THE CLINTON SECURITY CLEARANCE MELT-DOWN: ‘NO-GATE’ DEMONSTRATES ‘IT’S THE PEOPLE, STUPID’
(Washington, D.C.): In a landmark
speech on the floor of the House of
Representatives yesterday, Rep. Jim Leach
(R-IA) delivered what may prove to be the
single most incisive indictment of the
Clinton Administration. While Rep. Leach
was speaking specifically about the
Whitewater affair, his withering
criticism of the Administration’s
“arrogance of power” and its
“me-generation public ethics”
is no less applicable to Mr. Clinton’s
other, potentially much more serious
scandal: the wholesale
collapse of security procedures at the
White House.
No Kidding — It’s a
Melt-Down
The magnitude of this problem has
begun to become apparent in recent days,
thanks largely to tenacious investigative
work by another Republican congressman,
Rep. Frank Wolf of Virginia, the Washington
Times and the Wall Street
Journal. Consider just a few of the
latest, mind-boggling revelations:
No Security Clearances: The
Clinton Administration admits that, out
of a total of 1,044 White House
personnel, as many as 100 do not
have security clearances. These
include some of those who have routine
access to extremely sensitive national
security information, like Dee
Myers, the White House press
spokeswoman. It also includes others who
are responsible for activities that
necessarily involve classified data. For
example, Patsy Thomasson,
the director of the White House Office of
Administration — which, according to the
Wall Street Journal,
“oversees personnel, computers and
some security operations” for the
Executive Office of the President — only
got her clearance in February, thirteen
months into her job.
No Permanent Passes: The
White House also has been obliged to
confirm reports that, as of this week, fully
one-third of the staff do not have
permanent passes to the complex.
Instead, they have been granted access to
the White House via “temporary”
passes for months at a time, and in some
cases for over a year. Some even are
simply using “visitors” badges.
In this way, the normal security
investigation and approval procedures —
the latter requiring formal Secret
Service assent — can be, and have
been, circumvented. Given
the nature of most presidential staff
offices and the information available to
them, however, such “no escort
required” White House passes enable
access to classified information and
effectively authorize such access.
The Kennedy Cut-out:
The blame for much of this astounding
breakdown in security procedures at one
of the most sensitive facilities in the
country is being assigned to William
Kennedy III, an Associate White House
Counsel. Kennedy is a former partner of
Hillary Rodham Clinton at the Rose Law
Firm and deputy to departed Counsel
Bernard Nussbaum.
According to the 23 March 1994 Washington
Times, Kennedy chose last year to
stop sending FBI background checks on
White House personnel to the Secret
Service for review “after the Secret
Service expressed reservations about
approving permanent badges for two aides
for security reasons based on their FBI
reports.” As a result of Mr.
Kennedy’s “backlog,” hundreds
of individuals did not get permanent
passes for months after joining the White
House staff. For instance, Mr. Kennedy
himself did not get one until December
1993. Even White House Chief of Staff
Thomas “Mack” McLarty — the
author of guidelines for presidential
personnel — did not get his until 5
March 1994.
Security Clearances Without
Passes? According to yesterday’s
Wall Street Journal, Ms.
Thomasson has told Congress that
“there was no reason for concern
that senior White House aides lacked
permanent passes because they nonetheless
had gotten ‘requisite security’
approval.” The Journal reports,
however, that a senior administrative
official in the Carter and Bush White
Houses, Phil Larsen, dismisses that
contention as “malarkey.”
“The Secret Service must
clear a final financial check, and is
part of an adjudication. ‘None of
this makes any sense,’ [Larsen said].
It would be ‘astonishing’ if security
clearances were issued before passes
were. ‘The two always — and
should — go together.'”
(Emphasis added.)
No Aldrich Ames at the
White House?
Just in case the ominous implications
of such a melt-down of security
procedures at the White House were not
self-evident, Ms. Thomasson helpfully
clarified them in congressional testimony
this week. Referring to an individual who
was recently charged with being a
long-time Soviet mole at the CIA: “We
don’t think we have any Aldrich Ameses at
the White House. But we certainly
could.”
Interestingly, such a possibility was
specifically contemplated in a Decision
Brief issued by the Center for
Security Policy on 1 March 1994, a week
before the stories began to surface about
the latest White House scandal — perhaps
soon to be known as “No-gate,”
for obvious reasons. As part of an
examination of the odious background of
Derek Shearer, (1)
a longtime friend of President Clinton
and brother-in-law of Deputy Secretary of
State Strobe Talbott, who has been
nominated to become the U.S. Ambassador
to Finland, the Center asked
rhetorically, “How did this guy get
a security clearance?”
The Center speculated that Shearer may
have gotten cleared by being as selective
and disingenuous with the FBI about his
past associations and views as he was
with the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee. (2)
Alternatively, it wondered whether
Shearer’s close ties to the President and
Talbott militated against a rigorous
background investigation. Or, as the
Center asked:
“Is this case — like
that of Morton Halperin
[another hard-left Clinton appointee
who, after being blocked for a senior
Defense Department job was given an
extremely sensitive post at the
National Security Council] and
Rick Ames — simply evidence of the
depths to which the security
screening process and
counter-intelligence apparatus of
this country have plunged?”
