Appreciate you running this down. Any chance you all will run with the Washington Post's fact check of Clinton's Bosnia trip? She received 4 pinnochios(sp)!

Lead it for idiot Joe Scarborough to tells lies.

He's trying to downplay the connections the Clintons have with Jeremiah Wright

Hillary & Jeremiah

http://www.americablog.com/2008/03/did-hillary-sit-next-to-rev-wright-at.html

Bill & Jeremiah

http://www.politico.com/blogs/bensmith/0308/Jeremiah_Wright_was_White_House_g%20uest.html

Joe who has been sling mud each morning on Morning Joe against Obama, tries to dismiss this news.

It would also appear that Phil Singer had it wrong.

Joe has been doing his best Fox News imitation all week. I caught some of this morning and he was pushing every piece of news and spinning it against Obama. His poor co-host, Mika brzenski was left to chime in only when Joe would take time to draw a breath. I did like Tiki Barber!

He probably realizes this thing is over and he needs to soften up Obama for the general.

MSNBC sure is a schizophrenic network with their competing hosts' political allies.

Scarborough had this wrong?

How about Clinton communications director Phil Singer(you know, the guy responsible for vigorously emailing you and various other media outlets Clinton's perspective on the news) had this wrong, based solely off of unconfirmed and unsourced speculation from Joe Scarborough, a former GOP elected official?

And Obama is running an amateur campaign?

Hillary, for the good of everyone involved, please end this now.

So let me get this right. David Shuster found out about the Clinton connection by DOING HIS JOB!! How novel a concept, an investigative reporter actually doing some investigative reporting.

Greg,

Thanks for this update. Joe Scarborough will surely return your call soon; please don't forget to bring us up to speed then.

Abosolutely anyone who knows the Clintons and has watched Hillary Rove-style campaign knows her operatives may well be behind the Obama file security breach. Obama's campaign does not need to encourage people to suspect the obvious. It is more than enough to learn that a Clinton loyalist was in charge and supressed the information about the breach and allowed three breaches to occur, that Hillary suddenly reveals a breach of her own file from last year (come on!), and then the Clinton campaign attacks Obama in a effort to divert attention from Hillary.

The Clintons will do anything and everything to win, and anything and everything is becoming alarming. Why does the Democratic leadership not intervene. Will they wait until Hillary assures a Republican victory?

SCARBOROUGH'S HEAD ON A PIKE!!

The Obama campaign may not have been behind the story, but Josh Marshall himself was beginning to get a little grassy knoll on us last night. A few more nuggets like that and he'll drive Keith Olbermann to do another Special Comment--"Hillary: The New Gordon Liddy!"

When this race is over, some big names in the liberal blogosphere won't have a leg to stand on when reporting on the rightwing lies in the MSM as they've peddled shameless stories from Penn and Co. without any verification.

"I would eat this up like cake."
-- GOP hatchetman Rick Wilson, who did the 2002 Cleland-Osama morph ads,
talking about what the GOP will do with Obama-Wright connection,

"It’s harder for people to say it’s taken out of context because these are Wright’s own words.
You let people draw their own conclusions. You don’t have to say that he’s unpatriotic; you don’t
question his patriotism. Because I guaran-damn-tee you that, with that footage, you don’t have to."
-- Chris LaCivita, GOP hatchetman who helped craft the Swift Boat commercials against Kerry"

