No ‘Filegate’ Crimes Found, Final Report Says

In the first of several reports that will sum up the nearly 6-year-old Whitewater investigation, independent counsel Robert W. Ray reported Thursday that his prosecutors found no criminal wrongdoing when White House officials obtained hundreds of FBI personnel files early in the Clinton administration.

The furor over confidential files of mainly Republican appointees falling into the hands of Clinton aides erupted in 1996 and led to investigations by Republican-led committees of the House and Senate.

FBI Director Louis J. Freeh apologized for the security breach and vowed that it would never happen again. In that highly charged atmosphere, then-independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr began an inquiry into whether any criminal statutes had been violated and outsiders began calling the case “Filegate.”

Ray, a top deputy who succeeded Starr in October, said that a thorough investigation by his office had determined that “no prosecutions were warranted.”

The White House told congressional committees that the episode was a bureaucratic blunder by lower-level aides who were trying to update White House security clearances from previous Republican administrations.

Although Ray’s report, by law, remains under seal until released by a supervisory panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington, his office issued a public statement that read in part:

“The independent counsel determined that there was no substantial and credible evidence that any senior White House official, or First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, was involved in seeking confidential FBI background reports of former White House staff from the prior administrations of President Bush and President Reagan.”

Ray said that his office did not investigate alleged violations of the federal Privacy Act of 1974 “because such offenses are excluded from the jurisdiction of an independent counsel.” He added that “the matter is now closed.”

White House spokesman Jim Kennedy said the findings come as no surprise. Referring to other reports that will follow in coming months, Kennedy added: “We have made clear our desire to have all this finished as promptly as possible and in accordance with the statutes.”

Instead, the timing of the reports could cause political problems for the first lady, who is running for the U.S. Senate in New York.

The next report by Ray’s office, to be released perhaps this summer, is expected to deal with the administration’s firing of several longtime employees of the White House travel office in 1993 and whether any officials lied to Congress or a federal grand jury during the independent counsel’s investigation of the matter.

Later, a third report--the most voluminous of all--will deal with issues stemming from the Clintons’ investment in the Whitewater real estate venture when Bill Clinton was governor of Arkansas and the mysterious appearance in 1996 of long-missing billing records of Mrs. Clinton’s that had been subpoenaed two years earlier.

Photocopies of these records, dealing with the first lady’s legal work on Whitewater matters, were found on a table in the White House living quarters. Both the president and Mrs. Clinton said that they did not know where the papers had been and Mrs. Clinton testified about it to one of Starr’s grand juries.

The Filegate case attracted attention because of the large volume of personnel files--900--that White House aides had ordered from the FBI and because Republicans suspected an effort to find adverse information on past administration officials.

D. Craig Livingstone, who then headed the White House office of personnel security, told Congress that the confidential folders were obtained by mistake in an innocent effort to keep White House security credentials up to date. Livingstone and his top aide, Anthony Marceca, said they had been unaware that potentially sensitive data had fallen into their hands.

A former assistant, however, cast doubt on their testimony before Congress, declaring that they were fully aware some of the files were on former high-ranking GOP officials, including ex-Secretary of State James A. Baker III.

But congressional investigators could never find evidence that any information from the files was misused for political purposes.

The matter still is being pursued in federal court through a civil suit filed on behalf of the GOP appointees by Larry Klayman, chairman of Judicial Watch, a conservative legal foundation. Klayman charged that Ray’s findings were based on a less-than-thorough investigation.