The Center for Security Policy
believes that it would be a
miracle if the Clinton Administration’s
irresponsible approach to security at the
White House had not resulted in the
Executive Office of the President being
penetrated by one or more “Aldrich
Ameses.” It certainly would
be uncharacteristic of hostile
intelligence organizations like the
former Soviet KGB and GRU to permit such
an extraordinary opportunity to go
unexploited.
Red Flags From the House
Intelligence Committee
So serious is this problem deemed to
be that the chairman and ranking minority
member of the House Permanent Select
Committee on Intelligence, Reps. Dan
Glickman (D-KS) and Larry Combest (R-TX),
respectively, wrote to CIA Director James
Woolsey on 17 March 1994 asking:
“…What specific steps…have [you]
taken to ensure that information
classified to protect intelligence
sources and methods has not been made
available to individuals on the White
House staff who do not have appropriate
clearances[?]”
The Center has received reports that
these concerns are also shared by the
Department of Defense. It understands
that defense contractors have
been advised by Defense Department
officials not to share classified
information with the White House on the
grounds that there is no assurance that
only those with appropriate clearances
will have access to such information.
What’s Really
Rotten is not the Process, It’s the
People
When questioned about the grave White
House security problem at his prime-time
press conference last night, President
Clinton chose to address it as a mere
problem of procedure:
“[With regard to] the White
House passes — let me just talk
about what the facts are. About 90
percent of the people who work here
have been through all the clearances.
The others are going through the
clearances.
“I learned, when I read about
this, that apparently previous
Administrations have had some of the
same problems. That is they’d been
lax, because of the cumbersome nature
of the process. We, now, basically
put in rules that say that anybody
comes to work here now has to get all
this done in 30 days or is
immediately on leave without pay.
They can’t get paid unless they do
it. I asked Mr. McLarty and Mr.
Cutler to fix this and make sure it
never happens again, so I feel
confident that we have.”
In fact, according to press reports,
no previous Administration has
experienced anything approaching the
gravity of the Clinton security problem.
That is not because they were subjected
to a less “cumbersome” process,
however. Neither is it that they did not
have someone on staff like William
Kennedy who was prepared wantonly to
circumvent the system — a practice for
which he was effectively fired yesterday.
Rather, this Administration’s
unique problem with security is that it
is aggressively recruiting and appointing
to government positions — at the
White House and elsewhere —
individuals who could not and would not
pass muster under any rigorous security
screening process. In fact, this
reality is responsible for Mr. Kennedy’s
conduct. According to an Administration
source quoted by the Washington Times:
“Of about 1,000 FBI
background checks of White House
personnel, more than 500
revealed derogatory information that
would have prevented the people
[involved] from obtaining security
clearances at the FBI, Defense
Department or CIA.”
The Bottom Line
The Center for Security Policy has
long been appalled at the dubious
character and dismal quality of personnel
being employed by the Clinton
Administration. It has raised the alarm
repeatedly about individuals whose
background, judgment, behavior, past
associations and/or conduct make them
unfit for senior positions of trust — if
not outright security threats. Among
those identified about whom the Center
has warned are: Morton Halperin, Strobe
Talbott, Derek Shearer, Anthony Lake,
Winston Lord, Bobby Ray Inman, John
Shattuck and Sam Brown.
The legitimation and credentialing of
such relatively prominent individuals is
clearly only part of the problem,
however. For every one of these, there
are evidently hundreds of others being
given government jobs by an
Administration seemingly indifferent to
the implications of doing so for the
Nation’s security.
The Center commends Rep. Wolf and Rep.
Bill Clinger (R-PA) for seeking a GAO
investigation of “No-gate.” It
urges these senior legislators with
responsibility, respectively for
Appropriations and Government Operations
matters, to seek public hearings about
this critical situation before Reps.
Glickman and Combest’s Intelligence
Committee, if not their respective
committees. Obviously, counterpart
efforts are in order on the Senate side
as well. Such hearings are
absolutely essential if the American
people are to learn the truth about the
grievous personnel, as well as
procedural, problems symptomatic of this
Administration’s insidious
“me-generation” attitude toward
national security.
– 30 –
1. See From
the Folks Who Brought You the ‘Halbotts’:
Clinton Taps the Hard Left for Embassy
Helsinki, (
March 1994).
2. Concerning Dr.
Shearer’s efforts to flim-flam the
Foreign Relations Committee, see ‘Contempt
of Congress’: Shearer’s Apparent Untruths
to Senate Bespeak Larger, Ominous
Problems With Clinton Team,
(No. 94-28, 15
March 1994) and Center
Commends Foreign Relations Committee
Republicans for Opposing Dismal Clinton
Emissaries, (
March 1994).
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