Ex-White House Aide Adds to FBI Files Probe

A former assistant in the White House office of personnel security has told Senate investigators that she and others in the office were aware that some past Republican appointees were included on lists of FBI background files they requested.

Mari Anderson, whose statement was released Friday by the Senate Judiciary Committee, said some files on past GOP officials were obtained despite recognition of the names, including former Secretary of State James A. Baker III and former White House Press Secretary Marlin Fitzwater.

Anderson’s statement differed sharply from the testimony of White House officials, including her former boss, D. Craig Livingstone. The White House has insisted that hundreds of files of long-gone Republicans were requested by mistake because the security office was working with an out-of-date list provided by the Secret Service.

*

Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) said Anderson’s statement shows that the White House may have sought to “find dirt on these people.”

Anderson said in her statement, taken earlier this week behind closed doors, that she “noticed certain names that should not have been there” on a list provided by the Secret Service of people who supposedly held active White House passes and therefore would be subject to review by the White House security office.

These names included former President Bush and his wife, Barbara; former Vice President Dan Quayle and his wife, Marilyn, as well as Baker and Fitzwater, she said.

Anderson said “we took those names off the list,” and subsequently asked the Secret Service to provide a more up-to-date list. But that list also contained older Republican names, she said, and the White House then obtained yet a third version, which she said also had some out-of-date names.

She later resigned from her job and could not explain to investigators how so many old FBI files eventually were obtained by Livingstone’s office.

In releasing a transcript of Anderson’s testimony, Hatch told reporters:

“It now appears that . . . the White House ordered files of at least some prior Bush and Reagan administration officials with knowledge that it had no legitimate basis for doing so. My feeling is they wanted to find dirt on these people either for current use or for the future.”

*

Hatch also cited another conflict between Anderson’s testimony and that of Livingstone. In testimony last month, Livingstone offered an innocent explanation for a six-month gap in a 1994 daily log showing who had examined the sensitive materials obtained by his assistants.

Referring to the lack of entries in the log between March 29 and Sept. 21 that year, Livingstone said there was evidently “a period of time . . . when the log wasn’t kept.”

Anderson, however, told investigators that she had kept the log up to date and could not explain why the page that ends with March 29 is followed immediately in the loose-leaf binder by a page starting with Sept. 21. She added that Livingstone occasionally took a file without any entry in the log.