So is the Justice Department investigating the breach of Barack Obama's (and Hillary Clinton's and John McCain's) passport files or not? CNN quotes a Department spokesman as saying that prosecutors have "met with officials from the State Department Inspector General's office on this matter, and are coordinating with the Office of Inspector General on its investigative efforts."

But at this point, the Department of Justice can't be said to be actually investigating, just sort of keeping stock of things, apparently. "A knowledgeable official" tells CNN that it's too much to call this a "joint investigation" -- which is the same stance that the State Department had on Friday.

A statement from Sen. Barack Obama's (D-IL) Senate office:

"This afternoon, State Department officials briefed staffers from the offices of Senators Obama, Biden, Clinton, and McCain for approximately 90 minutes. There are still many unanswered questions, including why these passport files were accessed and for what purpose. Senator Obama believes a thorough investigation of these privacy breaches is necessary and expects one that is prompt and thorough."

From NBC News:

Two of the government contractors who allegedly took a peek at Sen. Barack Obama's passport records worked for a Virginia-based firm called Stanley, Inc., according to U.S. government officials with knowledge of the State Department passport controversy.

Stanley, Inc., is headquartered in Arlington, Va. and is employee-owned. The State Department awarded it a contract for $164 million in 2006. The contract calls for Stanley to print and mail millions of new U.S. passports.

NBC News contacted a Stanley, Inc., spokeswoman this afternoon, and informed her that two sources had confirmed that employees at her firm were involved with the scandal. The spokeswoman would only comment: "We've been directed by the State Department to direct all media calls to them."

The government officials tell NBC News that Stanley Inc. fired the two workers. A worker at a second contracting company, not related to Stanley, Inc., also allegedly took a look at the Obama files and those belonging to Sen. John McCain. That person has been disciplined but not yet been fired, State Department officials say.

One Stanley, Inc., contractor allegedly looked at Obama's passport records on January 9, and then a second Stanley employee allegedly took a peek at similar Obama records on February 21, the officials said. Stanley, Inc., fired both workers after the alleged security breaches were discovered, the officials added.

For now, this much is clear: the State Department's inspector general -- or its acting inspector general since Cookie Krongard resigned in scandal -- will be handling the investigation into the passport breaches for the foreseeable future.

Although the State Department's inspector general has contacted the Justice Department about the breaches, that doesn't mean the Justice Department is actually investigating, State Department Spokesman Sean McCormack explained today during a briefing:

I wouldn't characterize this as a joint investigation. I'll let the DOJ characterize their level and nature of involvement.

We have invited them in to participate in the way that they see fit, again, for the reasons that I talked about: as a hedge against any potential further action that might be required that would require the DOJ to take a look at whether or not they would take any action. Again, that's completely their call.

It's just a way of ensuring that there is openness and transparency, and that if there is any need for further action, beyond just the I.G. investigation, that the Department of Justice would have the option of looking at what it is they would or would not do, having had access to all the information and how we did the investigation from the very beginning.

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

Another Watergate? The scheming of would-be plumbers searching for vulnerabilities in the possible Democratic presidential nominee's past?

Or three bored cube rats who were just looking out of "imprudent curiosity?"

Thrice this year, on Jan. 9, Feb. 21 and March 14, contract employees of the State Department accessed Sen. Barack Obama's (D-IL) passport file. So far, everything beyond that simple data point is unclear.

The State Department refuses to release the names of the contractors (there are apparently two) or the employees -- two of whom have been fired, one "disciplined." It's not clear what information, exactly, they accessed -- "whether the employees saw anything other than the basic personal data such as name, citizenship, age and place of birth that is required when a person fills out a passport application."

And, of course, it's not clear why they were doing it. The verdict of a "preliminary investigation," the State Department says, is that they were motivated by "imprudent curiosity."

And at this point it's unclear who will do more than a preliminary investigation. Although Undersecretary of State Patrick F. Kennedy told reporters last night that they were asking the State Department's inspector general (an office still stinging from the resignation of Cookie Krongard) to investigate, but as the AP points out, the inspector general probably wouldn't be able to do much because the employees no longer work for the Department. So who else will? The searches may have violated the Privacy Act, but another State Department official says it's premature to consider whether the FBI or Justice Department should be involved. Meanwhile an "administration official" tells The Washington Times that the FBI is conducting a "preliminary inquiry."

State Department officials say that the breaches came to light as a result of a reporter's query yesterday afternoon (it's not clear exactly what that query was). The Department's database flags the access of the files of "high profile" people, so it was easy to discover the breaches once they were looking for them. Why weren't they discovered before?

"I will fully acknowledge this information should have been passed up the line," Kennedy told reporters in a conference call Thursday night. "It was dealt with at the office level."

So what about those supervisors? It's unclear. The contractors, Kennedy says, do work like data entry, customer service and other administrative tasks for the Department.

The whole thing compels a comparison to 1992, when Steven Berry, a Republican appointee at the Department, was discovered to have pulled Bill Clinton's passport records. The independent counsel selected to investigate, Joe DiGenova, found after a three-year, $2.2 million probe, that Berry had indeed been up to no good, but no one higher up the chain had known about it and it wasn't criminal anyway.

