2 fired for looking at Obama’s passport file

WASHINGTON — Three State Department contractors improperly accessed Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama’s passport records on three occasions, department officials said Thursday night, and an investigation into their motives and backgrounds is under way.

Two contractors were fired, and the third has been disciplined, said State Department spokesman Sean McCormack. He said the department’s computerized monitoring system flagged all three instances.

“It’s our initial view that this was imprudent curiosity on the part of these three individuals,” McCormack said, but he added federal officials would examine the workers’ backgrounds and what information they obtained.

It was unclear what the contract employees did with any unauthorized information reviewed.

Obama spokesman Bill Burton called the incident “an outrageous breach of security and privacy, even from an administration that has shown little regard for either over the last eight years.”

“Our government’s duty is to protect the private information of the American people, not use it for political purposes,” he said.

The State Department declined to release the workers’ names or their two employers. Contract employees aren’t asked about their partisan affiliations in background checks prior to being hired, said Undersecretary Pat Kennedy, but “this becomes a germane question ... to look into.”

The breaches happened Jan. 9, Feb. 21 and March 14. Kennedy said the department’s senior management first became aware of them Thursday. Obama’s office is to be briefed in more detail today. It was unclear why it took so long for management to be notified of the incidents.

Obama, who represents Illinois, was born in Hawaii and, as a child, lived in Indonesia for several years. As a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he has traveled to the Middle East, the former Soviet states with Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Ind., and Africa. His father was born in Kenya, and the senator still has relatives there.

There have been other, similar breaches involving public officials.

During the 1992 presidential campaign, officials in the administration of President George H.W. Bush searched the State Department files of then-Democratic nominee Bill Clinton. An inspector general’s report called the search improper and said it was aimed at finding material damaging to Clinton’s campaign.

At the time of the searches, which took place Sept. 30 and Oct. 1, 1992, Republicans were criticizing Clinton for anti-Vietnam War activities when he was a student at Oxford University in England in 1969-70.

The Associated Press contributed.