FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Clinton/Gore Email Campaign October 22, 1992 PASSPORT SEARCH ON GOV. CLINTON'S MOTHER SHOWS DEPTHS OF BUSH'S DIRTY-TRICKS CAMPAIGN [Statement by George Stephanopoulos, Communication Director] At the Republican convention in Houston, they spent two days attacking Hillary. . . . I expect them to come after Mother and Chelsea, but they must be saving that for later. -- Bill Clinton, 9/6/92 At long last, have they no shame? Today's revelation that senior state department officials personally searched the passport files not only of Governor Clinton but of his mother blows the lid off the Bush administration's dirty tricks and denials. Make no mistake. This is a monumental abuse of power, an invasion of Mrs. Kelley's privacy, and clearly a willful violation of the Privacy Act and the State Departments' own rules. There is no excuse for a U.S. government agency investigating a citizen who has done nothing wrong, solely for the purpose of assembling a political smear. When caught red-handed in an abuse of power, Bush's aides have responded with a series of evasions and denials. One by one, these alibis have proven to be inaccurate. First, it was reported that the FBI had launched an investigation of alleged tampering with Bill Clinton's passport file. After the White House had wrung publicity from that story, it was reported that there was no evidence of any tampering -- and never had been. Then, it was reported that a senior State Department official, Elizabeth Tamposi, had personally ordered embassy personnel to search for information regarding Bill Clinton. Bush's aides first denied that they had done anything wrong. They said that they were responding to press inquiries. But it is illegal to release a citizen's passport records without that person's written permission. Then they admitted that the actions had been improper, but blamed them on low-level clerks. Now it turns out that three senior officials -- including an Acting Assistant Secretary of State -- personally worked into the night at a government warehouse, digging for dirt on Bill Clinton and his mother. Today's revelation shows that these excuses are false. According to the Washington Post, there were no Freedom of Information Act requests for any information about Mrs. Kelley. That means political appointees in the State Department violated the Privacy Act when they rifled through Mrs. Kelley's files. This is the smoking gun -- proof of a taxpayer-funded dirty tricks campaign. Not since the Nixon campaign of 1972 has there been such a pattern of misuse of government agencies to smear an opponent. Here are some of the excuses offered by Bush's aides, all of which have been shown to be absurd: ALIBI: All these searches were in response to FOIA requests from the news media. TRUTH: There were no FOIA requests for documents relating to Mrs. Kelley. [Washington Post, 10/22/92] TRUTH: Even the FOIA requests for Gov. Clinton's files were prompted by Republican rumor-mongers. "The FOIA requests were filed by news organizations in response to rumors, fed in part by Republicans, that Clinton once had explored changing his citizenship during the Vietnam War. Clinton has flatly denied this, and no evidence to the contrary has ever surfaced." [Washington Post, 10/22/92] ALIBI: "One of the reasons [Tamposi] did this is because the day before the people had gone to pull the files from Suitland had found these indications that there might have been some tampering with the files." [State Department Spokesman Richard Boucher, 10/14/92.] TRUTH: There was "no evidence" of tampering with Bill Clinton's passport file, according to the FBI. [Newsweek, 10/19/92] National Archive officials have said that they told State Department officials that there was nothing suspicious about the file. [Washington Post, 10/20/92] ALIBI: Bush's aides first claimed that proper procedures were followed. "...[T]he question of timing, of speeding it up or slowing it down was not the issue. The issue was how to conduct a proper search and do it carefully... This was a request where Freedom of Information sent the memo up and there were specific, identifiable files that they could just go up and look for." [Richard Boucher, 10/14/92] TRUTH: The next day, Boucher admitted that he had been wrong. "That particular designation and other negotiations were clearly a mistake... And it was particularly a mistake to formally designate any of these cases as expeditious handling." [10/15/92] TRUTH: State Department rules provide for only two circumstances in which FOIA requests may be expedited -- when "an individual's life or safety would be jeopardized by the failure to process a request immediately," or "whenever it is shown that substantial due process rights of the requester would be impaired by the failure to proceed immediately . . ." [22 CFR Section 171.12(b)] ALIBI: The search was ordered by low-level staff. "The notations were made by low-level people working on the cases trying to reflect the urgency which the requesters in the media had placed on their requests. They were not done with any instructions." [Boucher, 10/15/92] TRUTH: As today's Washington Post reported, three top State Department officials -- including an Acting Deputy Assistant Secretary of State and a political appointee - worked until 10:00PM at a government warehouse, and returned the next day, searching the records of Bill Clinton and his mother. [Washington Post, 10/22/92] In any case, Tamposi herself is far from a "low-level" official. A protege of John Sununu, she was a former Republican candidate for Congress and political appointee. - 30 -