"Filegate" began on June 5, 1996, when Republican Pennsylvania Congressman William Clinger, chair of the House Committee on Government Reform and Oversight, announced that the committee had found during their ongoing "Travelgate" investigations, that FBI background reports on Travelgate figure Billy Dale had been delivered to the White House.[8] The following day, the White House delivered to the committee hundreds of other such files related to White House employees of the Reagan Administration and George H. W. Bush Administration.[8] Initial White House explanations for what had happened varied,[9] and Republicans made various charges, including that the file transfer was motivated by a desire to slander Dale and other White House Travel Office officials and thereby justify their dismissal.[10] At first Attorney General Janet Reno asked the FBI to look into it;[10] FBI Director Louis Freeh acknowledged that both the FBI and especially the White House had committed "egregious violations of privacy"[3][10] (in some cases the background reports contained information about extramarital affairs, trangressions with the law, and medical issues).[11] On June 21 Reno decided it was a conflict of interest for the U.S. Department of Justice to further investigate the matter, and thus recommended that it be folded into the overall umbrella of the Whitewater investigations, under charge of Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr.[8][6]

On June 26, 1996, Clinger's Government Reform and Oversight Committee held hearings on the matter.[12] Livingstone, who announced his resignation at the start of his testimony, and his assistant, Anthony Marceca, insisted during the committee's hearings that the mishandled files were a result of a bureaucratic mixup and that no improper motivations were behind it.[12] They said that when the George H. W. Bush administrative staff left the White House in January 1993, they had taken all the files of the Office of Personnel Security with them for use in the Bush Library, as they were permitted to do under law. The OPS staff were trying to rebuild these records to include those of permanent White House employees who remained to work in the Clinton administration; Marceca, a civilian investigator for the Army, had been hired for this task.[3] In doing so, they received an outdated list from the Secret Service of White House employees, which included many names who were no longer employees. This list was then given to the FBI and the personnel background files returned as a result.[12] Lisa Wetzl, another assistant, testified that she discovered the mistake in mid-1994 and destroyed the request list.[12]

Also called to testify were former White House counsel Bernard Nussbaum and former associate counsel William Kennedy III.[12] Livingstone, Nussbaum, and Kennedy all offered apologies to those whose files had been obtained.[10] On September 24, 1996 the Government Reform and Oversight Committee approved, on party lines, an interim report on the affair, blasting the Clinton Administration for a "cavalier approach" towards sensitive security procedures and saving that further investigation was necessary to determine if the events surrounding the files handling were "a blunder, the result of colossal incompetence, or whether they are established to be more serious or even criminal."[13][9] The Committee does not seem to have ever issued a final report.[14]

The Senate Judiciary Committee was also involved in investigating the matter, holding hearings beginning June 29, 1996,[15] and focussing on allegations that White House was engaged in a "dirty tricks" operation reminiscient of the Nixon administration.[15] Looking into accusations that senior White House officials or First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton may have inappropriately perused the files, in October 1996 Republican committee chair Orrin Hatch requested that the FBI do a fingerprint analysis of them.[16] On November 3, 1996, the FBI informed the committee that no fingerprints of either the First Lady or any other named senior official were on the files.[16]
A secondary question of the Filegate controversy revolved around what the Office of Personnel Security was, who had authorized the hiring of Livingstone, and whether he was qualified for the job. The Office was not responsible for actual White House security, as that was the charge of the United States Secret Service,[3] nor did it perform background checks on potential White House employees, a task done by the FBI,[17] nor did it keep the regular personnel files of employees, which were held in a different office within the White House.[9] Rather, its role was to keep track of who was employed by the White House, make sure their security clearances were up to date, and give security briefings to new hires.[18] Nevertheless, Livingstone seemed to lack qualifications for even this position; he had worked on a number of Democratic Party campaigns and transitions,[17] including being an advance man for the Clinton-Gore 1992 campaign,[3] and his only prior job in the "security" field was that of a local bar bouncer[4] at a Washington, D.C., night club. (At the congressional hearings, Livingstone objected to "false and unfair caricatures of who I am. [...] I have worked hard for little or no pay in political campaigns for candidates who I felt would make this country a better place to live."[17]) Clinton opponents stated that Livingstone had the highest level of security clearances in the U.S. government.[19] White House officials could not explain why Livingstone was hired, nor who had hired him.[12]

