Robert Parry: Obama's Passportgate: Historical Echo

[seafan]

(Robert Parry allows unlimited use of his articles at consortiumnews.)


The substance of the next attack against Barack Obama will be to question his PATRIOTISM. This is the blueprint.


http://www.consortiumnews.com/2008/032008.html">Obama's Passportgate: Historical Echo





By Robert Parry
March 21, 2008

Five presidential elections ago, when another George Bush was in the White House and when Bill Clinton was the Democratic nominee, State Department officials conducted an improper search of Clinton’s passport files, an echo of the current case in which Barack Obama’s passport files were penetrated three times this year.

The State Department announced on March 20 that two State Department contractors were fired and a third disciplined for accessing Obama’s files. Based on preliminary information, it was unclear what the motive of the Obama search was.

In 1992, the evidence revealed that representatives of George H.W. Bush, then fighting for a second term, pulled strings at the State Department and at U.S. embassies in Europe to uncover and disseminate derogatory information about Bill Clinton’s loyalty and his student trips to the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia.

That assault on Clinton’s patriotism moved into high gear on the night of Sept. 30, 1992, when Assistant Secretary of State Elizabeth Tamposi – under pressure from the White House – ordered three aides to pore through Clinton’s passport files in search of a purported letter in which Clinton supposedly sought to renounce his citizenship.

Though no letter was found, Tamposi still injected the suspicions into the campaign by citing a small tear in the corner of Clinton’s passport application as evidence that someone might have tampered with the file, presumably to remove the supposed letter. She fashioned that speculation into a criminal referral to the FBI.

Within hours, someone from the Bush camp leaked word about the confidential FBI investigation to reporters at Newsweek magazine. The Newsweek story about the tampering investigation hit the newsstands on Oct. 4.

The article suggested that a Clinton backer might have removed incriminating material from Clinton’s passport file, precisely the spin that the Bush people wanted.
Immediately, President George H.W. Bush took the offensive, using the press frenzy over the criminal referral to attack Clinton’s patriotism on a variety of fronts, including his student trip to the Soviet Union in 1970. With his patriotism challenged, Clinton saw his once-formidable lead shrink. Panic spread through the Clinton campaign.

Bush allies put out another suspicion, that Clinton might have been a KGB “agent of influence.” Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s Washington Times headlined that allegation on Oct. 5, 1992, a story that attracted President Bush’s personal interest.

“Now there are stories that Clinton … may have gone to Moscow as guest of the KGB,” Bush wrote in his diary that day.

Democratic Suspicions

The suspicions about Clinton’s patriotism might have doomed Clinton’s election, except that Spencer Oliver, then chief counsel on the Democratic-controlled House International Affairs Committee, suspected a dirty trick.
“I said you can’t go into someone’s passport file,” Oliver told me in a later interview. “That’s a violation of the law, only in pursuit of a criminal indictment or something. But without his permission, you can’t examine his passport file. It’s a violation of the Privacy Act.”

After consulting with House committee chairman Dante Fascell and a colleague on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Oliver dispatched a couple of investigators to the Archives warehouse in Suitland.
The brief congressional check discovered that State Department political appointees had gone to the Archives at night to search through Clinton’s records and those of his mother.

Oliver’s assistants also found that the administration’s tampering allegation rested on a very weak premise, the slight tear in the passport application. The circumstances of the late-night search soon found their way into an article in the Washington Post, causing embarrassment to the Bush campaign.
Yet still sensing that the loyalty theme could hurt Clinton, President Bush kept stoking the fire. On CNN’s “Larry King Live” on Oct. 7, 1992, Bush suggested anew that there was something sinister about a possible Clinton friend allegedly tampering with Clinton’s passport file.

“Why in the world would anybody want to tamper with his files, you know, to support the man?” Bush wondered before a national TV audience. “I mean, I don’t understand that. What would exonerate him – put it that way – in the files?

The next day, in his diary, Bush ruminated suspiciously about Clinton’s Moscow trip: “All kinds of rumors as to who his hosts were in Russia, something he can’t remember anything about.”
But the GOP attack on Clinton’s loyalty prompted some Democrats to liken Bush to Sen. Joseph McCarthy, who built a political career in the early days of the Cold War challenging people’s loyalties without offering proof.

