Barack Obama's passport file was breached without his consent, in violation of the Privacy Act, at least three times this year (on Jan. 9, Feb. 21, and Mar. 14). On Thursday night State Department spokesman Sean McCormack blamed the snooping on mere curiosity. Two of the three contract employees of the Bureau of Consular Affairs reportedly involved were fired, and the third disciplined.
The officials, all contract workers, used their authorized computer network access to look up files within the department's consular affairs section, which processes and stores passport information, and read Mr. Obama's passport application and other records, in violation of department privacy rules, State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was notified of the security breach yesterday, and responded by saying security measures used to monitor records of high-profile Americans worked properly in detecting the breaches.
Mr. McCormack said the officials did not appear to be seeking information on behalf of any political candidate or party.
"As far as we can tell, in each of the three cases, it was imprudent curiosity," Mr. McCormack told The Washington Times....
In this case, it does not appear that records were copied or altered, Mr. McCormack said.
There's clearly a concerted effort by the administration to portray the three breaches as trivial and coincidental.
A senior official told NBC News there was "no political motivation" to the incidents, adding that the three were low-level contract employees doing administrative work and accessed Obama's records out of "curiosity."
This official told NBC News that he does not believe any of the information was sent anywhere.
It could well be that nothing much was afoot; there are fools at every level of this administration. Indeed, this government has failed terribly in maintaining the privacy of records, especially when it hires private contractors to do its work.
However the last time a Bush occupied the White House, in 1992, another Democratic presidential candidate had his passport files rifled. And just as today, the initial cover story floated by the White House to explain the snooping portrayed it as innocuous.
The State Department confirmed today that senior officials personally took charge of a routine request for Gov. Bill Clinton's consular records and ordered a sweeping search for information from the 1960's about his travels in Europe.
The department said the search, conducted here and in London, was fruitless. It also said the search was a routine response to requests from news organizations. But an official of the American Embassy in London said officials there dealt with the search urgently because of its political overtones.
There were just a few hints that partisan politics might lie behind the cover story:
Officials of two of the news organizations involved, The Associated Press and Hearst Newspapers, said they had asked for Mr. Clinton's visa, passport, draft and citizenship records because of claims made to them by Republicans that Mr. Clinton, the Democratic Presidential nominee, had tried to renounce his citizenship in the 1960's...
The [State] department also confirmed that Elizabeth Tamposi, the Assistant Secretary of State for Consular Affairs, a political appointee of Mr. Bush's former chief of staff, John H. Sununu, took personal charge of the records search, an extremely unusual move for someone in her position.
After lengthy investigations, however, we learned that the initial story was highly misleading and omitted crucial details.
In 1992, for instance, George H.W. Bush’s White House pulled strings at the State Department and at U.S. embassies in Europe to uncover and to disseminate derogatory information about Bill Clinton in the final weeks of the campaign.
The Bush assault on Clinton’s patriotism moved into high gear on the night of Sept. 30, 1992, when assistant secretary of state Elizabeth Tamposi – under pressure from the White House – ordered three aides to pore through Clinton’s passport files in search of a purported letter in which Clinton supposedly sought to renounce his citizenship.
Though no letter was found, Tamposi still injected the suspicions into the campaign by citing a small tear in the corner of Clinton’s passport application as evidence that someone might have tampered with the file, presumably to remove the supposed letter. She fashioned that speculation into a criminal referral to the FBI.
Within hours, someone from the Bush camp leaked word about the confidential FBI investigation to reporters at Newsweek magazine. The Newsweek story about the tampering investigation hit the newsstands on Oct. 4. The article suggested that a Clinton backer might have removed incriminating material from Clinton’s passport file, precisely the spin that the Bush people wanted.
So are there any hints that today's explanation may not be the full story? Well, funny I should ask. We're told that each time Obama's file was rifled, an investigation began automatically.
Monitoring systems are tripped when an employee accesses the records of the high-profile individual, a department official told NBC News. "When the monitoring system is tripped, we immediately seek an explanation for the records access. If the explanation is not satisfactory, the supervisor is notified."
That's odd. McCormack stated on Thursday that the contractors who employed the workers were contacted "immediately" in each instance. Thus three separate investigations, the first going back more than two months, and the news reaches Condoleezza Rice only now?
On Thursday evening, the Obama campaign emailed to Daily Kos the following statement.
"This is an outrageous breach of security and privacy, even from an
Administration that has shown little regard for either over the last eight
years. Our government's duty is to protect the private information of the
American people, not use it for political purposes. This is a serious
matter that merits a complete investigation, and we demand to know who
looked at Senator Obama's passport file, for what purpose, and why it took so long for them to reveal this security breach," said Obama campaign
spokesman Bill Burton.
That's a reasonable thing to ask, and all the more urgent it seems when a member of the Bush family resides in the White House. I'd like to add my own request, if an investigation does turn up political wrongdoing, that this time Democrats not participate in sweeping it under the Oval Office carpet.
Oh, and this won't be adequate:
Speaking to reporters in a conference call, U.S. officials said they had asked the State Department's inspector general to conduct an independent investigation of the matter.
State Department Inspector General Howard Krongard cannot be trusted with this investigation. [Correction: As astute readers have pointed out, Krongard resigned in December 2007. Thanks for the fact-checking. SusanG.]