Campaign Spot reader Ken points out another interesting little wrinkle in the Obama passport story (see below)… back on December 29, Joe Conason of Salon.com — perceived, fairly or unfairly, as a fan of Hillary — wrote:
Both Obama and his campaign spokespersons have taken pains to deny the suggestion that he has spent no time in Europe. As he said at the first Democratic debate last April, Obama regards the European Union and NATO as the most important allies of the United States, which would make ignorance of Europe a huge void for an aspiring chief executive.
“I’ve traveled extensively in Europe … I love Europe,” Obama told the Iowa Independent Web site a couple of days ago. But as Clemons noted on the Washington Note, the Obama campaign has not provided much detail on his European experiences and itineraries so far.
Those details are readily available, as indicated in a Chicago Tribune profile of Obama, which covered his 2005 senatorial trip to examine nuclear sites in Russia with Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Ind., then the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. That story, whose deeper theme was Obama’s tutelage in foreign affairs, mentioned that he had traded his blue tourist passport — “which he had taken across Asia, Australia and Africa as well as most of Europe” — for a burgundy-colored passport that identifies him as an official of the U.S. government.
If Obama wants to show where he has been, he merely has to release his passport records. Then everyone would know that his boast about traveling extensively in Europe is true — even if this year he didn’t have time to convene a hearing on the momentous issues affecting our relations with that continent and the world.
Now, again, this doesn’t prove that the State Department contractors who were snooping in Obama’s passport file were doing so on behalf of Hillary (or anyone else, for that matter). But it is interesting that some folks felt what was in those records could prove or disprove a claim Obama had made on the campaign trail.
UPDATE: See this update here — apparently Obama’s passport file would only include identification of places for intended travel, and perhaps not even that. So what would be in the file that would be worth snooping around for?