Vincent Foster Hired Livingstone, Stephanopoulos Says

Who hired D. Craig Livingstone to run personnel security at the Clinton White House?

In the past week, no one at the White House has seemed to know. Livingstone, who was in charge of an office that housed hundreds of FBI files on former personnel, has become a political orphan with no known sponsor.

On Sunday, however, White House senior advisor George Stephanopoulos offered a new account, attributing the hiring to the late Vincent Foster.

Appearing on ABC-TV’s “This Week With David Brinkley,” Stephanopoulos said that Foster, the former deputy White House counsel who committed suicide three years ago, met with Livingstone after Livingstone had done work for the Clinton campaign and for the president’s inaugural committee.

Livingstone wanted a job so Foster “decided to put him in the security office on a temporary basis,” Stephanopoulos said. After Foster died, in the summer of Clinton’s first year in office, associate counsel William H. Kennedy III completed the hiring process and “took over the supervision of Craig Livingstone,” as Stephanopoulos put it.