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Subject: State Official Took Clinton File Home; Tamposi Said to Hold Passport Data
Date: Sat, 14 Nov 92 11:48:46 EST
Message-ID: <9.1992Nov14.114846@AmeriCast.com>

State Official Took Clinton File Home; Tamposi Said to Hold
Passport Data Overnight<By Walter Pincus and Michael
Isikoff=Washington Post Staff Writers= Former assistant secretary
of state Elizabeth M. Tamposi had Bill Clinton's passport records
delivered to her house on the night of Sept. 30 after the docu-
ments were discovered during an unusual evening search by three
Tamposi deputies at a National Archives warehouse in Suitland,
according to knowledgeable sources.

Tamposi's decision to have the Democratic presidential
candidate's records brought to her house in suburban Virginia and
to keep them there overnight is expected to be cited by the State
Department's inspector general next week as one of several irre-
gularities and violations of department regulations uncovered in
a wide-ranging investigation into the preelection search for the
passport files of Clinton, his mother and Ross Perot.

Tamposi has told State Department officials that she took person-
al possession of the Clinton file in order to keep the records
secure after having been told they appeared to have been tampered
with, according to sources.

Tamposi's Washington lawyer, Thomas C. Green, said yesterday that
as head of the consular bureau, Tamposi had, in his view, "the
authority to possess and examine documents that were within the
domain of her office. Where she did it is a red herring."

Tamposi has maintained to investigators that she did not share
the Clinton records with anyone outside the State Department,
sources said.

But other sources familiar with the inspector general's probe say
investigators have already uncovered evidence that Tamposi, a
former Republican fund-raiser and state legislator from New
Hampshire, had discussed the political implications of the Clin-
ton files with associates, including Steven K. Berry, assistant
secretary of state for legislative affairs.

Investigators also have interviewed senior White House aides and
Republican campaign officials in an effort to determine whether
Tamposi or any of her deputies involved in the search were acting
on the instructions or suggestions of persons outside the State
Department.

One administration official familiar with the matter said that
Tamposi had shown "appalling judgment" in having the Clinton
records brought to her house and then keeping them overnight.
Although the passport records are not classified, the contents
are protected by the Privacy Act and access is restricted to in-
dividuals who need them for official government business.

This official said he believed that Tamposi's actions in having
the records at her house would have been one of several grounds
for her removal from office had not President Bush ordered her
dismissal earlier this week.

Bush's decision on Tuesday to fire Tamposi came shortly after it
was disclosed that Tamposi's deputies had also searched the
passport files of Perot during the campaign, prompting Perot to
accuse the administration of a "gross abuse of federal power."

The renewed criticism from Perot irritated the president, sources
said. "Perot was the straw that broke the camel's back," said one
administration official. "The president had had enough."

The extraordinary search at the National Records Center original-
ly was explained as fulfilling expedited Freedom of Information
Act (FOIA) requests from three news organizations.

During the initial search on Sept. 30, three Tamposi deputies -
then acting deputy assistant secretary of state Carmen A. DiPla-
cido, chief of passport program support Richard P. McClevey and
special assistant Steven Moheban - visited the Suitland facility
about 6:10 p.m. and spent four hours screening passport files.
They looked for records on Clinton and his mother, Virginia Kel-
ley, under his original surname of Blythe and his adopted name of
Clinton.

The officials found three passport applications by him, all filed
under Clinton - one in 1968 when he first went to England as a
student, another in 1976 reporting his earlier passport as lost
or stolen, and a third in 1978.

According to an account Tamposi has provided associates, DiPlaci-
do called her at home at about 10:30 p.m. on Sept. 30 to tell her
there were indications the Clinton papers had been tampered with
at some earlier time.  She expressed interest in seeing the docu-
ments herself and asked they be brought to her Northern Virginia
townhouse.

After the documents were delivered, Tamposi has said she conclud-
ed there might have been tampering with the files and kept them
for safekeeping at her home that night. "They were never out of
her possession," the source said.

