Clinton Kept 21 Employees Despite Drug Use Before Hiring Workers Were Required To Submit To Intermittent Drug Tests

Twenty-one employees were allowed to continue working at the Clinton White House, despite FBI background checks indicating that they had used drugs within the year prior to being hired, government officials confirmed Monday.

The White House would not provide job descriptions for the 21, but White House Press Secretary Mike McCurry said none was among the 130 staff members in the top three job categories - assistant to the president, deputy assistant to the president and special assistant to the president.

The White House employs roughly 1,700 workers in positions ranging from senior presidential advisers to cooks and messengers.

Only nine of the 21 employees still work at the White House, McCurry said, a reduction that he attributed to normal staff attrition. The employees were subjected to intermittent drug testing beginning in May 1994, as a precaution urged by the Secret Service, and none has tested positive for drug use since then, McCurry said.

The fact that the 21 employees were undergoing special testing because of concerns about “recent drug use” first came to light in March 1995, during testimony by White House administrative director Patsy Thomasson before a Senate appropriations subcommittee.

The White House set up a special program of intermittent drug testing for the 21, in addition to the random drug testing required of all White House employees, McCurry said. Secret Service officials had insisted on the testing, fearing that recent drug use by White House employees might pose a security problem.

On Monday, Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala., the subcommittee chairman, rekindled the issue, speculating that it might explain why the Clinton White House obtained hundreds of FBI background summaries on White House employees and pass-holders who were no longer in the government.

White House officials have contended that, because of a bureaucratic blunder, the personnel security office improperly obtained the background summaries, whose subjects included some prominent Republicans. The matter now is under investigation by Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr and Senate and House committees.

But Shelby noted that the background summaries would have disclosed if there had been any indications of drug use by employees when Republicans controlled the White House. That would have been useful to an administration seeking to retain employees with their own drug problems.