White House Overruled Secret Service On Passes

WASHINGTON (AllPolitics, July 17) -- A Secret Service agent has told House investigators the Clinton Administration overrode his agency's objections and gave White House passes to some employees with a history of illegal drug use.

The agent, Arnold Cole, testified the past illicit drug use was discovered during FBI background checks. Because of it, the Secret Service denied passes to a number of employees, but they got access after a voluntary, drug screening effort was created in May 1994.

Cole, who supervised White House control operations, said the drug testing was begun to allay the Secret Service's fears that the drug use could "compromise the security of the White House without some other mechanism in place."

Cole's testimony to staff of the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee occurred last Wednesday and was released today. The panel is investigating how and why the White House obtained several hundred sensitive FBI background files on former workers in the Bush and Reagan administrations.

In a related development, Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.) has said he plans hearings on the background checks of 21 White House staff members who enrolled in the voluntary, drug monitoring effort, because of past illegal drug use. The White House has criticized it as another election-year attack on the president.

White House press secretary Mike McCurry, in discussing the drug use/access question, said he smoked marijuana during the 1970s, but that past drug use does not disqualify him from working at the White House. Nor should drug use disqualify others, he said.

"The point is, if I use drugs now, in any shape or form, I'm gone, I'm history," McCurry said in his daily White House briefing.

"I was a kid in the 1970s," McCurry said. "Did I smoke a joint from time to time? Of course I did. The FBI knows that. That doesn't disqualify me from serving here."

White House Overruled Secret Service On Passes

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