Bill Clinton: “Let's go back to the first question--there are two separate questions. I read Senator Rudman's report. I thought it was…”

“Let's go back to the first question--there are two separate questions. I read Senator Rudman's report. I thought it was quite interesting and had a lot of very helpful analyses of how this problem developed. And there were actually two separate organizational recommendations that he made in the alternative: either that the labs could be put under an independent board, or that the labs should be taken out of the present hierarchy of organization because of the culture--the committee--the Rudman group talked a lot about the culture of the labs and its resistance to oversight. He said another alternative might be to take it out from under the present organizational structure and make it directly answerable--the labs-- directly answerable to the Secretary's Office. And he posed those things in the alternative. I have asked our people to look at it. I have talked to Secretary Richardson about it. I think everyone recognizes that he has worked very hard to deal with the underlying security issues, which are the most important things. And I think we all just ought to try to get together and work out what the best organizational structure is, and I expect that we will be--I expect to have a chance to talk to him about that and to work on it. But I think the Rudman report was a service to the country, and I think that Bill Richardson is doing a good job on trying to implement the security measures that are necessary. He's being very, very aggressive. Now, on the second question, I went back--I've been interested in this question, and I went back and looked at exactly what I said. Let me go back to what the facts are. First of all, there's been a 20-year problem with lax security at the labs. And what I said was that I didn't suspect that any actual breaches of security had occurred during my tenure. Since then, we have learned of the offloading of the computer by Mr. Lee, from the secured computers into his personal computers. That's something we know now that I didn't know then. But I think my choice of wording was poor. What I should have said was I did not know of any specific instance of espionage, because I think that we've been suspicious all along. And I have to acknowledge, I think, I used a poor word there. I think suspicion is--we have been suspicious all along, generally. We did not have any specific instance, as we now do, of the offloading of the computer. But I also want to emphasize that I took no particular comfort in that, because what we have here is--what I learned in 1997 was that there was a general problem of very long standing with the security at the labs, and I issued the Executive order in early '98 to clean it up. And Secretary Richardson has been working on it since then. And I think we've made a lot of progress since then. Yes. Medicare”