Here's a comment that says what I wanna say better than I could say it:
"Because State Department managers failed to recognize the potential seriousness of these offenses, which could have involved tampering with the presidential election process, the State Department has suffered a monumental failure of management and therefore can't be trusted to investigate them. It would be equivalent to investigating itself.
Whether or not the State Department asks the FBI and Justice Department to open an investigation, since violations of law did occur (improper access to these files was a misdemeanor under the Privacy Act), the Senate and House subcommittees in charge of overseeing State Department operations must immediately start investigations of these events — and complete them quickly.
Those investigations should include asking to question and if necessary subpoena all three employees who illegally accessed these records, and fully examine their previous associations as well as contacts in the period since the files were accessed, taking care to interview their friends and colleagues to try to determine if any information about Senator Obama was shared with third parties (which would be a felony).
It is essential that this investigation continue until the possibility is excluded that the motive of these contract employees was an attempt to penetrate the State Department to obtain negative information about Senator Obama. That possibility can only be fully discounted by a thorough congressional investigation, not by an investigation conducted by any part of the Bush Administration.
Nothing is more important than the sanctity of the people's right to have exclusive control over the nomination and election of a president. When the privacy of a serious presidential candidate is invaded and a crime has been committed when doing so, that control is placed in jeopardy. What is at stake is not merely the confidentiality of Senator Obama's passport records, and not only the question of whether political shenanigans have occurred. It is whether or not we are going to have a serious democracy in this country.
Will Democrats in Congress recognize that? -Tribunus Plebis, on March 20th, 2008 at 8:55 pm
I believe that that comment was written before the news came out that Hillary Clintons' passport file was breached sometime in 2007 [!] and McCain's passport file was also breached [though I can't remember the stated date that was said to have occurred].