An FBI document suggested that Livingstone had been given his position because First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton was a friend of Livingstone's mother and recommended him. Hillary Clinton stated that while she was once photographed with the mother in a large group, she did not know her,[20] was questioned by the Independent Counsel in January 1998,[11] and in 1999 gave a sworn statement that she had nothing to do with Livingstone's hiring.[7] Livingstone also stated under oath there was no truth to the supposed hiring relationship.[7] Hillary Clinton would later refer to the whole affair as a "pseudoscandal".[21]

On November 19, 1998, Independent Counsel Starr testified before the House Judiciary Committee in connection with the Impeachment of Bill Clinton over charges related to the Lewinsky scandal. Here, for the first time, Starr exonerated both President Clinton and the First Lady of complicity in the FBI files matter, saying "while there are outstanding issues that we are attempting to resolve with respect to one individual [we] found no evidence that anyone higher [than Livingstone or Marceca] was in any way involved in ordering the files from the FBI. Second, we have found no evidence that information contained in the files of former officials was used for an improper purpose."[22] (Starr also chose this occasion to clear President Clinton in the Travelgate matter, and to say that he had not committed impeachable wrongdoing in the Whitewater matter; Democrats on the committee immediately criticized Starr for withholding all these findings until after the 1998 Congressional elections.[23])

In March 2000, Independent Counsel Robert Ray, Starr's successor, issued the office's final report on the matter. Ray determined that there was no credible evidence of any criminal activity by any individual in the matter.[24] It attributed the improper collection of the files by Marceca due to his having an outdated Secret Service list of White House passes, as Marceca had originally claimed.[24] It stated that even though Marceca's statements were sometimes "contradictory and misleading",[8] they were "sufficiently transparent"[8] and there was insufficient evidence to prove that Anthony Marceca had made false statements to Congress during his testimony.[7] The report ascribed the FBI files matter to "a failure of process at many levels," saying that the Secret Service had provided critically erroneous data,[8] and that this was compounded by the White House's informal process of requesting sensitive information by "inexperienced, untrained, and unsupervised personnel with backgrounds as political operatives."[8]

Based on an investigation that included the prior fingerprint analysis,[24] Ray's report further stated "there was no substantial and credible evidence that any senior White House official, or First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, was involved in seeking confidential Federal Bureau of Investigation background reports of former White House staff from prior administrations of President Bush and President Reagan."[7]

Ray's report also concluded that there was no credible evidence that Bernard Nussbaum testified falsely about not having discussed Livingstone's hiring with the First Lady, and found as well that there was no personal relationship between the First Lady and Livingstone that had formed the basis for his hiring.[7]

Separately from the Independent Counsel investigation, Judicial Watch, a conservative watchdog group, engaged in long-running litigation over the White House personnel file controversy.[25] Judicial Watch's Cara Leslie Alexander et al. vs. Federal Bureau of Investigation et al. class action lawsuit, filed on behalf of several members of the Reagan and George H. W. Bush Administrations,[26] alleged that Livingstone, along with Anthony Marceca and William Kennedy, obtained the files and then rifled through them. As late as January 2000 they were filing affidavits in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia under Judge Royce C. Lamberth related to the case.[27] In their $90 million lawsuit,[28] they claimed that the First Lady did, despite her denials, know Livingstone — indeed, that Livingstone had bragged to associates he was very close to both the president and his wife, and that Clinton had personally hired him for the security job.[28] (White House defenders pointed out that Livingstone had a long history of exaggerating his importance and connections.[3]) Judicial Watch also said they had five sources who claimed Livingstone had been hired by and worked under the First Lady,[28] and also discovered some photographs of Livingstone in the vicinity of the First Lady (but not talking with him).[19] In December 2002 Judicial Watch obtained a ruling from Judge Lamberth that recently uncovered White House e-mails be searched for possible evidence in the lawsuit.[29], and Judicial Watch founder Larry Klayman and Clintons antagonist suprême said that, "Hillary Clinton was the mastermind of Filegate. She will not escape justice."[29] Klayman and Judicial Watch had a severe falling out in 2003,[30] however; as of June 2007, nothing further appears to have happened in the lawsuit other than a court document filed in April 2004.[26]

Wow, good thing OBama would never do something like this, like personally peddling the lie that the Clinton campaig gave Drudge the turban photo. And instead of the hate, how about if one of you fools responds with anything that substantiates that story?