The next day, Tamposi says she raised her concerns with Under-
secretary of State for Management John F.W.  Rogers, setting off
a chain of events that led to a brief FBI investigation into the
alleged tampering. Within a few days, the FBI determined there
was no evidence to support the allegation.

Among the questions that remain unanswered is what documents the
State Department officials hoped to find in the passport files
and why political appointees at the State Department thought a
search was worth the effort. The FOIA requests from the news or-
ganizations had been submitted in September during a period of
widespread rumors - some of them fueled by Republican campaign
officials - that Clinton had once inquiried about renouncing his
U.S. citizenship.

Under the Privacy Act, passport and other files on Clinton could
not be released to news organizations without his approval or a
court order. State Department officials insisted when the search
first came to light that whatever they found would not be
released, but their practice was to search the files anyway to
see what existed.

At the same time, Republican congressmen and Bush-Quayle campaign
officials were escalating their attacks on Clinton for having en-
gaged in protests against the Vietnam War. They sought to tie his
antiwar activities to a holiday trip he took to Moscow in the
winter of 1969 while he was a student at Oxford University in
England.

On Sept. 29, Washington Post columnist Jim Hoagland was told by a
senior Republican campaign aide that the Bush-Quayle campaign was
researching Clinton's trip to Moscow and hoped to use it to raise
questions about Clinton's truthfulness in recounting his student
activities.

One logicial place to look for evidence on these questions was
the Passport Office. According to sources familiar with its
operations, the Passport Office had once retained tens of
thousands of pages of "classified" passport files on individuals,
including reports, photographs and other material about U.S. ci-
tizens submitted by the FBI, the CIA and other U.S. intelligence
agencies.

Such records had been compiled largely under the direction of
Frances G. Knight, a staunch anti-Communist who during her tenure
as chief of the Passport Office between 1955 to 1977 had worked
closely with FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover during his tenure. The
ostensible purpose for the file, also known as the "alpha file,"
was to determine if a passport applicant had engaged in activi-
ties that would make the person ineligible to receive one.

During the late 1960s, sources said, the Passport Office routine-
ly received copies of voluminous FBI reports on prominent dis-
sidents, antiwar protesters and student activists - the product
of Hoover's extensive surreptitious monitoring of the antiwar
movement.

"If you demonstrated before the U.S. Embassy in London (as Clin-
ton had done), the chances are you would be watched by people and
reports would be compiled with photographs and names," said one
knowledgeable source. Those reports, the source added, would then
have been forwarded to the alpha file.

Sources said that many of the classified alpha files were des-
troyed by the Passport Office in the late 1980s after officials
became concerned retention of such records might violate the
Privacy Act. But sources said that that for a variety of reasons
some "highly sensitive" material, including files on politically
prominent individuals, was left intact among State Department do-
cuments in the warehouse facility where the officials searched
Clinton's files.

Ironically, the passport officer who supervised the partial des-
truction of the alpha file was McClevey - one of the Tamposi
deputies who conducted the search at Suitland.

One theory, so far unconfirmed, is that the reason the Tamposi
deputies made such an extensive search at Suiltand was in hopes
of finding undestroyed copies of alpha file material on Clinton.
"That's what they were looking for - it's the only thing that
makes sense," said one knowledgeable source familiar with the
passport files.

The search at Suitland was particularly significant because
Bush-Quayle campaign officials had already despaired by that
point of obtaining access to whatever FBI files might exist on
Clinton.

The FBI, like the State Department, had received several Freedom
of Information Act requests for material on Clinton. But the
bureau had a 12-month backlog of FOIA requests, and FBI Director
William S. Sessions had issued clear instructions that none would
be expedited for the election.  "The instructions from the direc-
tor were that we are going to treat every request using the same
procedures," said one bureau official. "We treated them (FOIA re-
quests on Clinton) through the normal course of business."<11:02
11-14C9999-----

Copyright 1992, The Washington Post.  This story is from the
Washington Post's Capitol Edition On-Line and is not to be ar-
chived or redistributed.

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