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Waxman Queries State Dept. on Names of Contractors Behind Obama Passport Breach
House sleuth Henry Waxman (D-CA) has questions. His full letter to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is below:
Dear Madam Secretary:Yesterday, Ambassador Patrick Kennedy, the Under Secretary of State for Management, confirmed that three contract employees working for two State Department contractors gained unauthorized access to the passport records of Senator Barack Obama. When Ambassador Kennedy was asked for the identities of the contract employees and the companies, however, he declined to provide them:
Question: Are you releasing the names of any of these three contractors or the companies for which they were contracting on behalf of the State Department? …Ambassador Kennedy: In a word, no.
I am writing to request that you provide the Oversight Committee by Monday with the identities of the companies involved in these breaches. I also believe this information should be made publicly available.
The Committee on Oversight and Government Reform is the principal oversight committee in the House of Representatives and has broad oversight jurisdiction as set forth in House Rule X.
Sincerely,
Henry A. Waxman
Chairman
Remember the passport backlog that the Administration created in 2007 that they had to scramble to rectify? Unnecessarily delaying travelers and prompting calls for "volunteers" to make passports.
All because they didn't plan.
Yet there was still time to snoop through existing files during that crisis?
Doesn't smell good.
March 21, 2008 12:15 PM | Reply | Permalink
At least he tries, but I doubt he's going to get anywhere. Rice is notoriously contemptuous of oversight. What's he going to do if she tells him to f*ck off, ask Mukasey to investigate? Talk about the one person in the world who could possibly make Krongard look ethical.
March 21, 2008 12:18 PM | Reply | Permalink
Ridiculous that the government will protect contractors, but will eat the lunch of any government employee who disagrees with it.
March 21, 2008 12:29 PM | Reply | Permalink
Contractors/corporations run the American government - legally or illegally as necessary to get whatever they want. Rice is not about to sell them out. And it's clear that Mukasey will stall and stall and stall over providing anything to any congressional committee until the end of this administration.
Thanks to him, no one in the White House of any stature will be held accountable for any wrong doing of any sort - at least on Mukasey's watch.
His behavior so far has made that clear. Forget justice.
You don't have to be a blind conservative not to see it, just an ignorant one to deny it.
March 21, 2008 1:42 PM | Reply | Permalink