MAN BEHIND THE MESS

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Several former colleagues believe that Livingstone must have noticed the list was somehow faulty--he had been in politics for a decade, after all--but that he continued to let the files come in because he enjoyed the covert thrill of it all. "I think he made a stupid mistake that mushroomed far beyond what he could have imagined," says a friend. Livingstone's lawyers deny that he was running any kind of freelance operation. He was so busy trying to process background checks on Clinton staff members, they say, that he never had time to pay attention to, or even initiate, Project Update. At the White House Friday, Livingstone signed a sworn statement saying he had not asked anyone to obtain the FBI files and that he had not disclosed the information to anyone "for any improper purpose whatsoever." But Livingstone's know-nothing defense does not seem to be winning him any points inside the White House. That Livingstone "doesn't appear to have closely overseen this operation," says associate White House counsel Mark Fabiani, "is one of the troubling things about this."

The Nefarious Plot. Whitewater conspiracy buffs will find in Livingstone a Zelig-like character who was on hand for most of the Administration's darkest moments. On the day of the travel office purge, in May 1993, he wrote the memo barring the workers from the White House. When Vincent Foster committed suicide, in July 1993, he accompanied associate counsel William Kennedy III to identify the body. The next morning, two Secret Service agents said, they saw Livingstone leaving the elevator that connected to Foster's office suite with a briefcase and box of loose-leaf binders (Livingstone denied removing documents from Foster's office). Because of these provocative appearances, Livingstone was deposed by various investigatory panels, including the Senate Whitewater Committee, and ran up enormous legal bills. (He has started a defense fund.) The investigators focused on better-connected figures after concluding, in the words of a committee source, that Livingstone was "more or less clueless."

But that picture does not match the one offered last week by Gary Aldrich, a former FBI agent who spent five years assigned to the White House. He describes Livingstone as someone who seemed to be executing orders from higher-ups--his bosses during the Administration's first year were Kennedy and White House counsel Bernard Nussbaum, both staunch Hillary Clinton allies--in a White House that repeatedly violated the rules surrounding background investigations of White House employees. In an account that appeared on the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, Aldrich charged that staff members considered trustworthy by the Clintons could avoid background checks while permanent White House employees "whose loyalty to the Clintons was in question" were subjected to security investigations years before their periodic re-investigations were due. When Aldrich tried to stop the practice, he says, Livingstone "effectively told me to mind my own business."