Testimony Points To Computer Flaws

White House career employees and Secret Service agents testified Friday that a series of technical problems and computer flaws may have created confusion that led to the improper requests for more than 700 FBI files on past Republican appointees.

The testimony provided the strongest corroboration to date of White House claims that its office of personnel security unwittingly got outdated lists in 1993 and 1994 from the Secret Service. The FBI had insisted previously that its lists of individuals with White House clearances were updated every few days and could not have been in error.

Meanwhile, the White House worker who pulled sensitive FBI files on Republicans refused to testify before the Senate Friday, citing his right against self-incrimination.

In testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Secret Service agent Jeffrey Undercoffer said that “our computer system was at capacity and overloaded for several months” during the time in question and did not update personnel changes properly.

Undercoffer and his supervisor, Arnold Cole, sought to minimize the troubles, however, and suggested that computer glitches in their separate rosters of “active” and “inactive” pass-holders could not have caused as many improper White House requests for FBI background files as occurred.

Democrats sought solace in their testimony, which was supported by several White House career employees, and declared it showed that the 3-week-old files controversy was an apparently innocent blunder.

Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware, the committee’s ranking Democrat, said the Secret Service deserved a large share of the blame for what he called an inadvertent “screw-up” and asked, “Is this the outfit we’re counting on to protect the president?” He also said the White House and the FBI shared in the blame.

Republicans said it still could have been a sinister operation.

And the Democratic cause was not helped when Anthony Marceca refused to appear for further congressional testimony. His lawyer said that Marceca, a former Democratic political operative who requested the files, was invoking his constitutional right against self-incrimination.

The move was surprising because Marceca had given lengthy testimony two days earlier to a House committee investigating the same matter. His attorney, Robert F. Muse, did not explain the shift in tactics, although it could stem from the criminal investigation of the case that Whitewater Independent Counsel Kenneth W. Starr began a week ago.

Committee chairman Orrin G. Hatch, R-Utah, said Marceca’s refusal to testify signaled that “this investigation is getting somewhere.”

“The more we dig, the more we learn,” Hatch said.

Biden said that in addition to the Secret Service, fault can be found with “a very inexperienced staff in the White House office of personnel security in 1993, who received little if any formal training” in updating lists of persons who had clearance to the White House complex.

Also, he said, the FBI should never have have sent Marceca its back-ground files on Republican officials who clearly had left government, such as former White House chief of staff Kenneth Duberstein, Biden said.

Sen. Charles E. Grassley, R-Iowa, saying he still suspected something “sinister,” noted that the actual list used by Marceca cannot be found, according to the White House.

“All we’ve heard is a bunch of hearsay about outdated lists,” Grassley said, adding that the project may have been “based on a list that would give them a cover story in case they got caught.”