This was such a predictable announcement it's humorous. Last night, as soon as I heard that Obama's file had been breached, and it became national news, I knew the only way the administration could put out the fire was to announce that the same thing had happened to the other candidates.

8 years of antics like this and you get to know how these people think.

Does anybody smell a giant rat here?

trainees are encouraged to do test searches

they usually pick a family member

I wonder if the same private contractor that set up the WH email system is also running this. Makes me feel so safe.

And one other thought--

Is it literally beyond Congressional Democrats to organize all of these surveillance issues into one hearing? Can they not get Mark Klein, the Quantico Switch guy, anyone mentioned in the WSJ article on the NSA driftnet, and whoever else might be relevant, etc., into one big hearing on the dangers of unfettered government surveillance?

Why isn't this being strategized on Capitol Hill as we speak? Why am I, a lowly LA writer, able to think like this and they're not?

Well I guess someone should delineate the downsides of such a hearing before I crow about my tactical brilliance, but I'm not seeing any yet.

It's unbelivable to me that they think they can get away with not disclosing the name of the contractor or the names of the individual. They will probably not be able to avoid it, but the fact that they want to is quite interesting.

Who is the contractor? Does it make any difference that the IG "Cookie" Krongard was forced to resign in December for obstructing the investigation into Blackwater USA? Why did the Bush administration feel the need to leak the Obama story to the friendly Washington Times? Was there another whistleblower ready to blow the whistle?

The more we learn, the less we know, and of course "It is our policy never to comment on an ongoing investigation."

We have been hearing a lot lately about how important Washington experience is.

I seem to recall that Condi Rice used to be the National Security Adviser to George W. Bush before taking all her Security Experience and applying it to running The State Dept. in a very secure manner.

You are doing a heck of a job Ricey!!!!

Hmmmm ..despite three separate breaches the news only reaches Condi Rice, now?

NOTE: This tactic was used against Bill Clinton in 1992. In 1992 the initial reports were also portrayed as innocuous (Hillary and McCain also had breaches they are telling us):

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E0CE0D8143EF936A25753C1A964958260&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all

But there were hints that partisan politics were behind the intial report:

Officials of two of the news organizations involved, The Associated Press and Hearst Newspapers, said they had asked for Mr. Clinton's visa, passport, draft and citizenship records because of claims made to them by Republicans that Mr. Clinton, the Democratic Presidential nominee, had tried to renounce his citizenship in the 1960's...
The [State] department also confirmed that Elizabeth Tamposi, the Assistant Secretary of State for Consular Affairs, a political appointee of Mr. Bush's former chief of staff, John H. Sununu, took personal charge of the records search, an extremely unusual move for someone in her position.

Upon further investigation we learned initial reports were highly misleading:

Here's what they did to Bill in 92.

Passportgate

In 1992, for instance, George H.W. Bush’s White House pulled strings at the State Department and at U.S. embassies in Europe to uncover and to disseminate derogatory information about Bill Clinton in the final weeks of the campaign.

The Bush 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 tampering story to attack Clinton’s patriotism on a variety of fronts, including his student trip to Moscow in 1970. With his patriotism challenged, Clinton saw his once-formidable lead shrink. Panic spread through the Clinton campaign.
The Bush camp 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 [a] guest of the KGB,” Bush wrote in his diary that day.
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 an 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 National Archives warehouse in Suitland. The brief congressional check discovered that State Department political appointees had gone out to Suitland 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.

Not Letting Go

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. On Oct. 9, the FBI complicated Bush’s strategy further 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 the documents I obtained years later at the National 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 the right 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?”

PuhLEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEZE!!!
This is NO coincidence...Obama has been a world citizen since childhood...stay tuned folks. We already know about his highly ambitious kindergarten essay, lol...it is about to get far worse..manufactured dirt is hardest to disprove. We may need the FBI to stop this one.

