State Dept. Breach of Obama’s File

People working for the State Department committed unauthorized breaches of Obama’s passport file on three separate occasions, but there is totally nothing to see here, the State Department assures us.

The records were accessed on Jan. 9, Feb. 21 and March 14. Senator Obama was not notified until yesterday, March 21.

McCormack said it was not immediately clear what the contract employees may have seen in the records or what they were looking for. He said he did not know the names of the companies they worked for.
. . .
The State Department does not check the political affiliation of its contractors, but 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 when they accessed Obama’s records. This official told NBC News that he does not believe any of the accessed information was sent anywhere.

The don’t know anything, but if they knew one thing, it would be that the motivation was not political.

Obama’s files were first accessed after he defeated Sen. Clinton in Iowa. This look similar to unauthorized searches in 1991-1992 of then-Presidential hopeful, Bill Clinton’s passport file under the previous Bush administration.

The Obama campaign issued a 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.

And, just for the record, it’s entirely possible that nothing especially nefarious was going on here. That’s the beauty of this unpredictable universe: many, many improbable things are possible.

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Meanwhile, Sen. Obama points out the obvious – the War in Iraq is costing us dearly:

“When you’re spending over $50 to fill up your car because the price of oil is four times what it was before Iraq, you’re paying a price for this war,” Mr. Obama said to an audience at the University of Charleston. “When Iraq is costing each household about $100 a month, you’re paying a price for this war.”
. . .
“No matter what the costs, no matter what the consequences, John McCain seems determined to carry out a third Bush term,” Mr. Obama said. “That’s an outcome America can’t afford. Because of the Bush-McCain policies, our debt has ballooned.”
. . .
“The more than $10 billion we’re spending each month in Iraq is money we could be investing here at home,” Mr. Obama said. “Just think about what battles we could be fighting instead of fighting this misguided war.”

Those in favor of staying in Iraq indefinitely resolutely refuse to engage in a cost/benefit analysis of the War in Iraq; preferring instead a Manichean tunnel-vision where there is only “winning and losing” (curiously without a definition of ‘winning’); the only options are “surrender” and, apparently, staying for ever.