The State Department is apparently going to be briefing the Obama campaign later today. We'll keep you updated.

Late last week, Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) sat down with The Chicago Tribune and The Chicago Sun-Times for 90 minutes each to answer questions about all things Tony Rezko.

As a result, the Tribune's editorial board pronounced themselves satisfied:

U.S. Sen. Barack Obama waited 16 months to attempt the exorcism. But when he finally sat down with the Tribune editorial board Friday, Obama offered a lengthy and, to us, plausible explanation for the presence of now-indicted businessman Tony Rezko in his personal and political lives.

The most remarkable facet of Obama's 92-minute discussion was that, at the outset, he pledged to answer every question the three dozen Tribune journalists crammed into the room would put to him. And he did.

The outcome of the more combative Sun-Times interview seemed similar, so that near the end, there was this exchange:

Q: Comparing the benign-ness of the fact pattern and the trouble it's caused you, do you think you've mishandled this at all?

A: I think that running for president is a series of gauntlets you have to run. And I think that we could have - setting aside the initial mistake which I deserve some blame for, I have acknowledged publicly - I think that understanding that there would be heightened interest in me, that Rezko had been finally indicted and arrested, that there was gonna be a need for us to do this again, I think was, it probably would have been good for us to do earlier. There's no doubt about it.

The main revelation of the two interviews was that Rezko had raised about $100,000 more for Obama than the campaign had disclosed before, making it a total of approximately $250,000. The reason for the discrepancy, Obama explained, was that it was impossible to discover just what contributions Rezko had been responsible for in his state senate and run for the House in 2000. Obama estimated that Rezko helped raise between $50,000 to $60,000 in his run for the House and the remainder for his three state senate campaigns.

And about that house deal. Obama was much clearer about the timeline of how Rezko came to be involved in the deal. Remember that Rezko purchased the side yard of Obama house, raising suspicions that Rezko had helped out as a favor to Obama.

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The connection has dogged Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) ever since it was first reported in November of 2006. With Tony Rezko's trial finally beginning this week, and with the trial expected to last for months, it will keep dogging him.

You know the general outline. In June of 2005, Obama bought a home in Chicago's South Side. On the same day, Tony Rezko bought an adjoining lot, the house's side yard. It was not an isolated association between the two. Rezko was a big-time fundraiser and supporter of Obama, who raised more than $150,000 for Obama's state and federal campaigns over the span of nine years ($20,000 of that was from Rezko himself). Over the past 16 months, Obama has donated almost $160,000 of those Rezko-linked contributions to charity.

Rezko, a big-time real estate developer and mucky-muck in Illinois politics, was indicted in October of 2006 on fraud and extortion charges.

Although Obama's longterm relationship with Rezko has gained plenty of scrutiny, the house purchase has understandably gotten the most. Given Rezko's central role in Illinois' influence-buying and cronyism scandal, suspicion is natural. Obama himself has called his subsequent purchase of a strip of the adjoining lot from Rezko "bone-headed." It's hard not to agree.

There is no sure evidence that the house deal was worse than bone-headed. Not that the question has been put to rest. A number of unanswered questions remain.

For instance, it's unclear whether Rezko was actually doing a favor for Obama: whether Obama could not have bought the house otherwise or whether Obama derived a financial benefit from Rezko's involvement in the deal. The main suspicion has been that Rezko's purchase of the side yard at the seller's asking price allowed Obama's purchase of the house to go through since the seller insisted on closing both properties on the same day. But both Obama and Rezko have said that someone else had bid on the side yard, raising the bidding to the asking price. If that's the case, then Obama could have bought the house without Rezko's involvement. And Obama has said that his family has stayed off the side yard and never used it for family activities.

Obama has acknowleged, however, that Rezko's likely motivation for buying the lot was to curry favor with him. Rezko reportedly admitted as much to his business associates. And as The New York Times reports today, Rezko was so heavily in debt at the time he purchased the lot that he did it under his wife's name in order to protect it from creditors.

And then there's the other big question, whether Obama ever did anything for Rezko in return for his purchase of the side yard or all those contributions. Obama has said that Rezko "never asked me for anything" and "I’ve never done any favors for him.” No substantial evidence has surfaced to contradict that claim. (The Chicago Sun-Times did dig up letters from Obama in 1998, some seven years before the house sale, urging Illinois and Chicago officials to provide funding for a Rezko company to build apartments for senior citizens, but both Obama and Rezko denied that Rezko had asked Obama to write the letters, and there's no evidence to the contrary.)

As Rezko's trial nears, you're sure to hear the two names raised together again and again. And you'll be hearing about that house purchase. So we're laying it all out here. We've compiled the main details in our timeline of Rezko and Obama's relationship here.

Recently, NBC News got a good aerial view of the Obama's home and side lot, which is now owned by Michael Sreenan, a former business attorney of Rezko's:

Back in 2004, the home's owner put both parcels on the market. There was no fence between the two properties, since the undeveloped land served as the house's side yard, but the properties were listed separately.

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