Fbi File Explanation Doesn’t Wash

The Clinton administration offended nearly three-quarters of Washington’s conservatives by compiling an enemies list that goes only halfway through the letter “G.”

Everyone on the 340-person honor roll worked for President Reagan or President Bush. The Clinton team punished the transgressors by requisitioning their FBI background checks.

These reports have almost bottomless blackmail potential. They include everything that FBI agents heard or discovered while trying to determine the people’s fitness to work for the two previous administrations - biographical data, interviews, transcripts, bank records and plenty of gossip.

When reporters asked four years ago to see FBI records about Bill Clinton, then-press secretary Dee Dee Myers rejected the idea out of hand - precisely because the candidate’s team didn’t want the public to see a dossier packed with what former Clinton lieutenant Betsey Wright called “bimbo eruptions.”

Now, the Clinton team acts as if the fat sheaf of background checks tumbled into the White House like manna from the File Fairy. Proconsuls of the Most Ethical White House in History say they wanted to determine who could qualify for admission to the executive mansion three years ago.

But this explanation clarifies nothing. The White House sent more than 300 specific requests to the FBI, even though it had fired all but a handful of Bush-era employees.

Moreover, little grunts can’t process these queries. Only the White House Office of Legal Counsel may approach the FBI about such matters. Yet, Clinton aides say nobody in the counsel’s office can remember sending in the forms. (Sound familiar?)

The president’s political guards blame the mess on a civilian worker who was on temporary loan from the Pentagon. The fellow reported to Craig Livingstone, who became director of White House security after a career that included service for various Democrats, PR work for an Atlantic City, N.J., casino and promotional efforts for the movie, “The Last Temptation of Christ.”

Livingstone reported to William Kennedy III, one of first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton’s associates at the Rose Law Firm in Arkansas. Kennedy left town a while back, accused of trying to suborn the FBI and Internal Revenue Service in the Travelgate episode. He also handed White House passes to Clinton appointees whose backgrounds included recent and compromising histories of financial insolvency and/or drug abuse.

This account creates the potential for at least three scapegoats, but it still doesn’t answer some obvious questions: Why didn’t anybody notice that the roster didn’t include a single person who worked for President Clinton? Does anybody seriously believe that such juicy files would just be lying around unread for more than two years? And why hasn’t the president fired anybody involved in this fiasco?

There are plenty of reasons for suspecting the worst. The Clinton White House has a history of pawing through documents it shouldn’t have (such as the diplomatic passports of 160 Bush officials) and of hiring private detectives such as San Francisco’s famed Jack Palladino.

House Majority Leader Richard Armey, R-Texas, observes that while Richard Nixon deployed plumbers, Clinton uses earthworms - “guys who do nothing but dig up dirt.”

The president, who is much better at mourning than confessing, dispatched minions last week to apologize and proclaim his innocence regarding the FBI papers.

But C. Boyden Gray, legal counsel during the Bush administration, says he doubts the White House’s alibis. He says the file transfers would require two separate conspiracies of stupidity: ignorance of the law on the part of White House lawyers and idiocy on the part of the FBI.

It is hard to imagine such a list slipping through without notice since it includes such luminaries as former Secretary of State James Baker and former Reagan press secretary James Brady, who almost died at John Hinckley’s hand. Everybody in Washington, even the Sterno bums, knows these celebrities.

The White House account doesn’t scan for other reasons, too. If team Clinton submitted a completed list, why didn’t the roster include Republican National Committee Chairman Haley Barbour or Rep. Chris Cox, R-Calif., who worked on the Reagan team? And why did it include Joseph Hagin, whose last name was misspelled as “Agin”?

Finally, what was the president’s role? The White House tried to hide the controversial list by invoking executive privilege. But nobody can assert executive privilege without first briefing the president in detail. So, did Clinton know about the files and the cover-up? Did he practice his own special version of “don’t ask, don’t tell”?

Or was this just another innocent case of staff incompetence?

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