I WANT TO FIX HILLARY CLINTON FOR STAYING WITH BILL WHEN SHE SHOULD HAVE DIVORCED HIM OVER:
1. HIS ANTIMASTURBATION
2. HIS CHEATING ADULTERY
ALSO IM AGAINST HER NOT LISTENING TO ME ABOUT VOTING AGAINST THE ANTI POKER BILL (PHONE CALLS, LETTERS) AND RECEIVING FUNDING FROM HEALTH INSURANCE COMPANIES WHEN THEY ARE ALREADY OVERCHARGING AND AGE DISCRIMINATING. I ALSO BELIEVE LIKE JOE LIEBERMAN THAT BILL CLINTON SHOULD HAVE BEEN IMPEACHED AFTER ILLEGALLY CHEATING ON HIS WIFE.

And oddly, the one who was only suspended was the one who supposedly snooped on McCain...Time was, I'd have scoffed at anyone who theorized that, say, the McCain move was a deliberate smokescreen to disguise the latest in the great tradition of political snoopage; I miss that time...

Which companies are the usual ones for contracting this kind of govt work? Any big Repub ones that would flag our attention if their names were released? If State Dept continues not to release the names of the companies and the individuals, then the Obama campaign should make a HUGE PUBLIC issue of State Dept respecting the privacy of the law-breakers rather than respecting the privacy of the victim. Every citizen can identify with that point: bush admin protects the law-breakers, not the victims.

Like others, I believe that the Obama records were breached, and when the matter became public, then the Clinton and McCain breaches were fabricated and thrown out there. The Clinton breach was hardly on the level of the Obama breach. What was the date of Rove's retirement again?

Josh Marshall is right: The Clinton breach is, "not really in the same category" as the Obama breaches. And with regards to McCain, there's still too little info to be able to weigh it against the Obama breaches.

So even with the little we know so far, there's quite a distinction playing out here, and if we break down under the following criteriae, that distinction becomes more apparent:

[1] the number of incidents
[2] the "breachees" (# of breachees; independent contractor(s) or State Dept. employee(s))
[3] the circumstances, timing and significance
[4] the State Dept.'s actions (separate from the yet to be explained breakdown in system of not reporting any of the breaches up the chain of command, as well as the reasons why these breaches were not made known until yesterday).

In the Clinton case:

* There was a one time breach.
* The "breachee" was a "trainee" in the State Dept, and not an independent contractor.
* The circumstance was that the State Dept. was facing that massive backload of cases and the breach occured during a training session of those individuals who had been brought in to provide additional help to work through those cases.
* The timing was back in the summer of 2007 back when those case backloads were occuring.
* The trainee was admonished .

In the Obama case:

* There were 3 separate breaches.
* Each 3 breaches, were conducted by 3 different people and in all 3 instances, those breaches were conducted by independent contractors.
* Those 3 breaches happened over a period of at least 70 days, in 3 different months of this year, in Jan., Feb., and March.
* The timing, as Josh noted last nightt, "would be the day after the New Hampshire primary, the day of the Democratic debate in Texas and the day the Wright story really hit."
* Two of those independent contractors were fired, and the 3rd person (who, according to MSNBC about an hr. ago, conducted the most recent breach on Mar. 14) on Sen. Obama (and McCain's) files was only disciplined (suspended).

One can imagine the NSA trainees being told to go ahead and pick a telephone number to listen in on...just to see how it works. I see an SNL skit in the making.

"Paranoia strikes deep into your life it will creep "
David Crosby
Could the contractors have been trying to insert something into Obama's passport file ?
Why did they have to go at it three times -if there was "no there -there" - could they have been trying to fabricate something ?
Just asking - in this current climate its getting really weird enough for even a prevarication to be placed in a front runners passport record .(Maybe the third breach was to remove the inserted untrue info once all this was outted on Olbermann,,,heckuva job brownie ) ...

I just drove through a apartment complex - near a military base. Some idiot - literally had on his window.

"Obama's a sleeper"

WTF - People are so stupid.