Whitewater matter; Democrats on the committee immediately criticized Starr for withholding all these findings until after the 1998 Congressional elections.) In March 2000, Independent Counsel Robert Ray, Starr's successor, issued the office's final report on the matter, as part of a concerted effort to wrap up all Whitewater-related cases before the end of Bill Clinton's term. Ray determined that there was no credible evidence of any criminal activity by any individual in the matter. It attributed the improper collection of the files by Marceca due to his having an outdated Secret Service list of White House passes, as Marceca had originally claimed. It stated that even though Marceca's statements were sometimes "contradictory and misleading", they were "sufficiently transparent" and there was insufficient evidence to prove that Anthony Marceca had made false statements to Congress during his testimony. The report ascribed the FBI files matter to "a failure of process at many levels," saying that the Secret Service had provided critically erroneous data, and that this was compounded by the White House's informal process of requesting sensitive information by "inexperienced, untrained, and unsupervised personnel with backgrounds as political operatives." Based on an investigation that included the prior fingerprint analysis, the report further stated that: Ray's report also concluded that there was no credible evidence that Bernard Nussbaum testified falsely about not having discussed Livingstone's hiring with the First Lady, and found as well that there was no personal relationship between the First Lady and Livingstone that had formed the basis for his hiring. Judicial Watch lawsuit Separately from the Independent Counsel investigation, Judicial Watch, a conservative watchdog group, engaged in long-running litigation over the White House personnel file controversy. It was initially filed in September 1996 and sought $90 million in damages. Judicial Watch's Cara Leslie Alexander et al. vs. Federal Bureau of Investigation et al. class action lawsuit, filed on behalf of five low-level former members of the Reagan and George H. W. Bush Administrations, alleged that Livingstone, along with Anthony Marceca and William Kennedy, obtained the files and then rifled through them. Judicial Watch in particular alleged that Kennedy had abused the FBI background report process. Judicial Watch founder and Clintons antagonist suprême Larry Klayman attracted enough attention with the case to have the recurring Larry Claypool character modeled after him on the television series The West Wing. As late as January 2000, Judicial Watch was filing affidavits in