White House Aides Allegedly Used Drugs Up to Inaugural

A former FBI agent told Congress that White House aides used drugs as recently as President Clinton’s inaugural festivities, according to a deposition released Friday by a congressional panel.

The White House immediately denied the report and denounced its source, former FBI agent Dennis Sculimbrene, who had performed background checks on White House employees for almost 20 years.

In his deposition, Sculimbrene told the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee that investigations of employees cleared to work in the White House complex detected “recent” use of cocaine, hallucinogenic mushrooms and “designer drugs.”

“It was older people who had used illegal drugs much more recently, as recently as the inaugural,” Sculimbrene told committee investigators.

White House special counsel Mark D. Fabiani dismissed the report and questioned Sculimbrene’s integrity and motivation. “His hatred of the administration is well documented, as is his ongoing employment dispute with the FBI,” said Fabiani.

Sculimbrene retired from the FBI on Friday, saying that he had suffered “assaults on my career” since he raised questions about the White House travel office firings and the handling of FBI background files.

Fabiani said that all White House workers are subject to pre-employment drug testing and random periodic drug tests that cover 20% of the staff each year.

“There’s no way to respond to these charges because he doesn’t provide any particulars--names, dates, places. It puts us in an impossible situation. These are typical McCarthyite tactics,” Fabiani said.

Sculimbrene worked on background investigations in the White House with another former FBI agent, Gary Aldrich, who has published a book that includes a number of lurid and unsubstantiated charges against the president and First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Sculimbrene has been on limited duty since being seriously injured in 1994, when he walked into an airplane propeller, which left fragments of bone embedded in his brain.

The allegations follow revelations in mid-July that 21 employees were allowed to continue working at the Clinton White House despite evidence that they had used drugs within the year before they were hired.

White House officials would not name or provide job descriptions of the 21 workers but said that none was among the 130 highest-ranking officials. Only nine of the 21 remain on the White House payroll; the rest left through normal staff attrition, according to White House spokesman Mike McCurry.

There are about 1,700 employees within the White House complex, from senior policy advisors to cooks and gardeners.

The Government Affairs Committee is investigating the improper acquisition of FBI background files on hundreds of former White House employees--most of them Republicans--by Clinton administration operatives.

The former White House personnel security director, D. Craig Livingstone, who resigned under fire, has acknowledged responsibility for requisitioning the files. Clinton blamed the mess on a “bureaucratic snafu.”

Livingstone’s replacement, Charles Easley, told the committee in another deposition released Friday that he gave Livingstone a top-secret security clearance without reviewing his background file.

Easley said that he did so after being assured by the White House counsel’s office that there were “no problems” in the file. It has since been learned that Livingstone used a variety of illegal drugs until at least the mid-1980s.