FBI Rejection

On Oct. 9, the FBI complicated Bush’s strategy by rejecting the criminal referral. The FBI concluded that there was no evidence that anyone had removed anything from Clinton’s passport file.
At that point, Bush began backpedaling: “If he’s told all there is to tell on Moscow, fine,” Bush said on ABC’s “Good Morning America.” “I’m not suggesting that there’s anything unpatriotic about that. A lot of people went to Moscow, and so that’s the end of that one.”

But documents about the investigation that I obtained years later at the Archives revealed that privately Bush was not so ready to surrender the disloyalty theme. The day before the first presidential debate on Oct. 11, Bush prepped himself with one-liners designed to spotlight doubts about Clinton’s loyalty if an opening presented itself.
“It’s hard to visit foreign countries with a torn-up passport,” read one of the scripted lines. Another zinger read: “Contrary to what the Governor’s been saying, most young men his age did not try to duck the draft. … A few did go to Canada. A couple went to England. Only one I know went to Russia.”

If Clinton had criticized Bush’s use of a Houston hotel room as a legal residence, Bush was ready to hit back with another Russian reference: “Where is your legal residence, Little Rock or Leningrad?”
But the Oct. 11 presidential debate – which also involved Reform Party candidate Ross Perot – did not go as Bush had hoped. Bush did raise the loyalty issue in response to an early question about character, but the incumbent’s message was lost in a cascade of inarticulate sentence fragments.

“I said something the other day where I was accused of being like Joe McCarthy because I question – I’ll put it this way, I think it’s wrong to demonstrate against your own country or organize demonstrations against your own country in foreign soil,” Bush said.
“I just think it’s wrong. I – that – maybe – they say, ‘well, it was a youthful indiscretion.’ I was 19 or 20 flying off an aircraft carrier and that shaped me to be commander-in-chief of the armed forces, and – I’m sorry but demonstrating – it’s not a question of patriotism, it’s a question of character and judgment.”

Clinton countered by challenging Bush directly.

“You have questioned my patriotism,” the Democrat shot back. Clinton then unloaded his own zinger: “When Joe McCarthy went around this country attacking people’s patriotism, he was wrong. He was wrong, and a senator from Connecticut stood up to him, named Prescott Bush. Your father was right to stand up to Joe McCarthy. You were wrong to attack my patriotism.”

Many observers rated Clinton’s negative comparison of Bush to his father as Bush’s worst moment in the debate. An unsettled Bush didn’t regain the initiative for the remainder of the evening.

Criminal Probe

The search of Clinton’s passport file had other repercussions. Eventually, the State Department’s inspector general sought a special prosecutor investigation for a scandal that became known as Passportgate.

In the end, however, George H.W. Bush escaped any legal consequences from the passport gambit in large part because a Republican attorney, Joseph diGenova, was named to serve as special prosecutor.

DiGenova’s investigation cleared Bush and his administration of any wrongdoing, saying the probe “found no evidence that President Bush was involved in this matter.”

FBI documents that I reviewed at the Archives, however, presented a more complicated picture. Speaking to diGenova and his investigators in fall 1993, former President George H.W. Bush said he had encouraged then-White House chief of staff James Baker and other aides to investigate Clinton and to make sure the information got out.

“Although he did not recall tasking Baker to research any particular matter, he may have asked why the campaign did not know more about Clinton’s demonstrating,” said the FBI interview report, dated Oct. 23, 1993.

“The President advised that … he probably would have said, ‘Hooray, somebody’s going to finally do something about this.’ If he had learned that the Washington Times was planning to publish an article, he would have said, ‘That’s good, it’s about time.’ …
“Based on his ‘depth of feeling’ on this issue, President Bush responded to a hypothetical question that he would have recommended getting the truth out if it were legal,” the FBI wrote in summarizing Bush’s statements. “The President added that he would not have been concerned over the legality of the issue but just the facts and what was in the files.”

Bush also said he understood how his impassioned comments about Clinton’s loyalty might have led some members of his staff to conclude that he had “a one-track mind” on the issue. He also expressed disappointment that the Clinton passport search uncovered so little.

“The President described himself as being indignant over the fact that the campaign did not find out what Clinton was doing” as a student studying abroad, the FBI report said.

