According to Sean McCormack, the State Department spokesman, on January 9, February 21 and March 14 of this year, because of "an outrageous breach of security and privacy", the passport records of Sen. Barack Obama were accessed by three contract workers.
McCormack added that "was imprudent curiosity on the part of these three, separate individuals".
These three U.S. State Department contract workers declared in a conference call that they had the agreement of the State Department's inspector general for conducting an independent investigation regarding the problem.
Obama’s spokesman for the campaign, Bill Burton, replied that "Our government's duty is to protect the private information of the American people, not use it for political purposes". He also demanded to know the name of the persons "who looked at Senator Obama's passport file, for what purpose and why it took so long for them to reveal this security breach".
A spokesman for New York Senator Hillary Clinton declared that if this proofs to be true is blamable and "the Bush administration has a responsibility to get to the bottom of it."
A similar situation occurred in 1992, when the Democratic presidential candidate Bill Clinton's passport and citizenship files had been searched by the State Department officials. The investigations took place in the same time with Republican attacks on Clinton regarding his participation on a Vietnam anti-war movement, being a student, and also a trip to Moscow.
The news concerning the passport breach coincided with Obama’s speech regarding the race relations with his longtime Chicago pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.
The latest survey shows that Hillary Clinton overtook Obama (49 percent to 42 percent) in the contest to select the Democratic nominee to confront Republican Sen. John McCain in November. This is the picture of the popular feeling.
Clinton expected a rerun of Michigan's contested Democratic presidential primary, but Obama was against it. Both Michigan and Florida Democratic primaries were invalidated. The cause: party directives were overlooked and the balloting was held earlier. |
