[UPDATES] Hillary Clinton’s Passport Breached in 2007; Larry Johnson on AC360 re Obama/Passport Non-Crisis
By SusanUnPC on March 21, 2008 at 11:55 AM in Barack Obama, Larry Johnson, State Department
UPDATE: (From Larry Johnson) Just got off the phone with an old boss and friend who had been a senior official in the Passport office. … SEE THE REST OF LARRY’s 12:30 p.m. Friday update at the end of this story.
(Earlier) BREAKING: Hillary Clinton’s passport was breached in 2007, CNN reports. Adds Mark Halperin at Time‘s blog, The Page:
Clinton Senate office statement says candidate had been contacted by Rice to say her passport file was breached in 2007.
NBC News also says they’ve confirmed McCain’s has been breached as well.
[And Fox News adds that Bill Clinton's was breached in 1992 when he was a presidential candidate.]
BELOW: Video and Larry’s remarks last evening here regarding his appearance on CNN’s AC360:
(From Larry Johnson)–Folks, this is really a non-story. If high level political appointees were involved then one could make the case that someone was up to something unsavory. But you have two low level contractors and different points in time. The State Department will probably have to do an official investigation to demonstrate they were not acting on behalf of a candidate. However, they were fired when their bosses at State discovered they had been snooping.
But what could they find: Apart from his Social Security Number, all other information on the passport application is already public by virtue of Barack’s books and what has been written about him during his presidential campaign. Here’s the application. Look at it for your self. I am assuming he had a passport as very young child by virtue of his travel to Indonesia. So there may be some unflattering passport photos. But otherwise, he has not been a globetrotter. We know he has not visited Europe. His only real overseas travel before joining the Senate was to Africa. And the passport records do not contain info about that trip, other than the date he made the trip. People with no need to know should not have been checking out his documents, but at the end of the day there is no there there.
(Hat tip to CS for getting me the youtube version of my chat with Anderson Cooper. Great work as always.)
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UPDATE at 12:30 P.M. FRIDAY: (From Larry Johnson) Just got off the phone with an old boss and friend who had been a senior official in the Passport office. The sneak peeks at the files of Obama and McCain have no parallel with what was done in the Bill Clinton case. With Bill Clinton, senior political appointees helped direct an effort centered in London to produce data about Clinton’s activities in England when he was a student. They found nothing.
I have confirmed what I opined last night–the unauthorized activity was detected early on and the people who were trolling on Obama’s file were detected and fired. The problem was that the officials who detected this activity did not realize that they needed to inform their superiors. They did not understand that this was politically sensitive. However, when the investigation is done it will be demonstrated that the safeguards in place to detect unauthorized access worked and the offenders were punished.
And to repeat for the umpteenth time, the only information in Obama’s passport file that is not public is his complete Social Security number. The faux outrage about his privacy being violated is ridiculous. No information was released and the unauthorized access was detected and punished. Obama’s troops are fanning these flames in hopes of diverting attention from his Uncle Jeremiah issue. Ahh, politics.
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