Bush’s comments seem to suggest that he had pushed his subordinates into a violation of Clinton’s privacy rights. But diGenova, who had worked for the Reagan-Bush Justice Department, already had signaled to Bush that the probe was going no where.

At the start of the Oct. 23, 1993, interview, which took place at Bush’s office in Houston, diGenova assured Bush that the investigation’s staff lawyers were “all seasoned prof(essional) prosecutors who know what a real crime looks like,” according to FBI notes of the meeting. “(This is) not a gen(eral) probe of pol(itics) in Amer(ica) or dirty tricks, etc., or a general license to rummage in people’s personal lives.”

As the interview ended, two of diGenova’s assistants – Lisa Rich and Laura Laughlin – asked Bush for autographs, according to the FBI’s notes on the meeting.

Czech-ing on Bill

In January 1994, the story about Clinton’s student trip to Czechoslovakia in 1970 took another turn.

The Czech news media reported that former Czech intelligence officials were saying that in 1992, the Czech secret police, the Federal Security and Information Service (FBIS), had collaborated with the Bush reelection campaign to dig up dirt on Clinton’s student trip to visit a friend in Prague.

The centrist newspaper Mlada Fronta Dnes reported that during the 1992 campaign, FBIS gave the Republicans internal data about Clinton’s Moscow-Prague trips and supplied background material about Clinton’s “connections” inside Czechoslovakia.

Derogatory information also allegedly was funneled through officials at the U.S. Embassy and was leaked to cooperative journalists. On Oct. 24, 1992, three Czech newspapers ran similar stories about Clinton’s Czech hosts.

“Bill Was With Communists” was one particularly nasty headline in the Cesky Denik newspaper.

The Czech stories suggested that the first Bush administration would go so far as to collaborate with a foreign secret police agency to undermine a political opponent.

Though the Passportgate case is now only a footnote to the 1992 election – especially after DiGenova cleared Bush and his administration of any wrongdoing – the scandal was viewed as much more important inside George H.W. Bush’s White House.

After Bush’s election defeat in November 1992, chief of staff (James) Baker grew depressed, blaming himself for the passport disaster and the reelection loss. On Nov. 20, 1992, at 10:30 a.m., a despondent Baker visited Bush.

“Jim Baker came in here … deeply disturbed and read to me a long letter of resignation all because of this stupid passport situation,” Bush wrote in his diary. Bush rejected Baker’s offer to resign.

The disclosure that three State Department contractors accessed Obama’s passport files on Jan. 9, Feb. 21 and March 14 may not have the high-level political intrigue of the Clinton passport case, but the intrusion does have a troubling precedent.

Bill Clinton: George H.W. Bush will help President Hillary




America is ready for a new direction.

[mmonk]

1. Yes, I thought about that.

Then it was about "commie" ties. Now it will be about "terrorist" ties. Or we could be way off base and this could be linked to entities such as the ATC or groups such as The Cohen Group or Defense of Democracies or something along those lines.

[tanyev]

2. They've already been attacking his patriotism with all the emails

claiming he's a Muslim and that he refuses to pledge allegiance to the flag.

[seafan]

3. Nov 18, 1992: State Dept. Official Who Searched Clinton's Passport Files Resigns

State Dept. Official Who Searched Clinton's Passport Files Resigns

By ROBERT PEAR
November 18, 1992

A State Department official who carried out the two-day search of passport files for information about Gov. Bill Clinton said today that he had resigned, just 48 hours before Federal investigators are expected to issue a report criticizing the search.
The official, Steven M. Moheban, was a top aide to Elizabeth M. Tamposi, the Assistant Secretary of State for Consular Affairs who was dismissed last week by President Bush for her role in the search of files on Mr. Clinton, his mother, Virginia Kelley, and Ross Perot, the independent Presidential candidate.

.....

He was reluctant to give details about his role in the file search, saying he wanted to wait for a report from the inspector general of the State Department. But the timing of his resignation suggested that he was accepting some responsibility for the search and the way it was conducted.
The inspector general, Sherman M. Funk, and the Acting Secretary of State, Lawrence S. Eagleburger, plan to issue the report on the investigation on Wednesday. Among those it is expected to criticize are Ms. Tamposi and Mr. Moheban, a political appointee who had served as her special assistant since July 1990.

