A Clintonite hack who brags of having infiltrated Republican campaigns and passed material on to his fellow Democrats is the most interesting, and shadowy, figure in the new FBI Filegate mess.
Filegate is the name being given to the improper search of 340-odd FBI background reports on Reagan and Bush White House officials by aides in the Clinton White House, and it was begun on orders from White House personnel security director Craig Livingstone. Livingstone asked his friend Anthony Marceca, who was brought to the White House from the Pentagon, to begin retrieving the files from the FBI. The files remained in Livingstone’s control for at least a year, it appears. And his background makes it difficult to believe that this was the “completely honest, bureaucratic snafu” President Clinton claims it was — not to mention making you wonder how he could have resisted the temptation to examine some of them. James A. Baker III’s, for example, or Marlin Fitzwater’s.
Before the 1992 campaign, Livingstone worked on the campaigns of Geraldine Ferraro, Gary Hart, and Al Gore. In a May 1994 Pittsburgh Post-Gazette profile, Livingstone was described by a business acquaintance as “real businesslike and pleasant but I wouldn’t want to be on his bad side.” More telling, he spent some time in 1988 working as a Democratic spy on the Bush/Quayle effort. Livingstone claims to have told top Democrats that Quayle was planning to compare his record in the Senate to John Kennedy’s during his debate with Lloyd Bentsen. That, of course, sparked Bentsen’s famous response — “Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy” — for which, if you believe Livingstone’s account, his surreptitious intelligence was responsible.
In the intervening years, Livingstone’s self-described employment ranged from doing public relations for an Atlantic City casino and the controversial film The Last Temptation of Christ to teaching democratic politics to Angolan guerrilla soldiers. In the 1992 campaign, Livingstone did advance work for Gore, and he worked with Clinton friend Harry Thomason during the inauguration. Not really the kind of credentials one usually looks for in a personnel security chief, one of the more sensitive jobs in the White House. Or, at least, not in the kind of White House Bill Clinton promised — the most ethical in history, he said during the transition. Remember?
