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Subject: Ousted State Dept. Aide Denies Wrongdoing; Tamposi Is Said to Tell Inquiry She
Date: Thu, 12 Nov 92 04:42:06 EST
Message-ID: <14.1992Nov12.044207@AmeriCast.com>

Ousted State Dept. Aide Denies Wrongdoing; Tamposi Is Said to
Tell Inquiry She Was Unaware of Perot and Virginia Kelley File
Searches<By Walter Pincus and Michael Isikoff=Washington Post
Staff Writers=

Former assistant secretary of state Elizabeth M. Tamposi,
dismissed this week amid allegations she directed State Depart-
ment officials to dig up politically damaging information on
President Bush's opponents, has denied wrongdoing in the matter,
telling investigators she did not even know her subordinates had
checked the passport files of Bill Clinton's mother and Ross
Perot until she read about the searches in the newspaper, sources
said yesterday.

Tamposi has told investigators for the State Department's inspec-
tor general's office that she did authorize searches for material
on President-elect Clinton but did so solely in response to Free-
dom of Information Act (FOIA) requests from news organizations,
the sources said. Tamposi said she had no role in how the
searches were conducted and higher-level State Department offi-
cials were aware of them at the time they were made, the sources
said.

Tamposi told investigators that one of her deputies - Carmen A.
DiPlacido - was responsible for directing the extraordinary two-
day search involving Clinton's passport records at the National
Records Center in Suitland on Sept. 30 and Oct. 1, the sources
said. During that search, DiPlacido and two other Tamposi aides
also examined the passport records of Clinton's mother, Virginia
Kelley.

The sources said Tamposi told investigators she had cleared the
search beforehand with Undersecretary of State for Management
John F.W. Rogers and told him what took place immediately after-
wards. According to Tamposi, Rogers offered no objection to how
the search was conducted.

Tamposi also said that on Oct. 2 she ordered the passport files
of Clinton, Perot and Bush sequestered in her office - a step she
said she took to prevent the records from being used for politi-
cal purposes in the campaign, according to the sources. Tamposi
said that a memo she drafted on Oct. 2 about the order was dis-
tributed to senior State Department officials, including acting
Secretary of State Lawrence S.  Eagleburger.

Bush's records had been retrieved after he became president in
1989, obviating any need to conduct a search for them, the
sources said.  Other than a brief public statement denying wrong-
doing released Tuesday night, Tamposi has been unavailable for
public comment since her dismissal. But friends of the former
State Department official who have discussed the matter with her
in recent days agreed to talk on condition they not be named and
have described her as upset at being singled out for blame in the
matter.

The actions of Tamposi, a former Republican state legislator from
New Hampshire who was appointed to her State Department job by
Bush in 1989, are at the center of an inspector general's inquiry
ordered three weeks ago and expected to be completed by early
next week. Tamposi has hired veteran Washington criminal defense
lawyer Thomas C. Green to help her respond to questions from
department investigators.

According to sources familiar with the inquiry, the investigators
have questioned 60 individuals about the passport searches, in-
cluding Bush-Quayle campaign officials and at least five White
House aides.  A focus of the inquiry has been whether Tamposi and
her deputies were acting on their own initiative or received in-
structions from Bush-Quayle campaign aides outside the State
Department.

Tamposi has told investigators she talked to no one outside the
department about the passport searches.

Earlier this week, sources said, investigators questioned White
House aide Margaret Tutwiler, former assistant secretary of state
for public affairs, after discovering Tutwiler's name on
Tamposi's phone logs. Tamposi and Tutwiler have both told inves-
tigators that, while Tamposi did place a call to Tutwiler, the
White House aide did not take it and the two have not spoken to
each other since well before the searches.

Sources also said that another White House aide, Janet Mullins,
former assistant secretary of state for legislative affairs, was
contacted because she was among dozens of persons listed on the
phone logs of Steven K. Berry, a political appointee who replaced
Mullins at the legislative affairs post. The sources said that
Berry had received numerous inquiries from Republican members of
Congress about rumors relating to Clinton's protests against the
Vietnam War while Clinton was a student at Oxford University in
1969, as well as his trip late that year to the Soviet Union.

Berry and Tamposi discussed these inquiries and the FOIA requests
dealing with Clinton, sources said. Tamposi has maintained she
was unaware of Clinton's anti-war activities at the time she au-
thorized the passport search, though the activities had been pub-
licly reported and were becoming a campaign issue.

Other White House officials listed on Berry's phone logs also
have been interviewed briefly by department investigators. One of
them said he had a "one minute" phone conversation with an inves-
tigator who asked simply if Berry had spoken to him about the
Clinton passport issues.

Sherman Funk, the State Department's inspector general, refused
to comment yesterday on the investigation.

Tamposi was dismissed Tuesday shortly after President Bush phoned
Eagleburger in response to a Washington Post report about the
search of Perot's passport file. In a statement released late
Tuesday, Tamposi said: "I took no action that I deemed wrong or
inappropriate. At no time did I initiate or attempt to expedite a
review of any passport files."

The search of Perot's passport records on Oct. 13 was particular-
ly questionable because, according to a senior department offi-
cial, there were no FOIA requests seeking such records. Tamposi
did not mention the Perot search in her statement, but said, "I
did not approve, encourage, or condone any review of passport
records other than those specifically identified in the FOIA re-
quests."

According to sources, Tamposi has said DePlacido was the first to
suggest there may have been tampering with Clinton's file, rais-
ing the issue in a Sept. 30 phone call while he and two other
Tamposi aides were combing the files at the Suitland facility.
The next morning, by Tamposi's account, Tamposi took the Clinton
files, showed them to Rogers and described what had taken place.

Reached at his home yesterday, DePlacido said he could not com-
ment and hung up the phone.<Staff writer Ann Devroy contributed
to this report.<02:15 11-12C9999-----

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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