THE WHITE House has stumbled into yet another embarrassing blunder over FBI files.
President Clinton has been forced to apologise to senior Republican figures whose secret FBI files had been sent to the White House for vetting, even though they had left there following the 1992 election.
The President's chief of staff Mr Leon Panetta, admitted that it was "inexcusable" for the White House to have confidential FBI files on prominent Republicans and that all of them deserved an apology.
President Clinton endorsed the apology but insisted it was a "completely honest" bureaucratic mistake "when we were trying to straighten out who should get security clearances to come to the White House".
But Senator Robert Dole, who steps down today after 35 years on Capitol Hill, said the matter "smells to high heaven". He compared it to the Watergate scandal which drove President Nixon from office.
Other Republican leaders are threatening to call for congressional hearings which would oblige the White House to supply internal files and to testify.
Among senior Republican figures who had served under President Bush and whose FBI files were being searched by the Clinton administration were former Secretary of State, Mr James Baker former chief of staff, Mr Kenneth Duberstein, and Mr Tony Blankely, now press secretary to the Speaker, Mr Newt Gingrich. In total, 340 FBI files on people who served in the Bush administration were improperly obtained.
The White House explanation is that an army civilian employee, Mr Anthony Mareca, was given the job of updating the security files on the officials who had served in the Bush administration and had been kept on under President Clinton. He was given an out of date list by the Secret Service and the mistake was only spotted after a new person was appointed to do the vetting job.
Mr Mareca says that he recalls only three files with "derogatory information" which he handed over to his superior for further vetting but no action was taken. The rest of the files were then stored in the White House archives but their existence there was revealed last week when they were immediately handed back to the FBI.
Although the incident appears to be a bureaucratic muddle, it comes at a time when the Republican opposition is in full cry after President and Mrs Clinton over Whitewater and other personal matters. The existence of the files has been revealed as a result of a congressional inquiry into the dismissal of the White House travel office in 1993, allegedly at the instigation of Mrs Clinton. She has denied this but according to the notes of an official she was involved.