Ms. Tamposi has said that White House officials encouraged the search of Mr. Clinton's records and that her superiors approved it. The inspector general has interviewed White House officials. But it is not clear whether he will assign any responsibility for the search to senior officials at the White House and the State Department, or will merely focus on Ms. Tamposi and lower-ranking employees.
Officials following the investigation said Mr. Funk's report would probably not accuse or absolve anyone outside the State Department. In addition, they predicted, Mr. Funk will probably conclude that officials made contradictory statements to him and that he has no way to resolve some of them.

Ms. Tamposi, a 37-year-old former State Representative in New Hampshire, got her job at the State Department on the recommendation of John H. Sununu, a former Governor of New Hampshire who was President Bush's first chief of staff and was often blamed for many of Mr. Bush's political troubles.

State Department officials say they searched Mr. Clinton's passport file in response to requests filed by several news organizations under the Freedom of Information Act. The department acknowledges that it violated its own regulations by accelerating the search so it would be completed before Election Day.

Mr. Moheban confirmed that he went to a National Archives warehouse in suburban Maryland on Sept. 30 and on Oct. 1 to look for Mr. Clinton's records. Mr. Moheban carried out the search with two career employees of the State Department.
"I went out to the records center to respond to the F.O.I.A. requests," Mr. Moheban said. "I personally was asked by Ms. Tamposi to get involved." Mr. Moheban said his responsibility was to make sure the two Civil Service employees followed proper procedure in performing the search.

Ms. Tamposi says she was told by another State Department official on Sept. 28 that the White House wanted the files checked for negative information on Mr. Clinton. Ms. Tamposi has told associates that she believes the Administration is trying to make her a scapegoat in the incident.

Links in Business Deals

Mr. Moheban's family has been involved in many real estate deals with the Tamposi family in New Hampshire. Maurice L. Arel, a former Mayor of Nashua, said Mr. Moheban had worked for the Tamposi family's real estate business. Ms. Tamposi and her family have raised large amounts of money for President Bush, Mr. Sununu and other Republicans.

In a financial disclosure statement filed with the Federal Government in 1989, Ms. Tamposi reported that she had an investment in a business called Moheban Enterprises. She estimated the value of her interest in the underlying assets at $215,000 to $550,000.
Ms. Tamposi's 1990 disclosure form shows that her family investment company, of which she is a partial owner, wrote off a debt that it was owed by Moheban Enterprises. There is no indication of the amount of the loan, which was deemed uncollectible because of the real estate slump in New England.

On Oct. 1, Ms. Tamposi concluded that someone had apparently tampered with Mr. Clinton's passport file, and she referred the matter to Mr. Funk, who called in the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The bureau concluded on Oct. 9 that there had been no tampering.

Mr. Funk is in the awkward position of having to investigate his own role in the State Department's handling of Mr. Clinton's passport records. Some Democrats in Congress have asserted that the suggestion of tampering was trumped up to create an impression that there was politically damaging information about Mr. Clinton in his file and that someone had removed it.
State Department officials said Ms. Tamposi and Mr. Moheban were looking for documents that would show whether Mr. Clinton had ever considered renouncing United States citizenship or becoming a citizen of another country to avoid military service in Vietnam. No such information on Mr. Clinton was found.

In this year's Presidential election, the Bush-Quayle campaign portrayed Mr. Clinton as a draft dodger, criticized him for taking part in demonstrations against the Vietnam War and suggested that a 1969 trip to Moscow by Mr. Clinton raised doubts about his patriotism and his character.

In the 1950's and 1960's, the State Department's passport office kept a computerized file on more than 243,000 Americans who were suspected of being "subversives" or who might fail to "reflect credit" on the nation abroad.
The existence of the file was not disclosed until 1971, after Mr. Clinton returned to the United States.

Ms. Tamposi told Federal investigators that the search for Mr. Clinton's file had been cleared in advance by a State Department lawyer, William B. Wharton. But in an interview this week, Mr. Wharton said that no one asked for his advice before the search.

(Hat tip to Randi Rhodes for talking about this article today.)

[seemslikeadream]

4. .

[malaise]

5. Moon and the Washington Times again

They're trying to cover this up with the last minute McSameasBush breach.

Truth will out. They are going to get caught one of these days.

Sp.

[robertpaulsen]

6. K & R! Parry, once again, right on target.

:kick: