On the recordSeptember 11, 1996
I believe my colleague would be correct if he had said that that was a precise quotation from the President. He described this as a bureaucratic snafu. This was a couple of years after the White House counsel's office began investigating the whole thing according to this very memo and identified it as a scandal in the making. Only, they identified it just to themselves, not to anyone else. Yet when it first burst upon the national scene, it was for the President to say, this is merely a bureaucratic snafu. Now we know that the administration was at least criminally incompetent if not malevolent in abusing the privacy of scores of honest public servants.
Source
govinfo.gov
