Bush Appointees Face Tougher FBI Background Checks

David Beckwith, the red-bearded, towering Time magazine correspondent who has been enlisted to serve as Vice President-elect Dan Quayle’s press secretary, stood somewhere between bemused and perplexed.

Confronting him was the packet of questionnaires, asking for a summary of his life since he was 18, that all appointees to the incoming Bush Administration must complete.

“It’s going to take me two days to do it,” Beckwith said with a groan. “I’m 46 years old. I vaguely remember the name of the street I lived on in law school. How do you look up stuff like that?”

As Beckwith can testify, the FBI is subjecting would-be jobholders in the new Administration to tougher and more penetrating background checks. Not only the potential appointees, but also their friends, neighbors and employers are fielding questions about everything from past drug use to relatives’ birthplaces.

Embarrassing Cases

The beefed-up probes are designed to avoid repeats of such embarrassing recent cases as that of federal judge Douglas H. Ginsburg, whose previous marijuana use--undetected by the FBI--forced him to withdraw last year as President Reagan’s nominee for the Supreme Court.

But the FBI’s new-found caution has a major drawback--the time it consumes. The new system is blamed for delaying Bush’s recent choice of Robert A. Mosbacher, a wealthy oilman, as his commerce secretary, and John Tower, whose prospective nomination raised questions about his personal life and dealings with military contractors, as defense secretary.

Bush’s counsel, C. Boyden Gray, heads a team of attorneys whose job it is to assess FBI background investigations. He said the intensified probes were the product of Bush’s high ethical standards and increased pressure from Congress.

“I think it’s healthy,” Gray said, “although it sure does irritate.”

Gray said he had not completed his forms, even though he has only to update the last questionnaire he completed about two years ago.

Questionnaire Gets Tougher

Since then, however, the questionnaire has become tougher. Beginning in October, 1987, the revised federal “questionnaire for sensitive positions” asked applicants to detail any involvement they had with alcohol and dangerous drugs over the last five years. And now, would-be Administration jobholders are asked to cover any use since they were 18 and to list any treatment they received for drug or alcohol dependency, including membership in such groups as Alcoholics Anonymous.

An added catchall question asks if there is “anything in your personal life that could be used by someone to coerce you? Is there anything in your life that could cause an embarrassment to you or to the President if publicly known? If so, please provide full details.”

A separate form, entitled “personal data statement,” asks whether the applicant has ever been publicly identified, individually or by organizational membership, “with a particularly controversial national or local issue.”

Prospects for Administration appointment are asked to list publications, books or articles they have written or edited “if any of these publications are particularly controversial.” That description is meant “to focus on issues that could be used, even unfairly, against you.”

Donovan Case

The FBI background investigation now employs techniques designed to reduce the chances that embarrassing disclosures will be made after appointees have taken office. The FBI remembers the case of Raymond J. Donovan, President Reagan’s first labor secretary.

The FBI’s background check of Donovan before he was nominated failed to discover that he and his New Jersey construction company had been mentioned in telephone conversations the FBI had tapped during an investigation of organized crime activity. Donovan resigned as labor secretary after a New York state grand jury indicted him on fraud charges of which he was eventually acquitted.

Now, before FBI agents take to the field to question friends, neighbors, employers and others who know the prospective appointees, the job candidates are interviewed at length about their written responses to their questionnaires.

This initial personal interview can run “several hours,” said Joseph J. Jackson, a 21-year FBI veteran who heads the bureau’s civil rights and special inquiry section.

More Extensive Interviews

In the past, these sit-downs with the subject were often cursory and restricted, FBI officials admit. Now, Jackson said, “the width, breadth, expanse of the interview is much more extensive.”

Last month, agents from several of the FBI’s 58 field offices were brought to headquarters for a week of retraining on the intensified investigations. “We went over areas to be covered and the mannerisms to use,” Jackson said.

Most significantly, the FBI has dropped the practice of only summarizing derogatory information in its report to the White House. Now it gives the White House the raw data itself.

“If we have any derogatory information--personal life style, arrest checks . . . we provide the exact data as it is told to us,” Jackson said.

When sources who are willing to be named give unfavorable information about a potential nominee, Jackson said, Gray and his staff can evaluate their credibility. Anonymous information also is passed along, Jackson said, but when a source refuses to attach his name to his information, it “can speak to credibility.”

Gray emphasized that the White House will not provide the raw data to Senate committees for their confirmation hearings on Administration appointees.

“It’s at the point now where we may be crossing the line in circulating these reports,” Gray said. “If we go the slightest bit further, I think people will not talk to the FBI, and (the investigative effort) will collapse.

“I will verbally inform the Congress of difficulties,” he added. “But I’m not going to show them the files.”

Use Various Data Bases

The FBI’s background probes now draw heavily on computerized indexes not only of investigations by the bureau itself and U.S. attorneys but also of data bases maintained by the State Department, CIA, National Security Agency and the Internal Revenue Service.

For a Cabinet-level appointee, Jackson estimated, the FBI queries 20 to 30 federal, state and local government agencies and conducts 25 to 55 interviews.

Craig Fuller, co-director of the Bush transition staff, said that to date no prospective Administration officials had been ruled out by an FBI background check. Nor, he said, had a job candidate balked at the more detailed process now being used, although he acknowledged that some prospects “have indicated they’re . . . just unable to serve at the present time.”

Jackson said the incoming Administration was being flexible in giving the FBI the time it needed to complete its investigations. “Everyone is acutely sensitive to the need for thoroughness,” he said.

Some Cases Urgent

Gray did not entirely agree. “We’re asking them to hurry up in some cases and to relax in others.”

But both the chief investigator and the chief client agree that no investigatory technique, no matter how thorough, can guarantee that the new Administration will not be blind-sided by nominees who turn out to have embarrassing pasts.

Although Jackson seemed intentionally to avoid mentioning the Ginsburg and Donovan cases by name, he said: “We’d like to think there have been enough adjustments so that we will not have a replication of the two.”