What a difference a couple of years makes. On May 22, 1994, White House advisor George Stephanopoulos said this of Craig Livingstone, the then director of the White House office of personnel security: "He does a terrific job. All I know is that anything that has to do with security or logistics - Craig's going to take care of it. You don't have to tell him how to do it, when to do it. Just that it needs to be done, and he does it. And he knows how to cut through the bureaucracy and get things done." Stephanopoulos told this to the Pittsburgh Post Gazette, Livingstone's home town newspaper.
When confronted with the quote late last week, Stephanopoulos now says, "I don't know him that well. He's a guy that was around. He came up to me one day and said 'my paper's doing this and would you give them a quote' and I said 'sure.' I never worked with him on a campaign but he seemed competent." As to the contention that Livingstone knows how to cut through the bureaucracy, Stephanopoulos says, "I just can't think of a specific thing he handled."
Which version of the truth from the White House do you believe? This is, in fact, the crucial question as we ponder the meaning of the issue over the hundreds of FBI files on Republicans turned over to the White House. The first spin put out by the White House was that Livingstone and Anthony Marceca were just low level bureaucrats who made a mistake.
Now comes Denis Casey, the former Gary Hart for President campaign coordinator in Western Pennsylvania, who tells us that Livingstone and Marceca were busy gathering dirt on union officials who supported Walter Mondale in 1984. They were doing this in an effort to try to blackmail the officials into switching to Hart's side to the point where Casey demanded that they be fired. The Casey testimony casts a whole different light on this issue. Livingstone and Marceca, it would seem, were professional political assassins who placed in charge of all of the sensitive material gathered by the FBI on their political opposition.
Now the question is who put them in their positions? Who understood their background? To whom did they report? What did Bill Clinton know and when did he know it?
Attorney General Janet Reno is absolutely right in asking that Independent Counsel Ken Starr investigate this matter. It is not something which any person connected with the Clinton administration can be trusted to handle. Let's remember that Chuck Colson, former Nixon White House aide, went to jail for showing a single FBI file to a reporter. We need to know why these FBI files were requested and exactly how the information therein was used.
The fact that George Stephanopoulos could change his story on Livingstone so easily suggests that it is going to be very difficult getting at the truth on this issue. At the heart of the matter is no less than this question: Is the United States still a free nation where reasonable people can disagree and still continue to practice politics, or have we gone down the road to a dictatorship where if our opponents win the election, the rest of us have to live in fear over what comes next?