A FUNNY THING HAPPENED...

By GEORGE J. CHURCH

It's hard to believe we were so stupid. But we'll do our damnedest to convince you we were exactly that stupid. It's better than having you believe we were misusing the FBI to help us smear top Republicans.

That is not what voters would ordinarily hear from the White House during an election campaign. Presidential aides, however, stuck doggedly to just that line in trying to explain the concededly inexcusable White House request for secret FBI files on some 700 people, mostly low-level workers in the Reagan and Bush administrations but also including prominent Republicans.

Moreover, the White House scored a sort of Pyrrhic victory. In two days of House and Senate hearings, Republicans could unearth no evidence that Clintonites used the files to construct a Nixonian enemies list. In fact, the Republicans could not establish that any officials above a rather low level had seen the files. G.O.P. probers who began last week thinking they might uncover a Watergate-size scandal ended up focusing on a less momentous query: Who hired Craig Livingstone?

Less momentous, but still embarrassing to the Administration. Livingstone announced his resignation as head of the Office of White House Personnel Security from the witness table in the 90 minutes of hearings, but he remained a focus of the investigation because the files had wound up in his office. So who chose the "beefy former bar bouncer" (his own plaintive summary of how the press has described him) for such a sensitive job? Nobody could give any coherent answer--not even Livingstone, who seemed remarkably vague on many matters. He insisted, for example, that he learned only about a month ago the scope and breadth of the files in his office.

Current and former White House supervisors appeared to have little idea of what people under them had been doing. Former White House Counsel Bernard Nussbaum insisted he did not know that underlings had used preprinted forms with his name on them to ask for the FBI files. Livingstone denied knowing how many files a former deputy, Anthony Marceca, was receiving in a supposed attempt to update the security clearances of career White House employees who had survived the change in administrations.

Marceca told a House committee that he never realized he was working from a sadly out-of-date list of people who had access to the White House. That seems odd, since Lisa Wetzl testified that when she looked at the list after taking Marceca's job in the fall of 1994, one name that shouldn't have been there "jumped out at me." It was the name of Marlin Fitzwater, who had been George Bush's press secretary. (Some other names that Marceca, who had worked in Democratic campaigns, should have recognized: James Baker, Bush's Secretary of State, and Brent Scowcroft, Bush's National Security Adviser.) Wetzl says she then told Livingstone that Marceca had been using an outdated list. She described his reply as "nothing memorable."

And how did Marceca get such an old list? He blamed the Secret Service, which then dispatched Arnold Cole and other agents to the Friday Senate hearing to insist it kept its lists up to date. Under questioning by Democratic Senator Joseph Biden of Delaware, it developed that no one--not the White House staff, not the Secret Service, not the FBI--has an accurate current list of who has access to the White House. Biden exclaimed "this Administration...seems not to know what they were doing" and quoted an unnamed fellow Senator as joking, "Thank God the Russians aren't coming."

A Republican could not have put it more tartly. But the President could live with the embarrassment if the affair would end there. It won't, though.

There will likely be more hearings when Congress reconvenes next week. One fresh mystery: Why did Marceca claim his Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination and refuse to appear at the Senate hearings last Friday? Senators may try to compel him to talk, contending he waived his privilege by testifying to the House two days earlier. Or the Senators may offer him immunity. One way or another, they are most curious to hear whatever it is Marceca does not want to say.

An obvious line of questioning would concern how and why Marceca, a civilian investigator for the Army temporarily attached to the White House, left it when he had reached only names beginning with G in the alphabetically ordered list of people whose files he demanded from the FBI. In a lawsuit filed in Austin, Texas, Marceca declares he believes he was fired--he does not say by whom--because of derogatory information in his own FBI background check. He is suing two Texas women for defamation, claiming they told the FBI falsely that he had Mafia connections, among other things. His suit asks that the FBI be ordered to show him his full file. He contends he got only a "cursory" look, in Livingstone's office, when his file fell on the floor while Livingstone was on the phone. That irony--the man who got 700 other people's files delivered to him unable to get more than an accidental peek at the one on himself--should not distract attention from the object lesson in why access to FBI files should be sharply restricted.

A continuing investigation may also furnish critics more chances to take shots, rightly or wrongly, at their favorite target: Hillary Rodham Clinton. Gary Aldrich, a retired FBI agent who was assigned to the White House for five years, has already started. In a new book, Unlimited Access, he relates all sorts of lurid tales about the Clintons, most consisting of unsubstantiated rumor and secondhand gossip.

More substantively, Aldrich claims to have been told directly by former White House Associate Counsel William Kennedy that it was Mrs. Clinton who got Livingstone his White House job. Kennedy last week denied that. After some backing and filling, Livingstone said that while Kennedy technically hired him, the person he consulted about a White House job was Christine Varney, a former senior White House aide and currently a Federal Trade Commissioner. Last week Varney could not be reached for comment. Another FBI agent who worked at the White House, Dennis Sculimbrene, has charged that it was Mrs. Clinton who insisted that the FBI, which normally updates background checks on career White House employees every five years, review some much earlier. The alleged reason: she suspected them of disloyalty to the new Administration.

Though they have found no dark plot reaching high up in the White House, Republican probers are still skeptical that the lower-level employees were quite as innocently incompetent as they contend. Even if they were, argues Ed Amorosi, spokesman for Republicans on the House government oversight committee, "Anthony Marceca and Craig Livingstone know things about people that they shouldn't know. That's violation enough." No argument there.

--Reported by Jeffrey H. Birnbaum, James Carney and Elaine Shannon/Washington and Hilary Hylton/Austin

More information on the Filegate scandal can be found on TIME and CNN's politics Website at http://AllPolitics.com

With reporting by JEFFREY H. BIRNBAUM, JAMES CARNEY AND ELAINE SHANNON/WASHINGTON AND HILARY HYLTON/AUSTIN