Furor Erupts Over Clinton Records Search : Investigation: There is a question about whether the State Department was bound by the Freedom of Information Act.

A political furor erupted Wednesday over the State Department’s action in launching an unusually intensive search for records from Democratic presidential candidate Bill Clinton’s past at a time when President Bush was accusing him of unpatriotic acts in his student days.

A senior official acknowledged that the department had moved quickly because it wanted to complete the search before Election Day. “We didn’t want to sit on it,” the official said. “There was a feeling that we could be accused either of covering up something that was there, or of leaving the allegations about Clinton hanging out there unfairly. So we wanted to get it done.”

Officials insisted that the search for Clinton’s records did not occur any faster than it normally would have--but they said it was done more thoroughly, with more high-level supervision. They insisted that the White House and the Bush campaign had no involvement.

Reports of the search--which turned up no new information about Clinton--prompted Democratic vice presidential nominee Al Gore to accuse the Bush Administration of “police-state tactics.” And leading Democrats in Congress, including Senate Majority Leader George J. Mitchell (D-Me.), Sen. Bill Bradley (D-N.J.) and House Majority Leader Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo.), demanded an investigation.

But the State Department defended the decision of Assistant Secretary of State Elizabeth M. Tamposi, a former Republican Party fund-raiser, to launch searches in Washington, London and the Norwegian capital of Oslo for any record of Clinton’s actions overseas in 1969 and 1970.

“I absolutely feel that there is no inappropriate behavior at all in this,” spokesman Richard A. Boucher said. Tamposi had no contact with the White House or the Bush campaign over the issue, he added.

Tamposi herself refused to comment directly to reporters.

The issue arose after three news organizations filed requests with the State Department in September under the Freedom of Information Act, which allows citizens to seek the release of government records.

One of the issues in question is whether the State Department violated its own policies by examining Clinton’s records at all. The director of the State Department’s Freedom of Information office, Frank M. Machak Jr., told the Washington Post that “name-specific” files, like Clinton’s, are normally never examined in response to journalists’ requests because the privacy act bars their release.

Boucher disagreed on Wednesday, saying department policy requires that the files be examined, in case they contain some material that can be released. He said he could not explain why Machak had cited a contrary policy, but suggested that he might have “misinterpreted” a reporter’s question.

“We asked him this morning about this, and . . . he agrees with us that the files are indeed pulled,” Boucher said.

Boucher said he could not immediately locate the policy in any written form. Machak did not respond to a request for a first-hand explanation.

A second issue centers on the speed with which Tamposi’s office handled the request for Clinton’s records. Most freedom of information requests at the State Department languish for more than a year before they are acted on. But the consular affairs bureau, which Tamposi heads, exhumed Clinton’s passport file from the department’s archives only 16 days after the first request, one official said.

Boucher said, however, that there was no indication that Tamposi had ordered the request handled with unusual speed. “The question of timing--of speeding it up, or slowing it down--was not the issue,” he said. “The issue was how to conduct a proper search and do it carefully.”

When officials retrieved Clinton’s file, they discovered staple holes and a torn corner on the Arkansan’s passport application--and reported to Tamposi that it looked as if something might have been removed, officials said.

Tamposi then contacted officials in the U.S. embassies in London and Oslo and told them to handle the records search with special care--making sure, for example, that at least two embassy officers were involved, to protect against accusations of tampering.

Tamposi also notified the State Department’s inspector general, Sherman Funk, of the problem. Funk consulted with Acting Secretary of State Lawrence S. Eagleburger, and the two agreed to turn the investigation over to the Justice Department, Boucher said.

A few days later, the fact of the investigation leaked to Newsweek magazine.

Speaking to reporters in Atlanta, Gore said: “The White House is politically using the State Department . . . in a failed effort to try to discredit Bill Clinton. I think it’s very disturbing.

“We’ve had the Joe McCarthy technique and the smear campaign,” he said. “Now we have the police-state tactics of rummaging through personal files to try to come up with damaging information. This is an abuse.”

Clinton campaign spokesman George Stephanopoulos called the records search “an outrageous misuse of power. . . . The Administration has lots of questions to answer. Who ordered the search? Did the President know? Did (White House chief of staff James A.) Baker know? And what will the Administration do to find out?”

Times staff writers Sam Fulwood III in Atlanta and David Lauter in Virginia contributed to this story.

Today on the Trail . . .

Gov. Bill Clinton campaigns in Richmond, Va.

President Bush campaigns in Richmond, Va.

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