Passport inquiry widens

Saturday, March 22, 2008

Passport inquiry widens

Secretary of State Rice apologizes to Sens. Clinton, Obama and McCain, and promises full investigation.

Desmond Butler and Anne Flaherty / Washington Post

WASHINGTON -- The passport files of all three major presidential candidates were breached by unauthorized searches by four employees, the State Department said Friday, prompting apologies from Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, outrage from the candidates and calls by lawmakers for further probes.

The State Department had announced Thursday night that two contract employees had been fired and a third disciplined for separately examining Sen. Barack Obama's passport file in January, February and March.

No sooner had Rice gotten off the phone Friday morning after expressing her regrets to the Illinois Democrat and pledging a full investigation, when the department announced that the passport files of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., and Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., had also been inappropriately reviewed. Rice quickly placed apologetic calls to Clinton and McCain, as well.

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"We are going to do an investigation through the inspector general, who will get to the bottom of it and make certain that nothing more was going on," Rice told reporters.

The nearly 200 million passport files maintained by the State Department contain individuals' passport applications, which include such raw data as each applicant's Social Security number and physical description. Otherwise, the files provide rather limited information; they do not contain records of overseas travel or visa stamps from previous passports.

The State Department said it is examining whether laws were broken.

Bush administration officials Friday struggled to explain why repeated attempts to look at the files were not known by senior officials until they received a reporter's inquiry Thursday. The two employees fired for examining Obama's file worked for Stanley, a Virginia firm that has handled passport processing for 15 years and this week won a five-year, $570 million contract.