PANDEMONIUM BROKE OUT at the White House on June 20 when Attorney General Janet Reno’s decision to hand the Filegate investigation over to independent counsel Kenneth Starr was reported on CNN. The news shocked President Clinton and his aides. They hadn’t a clue it was coming. leetngs on other topics stopped instantly, and Filegate damage control took over. Reno was bitterly denounced. Clinton aides had thought the attorney general, who earlier insisted the Justice Department would retain jurisdiction over Filegate, was sensitive to White House wishes. Not enough, it turned out, and staffers trashed her as a traitor. One senior offcial noted the irony of Reno’s appointment in the first place: She’d been brought to the attention of the White House by Hillary Rodham Clinton’s brother. Now, she was making it easier or Start, the prosecutor who terrorizes Clinton and his aides, to cause legal trouble for the Clintons, especially Hillary.
The anger and trepidation reflect White House fears that Filegate might prove a catastrophe. This isn’t paranoia. More than Whitewater or the Paula Jones case or even Travelgate, Filegate may engage the press and the public and prolong itself indefinitely. It may not be Watergate or Iran-contra, but it’s still a major scandal.
Why? First, it’s simple to understand: White House flunkies collecting secret FBI files on Republicans. Second, it involves important issues: right to privacy, security lapses, etc. And third, it all happened in Washington, not Arkansas.
Still, Filegate hasn’t reached critical mass yet. Far from it, in fact. To become a presidency-shattering scandal, it must advance on five fronts:
The press. Unless reporters develop a lust for pursuing Filegate and initiate a feeding frenzy, it’s bound to fade. Only the Washington Times, Wall Street Journal (editorial and news pages), ABC, and CNN have gotten excited about Filegate so far. The rest of the media have treated Filegate as more serious than Whitewater, but that’s not saying much. The coverage of Whitewater has often been downright dismissive: The report of the Senate Whitewater Committee, for example, was played as a purely partisan document, merely the Republican version. In the annals of congressional-investigation coverage, that is unprecedented; when Democrats ran Congress and a Republican was president, the press always treated the majority’s view as the “committee” report.
What’s kept the media going after Filegate is Capitol Hill hearings and leaks from investigating committees. But those won’t last forever. For the story to take off, the press has to begin digging up its own stories. Among the networks, only ABC has been working the story that aggressively. It interviewed Bush White House aide Jim Cicconi, who said personnel files on President Bush’s aides were readily available from the Bush library. Thus, FBI files on Bushies did not have to be requisitioned to compile any lists, and, Cicconi said, Clinton aides knew this. ABC also uncovered recommendations to the White House in 1994 by Senate Intelligence Committee chairman Dennis DeConcini of Arizona, who said new personnel security procedures were required. The White House said it would give those procedures serious consideration, but didn’t. Neither story was widely picked up.
The death by a thousand cuts. According to this theory, the folks at the center of a scandal — the Clintons — will appear to be riding it out until one final cut brings them down all at once. Then, polls showing the president routing Bob Dole will flip. What’s the final cut in Filegate and when will it come? It may never come, but we know what it will be if it does: if higher-ups at the White House, Hillary perhaps, are implicated, instead of just mid-level security ofifcials Craig Livingstone and Tony Marceca. The first day of hearings in the House didn’t produce such a revelation. If the scandal doesn’t reach beyond Livingstone and Marceca, it will die — and soon.
Democrats. Many are thinking about distancing themselves from the White House, dubious about the story that Filegate is a bureaucratic bungle. It’s vitally important for some Democrats to defect and attack Clinton. That would give the scandal more gravity and lift it above mere partisan politics, which would impress reporters. In Watergate and Iran-contra, maverick Republicans on the congressional investigating committees took on their party’s president, gained credibility, and became media favorites. No Democrat has come close to this in Filegate, though Sens. Joe Biden of Delaware and Paul Simon of Illinois (who is retiring) have zinged the White House. Biden even raises the possibility Clinton aides were indeed scouring FBI files for dirt. “It may be there’s something nefarious here,” he said on Face the Nation on June 23. “At a minimum, they violated the rights of 400 people whose files should never have been collected at the White House and at a maximum they had some purpose for it. But there’s no evidence to support that.” In other words, Biden isn’t jumping ship yet. And, in truth, the media praise heaped on Republicans who attacked Reagan and Bush is likely to be far more muted when the target is a Democratic president for whom 89 percent of the Washington press corps cast a vote in 1992.
Internal criticism. Once administration officials start taking potshots at the White House — on deep background, of course — the Clintons will be in terminal trouble. Reporters will be the first to sense this. For now, officials around Washington are standing by their man Clinton — with two exceptions. Both Reno and FBI director Louis Freeh went out of their way to distance themselves from the White House. In turning Filegate over to Starr, Reno responded more to Republican complaints than Clinton’s political needs. Freeh was rougher, publicly accusing the White House of “egregious violations of privacy.” Both he and the FBI, Freeh said, “were victimized.”
State’s evidence. To put Filegate over the top, an insider must become a turncoat, then testify on Capitol Hill and blab to Starr. That’s what happened in Watergate when White House counsel John Dean flipped. And Robert McFarlane’s decision to testify against other Reagan White House aides deepened the Iran-contra scandal. The only insiders at the Clinton White House to aid investigators are two FBI agents, Dennis Sculimbrene and Gary Aldrich. In his new book, Unlimited Access, Aldrich describes Livingstone as “extremely close to the Clintons’ and quotes one-time deputy White House counsel William Kennedy’s explanation of Livingstone’s appointment as chief of security: “Hillary wants him.” Sculimbrene said he was told that Craig Livingstone was close to Hillary Clinton. Now, investigators think that Livingstone, who cried when Senate staffers interrogated him privately, might buckle and turn state’s evidence.
So Filegate has a ways to go before it’s here for good. Perhaps it won’t make it. But there’s an intriguing parallel with Watergate. When the Watergate burglars were caught in 1972, they were treated as bumblers who left tape on the door they had broken into, alerting a security guard. Bumblers? Isn’t that how Livingstone and Marceca have been portrayed?
by Fred Barnes
