Passport files of McCain, Clinton, Obama all breached
A day after word came out that three State Department workers had taken unauthorized looks at Obama's records, additional incidents are uncovered. Condoleezza Rice apologizes to the three candidates.
Washington -- The passport files of the three remaining major presidential candidates were improperly accessed by State Department workers, officials said today, in a disclosure that prompted personal apologies from Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.
Embarrassed officials said an investigation begun Thursday has revealed that since last summer, one staff trainee and three contract workers in the department's passport bureau poked into passport application files that contain Social Security numbers and other personal and family information.
Officials said they believe the workers were motivated by nothing more than "imprudent curiosity," but they have not ruled out more serious motives, and have asked the department's inspector general to investigate the issue.
Rice said this morning that she had called Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) "and told him that I myself would be very disturbed that somebody had looked into my passport files.... None of us wants circumstances where any American's passport files are looked at in an unauthorized way."
Later in the day, Rice called both Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY) and Sen. John McCain to express similar sentiments, and to promise that the department intended to get to the bottom of the issue, officials said.
The incidents came to light Thursday evening with the disclosure that three contract workers had snooped in Obama's file in incidents between January and mid-March. State Department officials began additional checks, and by this morning had discovered that supervisors in the Office of Passport Services knew of incidents involving all three of the major candidates.
The disclosures brought statements of concern from the candidates, advocates of greater privacy protection, and critics of the administration. The blogosphere came to life with theories that the incidents had political motives.
Obama said he wanted a congressional investigation into the incidents, while Clinton's campaign said in a statement that she intended to "closely monitor" the State Department's probe. Two of the contract workers have been fired, while one contract worker and the trainee have been admonished but remain on the payroll.
Officials said they are still investigating whether the workers broke any law, and whether the lower-level supervisors broke any rules by failing to pass along to superiors word of the explosive incidents.
