The Dirty Tricks Start Already

by Steve Soto

This is Condi’s “No one could have imagined” State Department at work:

Two contract employees of the State Department were fired and a third person was disciplined for accessing passport records of Sen. Barack Obama "without a need to do so," State Department officials confirmed to NBC News.

The three people who had access to Obama's passport records were contract employees of the department's Bureau of Consular Affairs, NBC News has learned. The unauthorized activity concerning Obama's passport information occurred in January.

According to NBC, Obama's records were "breached" not once but three times over a two-month period from January to now, and yet Obama was just told about this in the last 24 hours. Worse yet, the Mukasey Justice Department has still not opened an investigation of something that happened two months ago involving a security breach involving a Democratic presidential candidate, Why does the State Department even have contract employees doing anything with passport records, let alone those from one of the two likely Democratic candidates for president?

Update: The State Department tells the media tonight that they first heard about the breach from a reporter today, and that no senior official knew anything about these three separate breaches by three separate contract employees over the last two months until today.

How come no one is asking the obvious question: How did the reporter find out?

Update #2: If the official story is true, that this did not involve the Bush political team but rather lower levels of the bureaucracy, does this not raise the possibility that a Clinton holdover could also be involved?