BUREAUCRACY WATCH : Passport Follies

Elizabeth M. Tamposi has been deservedly fired from her political-appointee job as chief of the State Department’s consular bureau, about 10 weeks shy of when the advent of the Clinton Administration would have seen her out the door anyway.

Tamposi left with a carefully worded written statement denying she took any action “I deemed wrong or inappropriate.” If that’s the case then Tamposi’s standard of rectitude would appear to differ markedly from what the law requires and what respect for the nonpartisan traditions of the State Department compels.

The searches of old passport files on President-elect Bill Clinton, his mother and--as was learned just this week-- on independent presidential candidate Ross Perot that were carried out under her auspices during the presidential campaign clearly violated the department’s regulations and the protections of the Privacy Act.

The department says it will make public its full internal report on this matter within a few days. From it might be learned whether Tamposi acted on her own, as a zealous partisan trying to dig up dirt on President Bush’s political opponents, or whether she was doing the bidding of Republican campaign officials or someone in the White House. Whatever the motivation, the actions themselves represented a chilling official effort to use protected personal information for political advantage. Such illicit invasions of privacy by federal authorities did not begin with the Watergate scandal two decades ago. Neither, as we have seen again, did they end with it.