He's the lead reporter? It's not particularly encouraging that he got Maura Harty's name wrong then...

Call me crazy or uninformed but:

This is from a March 12th Clinton Memo:
"As voters evaluate you as a potential Commander-in-Chief, do you think it's legitimate for people to be concerned that you have traveled to only one NATO country, on a brief stopover trip in 2005, and have never traveled to Latin America?"

Here is the link:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/03/12/clinton-camp-to-obama-yo_n_91156.html

How did the staff know on the 12th of March about Obama's complete international record? Including the very specific "stopover detail" (something you could get from passport records. Does everybody know this stuff? Am I just being delusional by seeing something fishy here. I have been delusional before, so, no worries.

Mike

Scarborough needs to join Tucker in the unemployment line.

They are both hacks with no talent, who depend on their political and family connections to retain their jobs.

Now that Tucker's abysmal ratings finally forced MSNBC to drop him like a cold potatoe, they should take a close look at Morning Joe's constant failures, and decide what it is that he brings to the table.

As far as I can see it, Scarborough's another albatross hanging around MSNBC's ratings neck. No offense to CNN or anyone else, but with Gregory, Matthews, Olbermann and Abrams lined up, I can now watch that channel for a whole stretch and not be compelled to turn the channel out of disgust. Now if they would just give Shuster and Maddow a feature spot, that would be a full line-up.

Nora O'Donnell and her fellow cute-girl cheerleaders need to move to Fox, though, Nora's got some serious credibility issues that are getting more obvious the closer we get to the 111th COngress being elected. She's clearly biased against Democrats in general and particular Democrats in excess.

Chriso;
your comment, "And yeah, I'm really concerned about Richardson's endorsement. He'll really deliver that Latino vote. You know, the one he couldn't even deliver for himself?" is the best example here of hypocrisy. As one of the Clinton cultists, you obviously would have lauded the wonderful Gov. Bill had he endorsed Hillary.

But now he's an impotent hack, because he endorsed Obama.

Tirvializing his endorsement is nothing more or less than an admission of desperation on your part. Seems as if the Hill Cult is having trouble keeping it's brainwashing cycle running.

What iis in a passport file ? Application, birth certificate, place/date of birth, hospital, mother and fathers name, ethiniticy.

If Obama is who and what he claims to be, what does he have to worry about?

Can you say "smoke screen"!!!???

I still can't see where passport gate leads to anything but smoke screen. You can find out much more about a person on-line than you can from a passport file.

And i submit that there is more on-line about Obama at this time than any other individual in the world.

You might want to note that the CEO of the firm which conducted the 1st 2 intrusions into BO's file gave HRC a $1000 contribution for his first Dem. contribution ever.

When? within 24 hours of the 2nd event. And what happened right after that. HRC's campaign pushed the fact that BO had only ever been to 1 NATO country. Wonder where they might have found that interesting fact?

I know Maura Harty, she's a career diplomat. She received her ambassadorship after a career of service to her country. She's not a political appointee with some outside agenda. Not to mention she retired in February, before the last passport breach.

Probably trying to find about the fact he's really an Arab-American.

Has anyone heard who the unnamed reporter was who contacted the State Department? It's odd that the top dogs at state new nothing about it till the reporter asked them. How did the reporter know about the breach to start with?

Obama want us to unite,if we would tell the truth, his brand of unity has divided the Democratic Party, so much that, McCain is now favored to win the Presidency! Four more years of Bush's policy, How sad!