state and the ambitions of politicians.
From the White House, excuses are offered, adjusted and readjusted, as they have been from Travelgate to Whitewater. How did more than 400 FBI personnel-background files end up in the White House? A "bureaucratic snafu," says Bill Clinton.
To be sure, the president has both apologized and shaken up the office that, ostensibly to update security clearances, requested the files. Most of the background summaries were of permanent support staff who have worked at the White House many years. Some, however, were of high-level GOP appointees who had left White House employment.
Administration spokesmen say these were requested mistakenly because the names were on an outdated Secret Service list of people with White House access. They insist no one on the political end of the White House even knew about this collection of files, much less made use of them.
It turns out, though, that the bureaucrat who made the "snafu" wasn't just a neutral civil servant with presumably no interest in the political implications of the files' contents. Anthony Marceca, an Army civilian investigator on loan from the Pentagon to help get the White House security clearances in order, was also a friend and political ally of Craig Livingstone, the chief of personnel security now on leave of absence. And, despite being a government employee, Marceca worked in several Democratic presidential campaigns, including Clinton's.
All of which raises questions that ought to be answered under oath in congressional hearings. Among them: Why was a political operative allowed to request and rummage through FBI files on leading Republicans?
Even if this was just another stupid mistake, there's no harm in establishing the fact with more clarity and credibility than are now in evidence.
Some good, meantime, will come from the publicity if it reduces chances of recurrence. FBI background files contain information, including unverified rumors, that can hurt reputations and ruin lives. Maintaining their confidentiality and restricting their use to only the most essential purposes ought to be a high priority in the FBI.
It hasn't always been. Longtime director J. Edgar Hoover not only manipulated such files for his own job security. He made them selectively available to presidents to use against their political enemies. Since Richard Nixon's resignation, all this was supposed to have ended.
Which is why the agency's casual release, in 1993 and 1994, of hundreds of such files to a White House underling, without even signed approval, raises more concerns about the FBI than about the White House. Once again, new safeguards are needed to prevent abuse. It is good the FBI is putting them in place.
That is not, however, the end of it. Whitewater prosecutor Kenneth Starr's decision this week not to include the files flap in his otherwise expansive inquiries probably suggests he saw little or no reward in the pursuit. But the public deserves answers, and our respect for democracy demands them.
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