Clerks Blamed in Clinton Passport Search : Inquiry: The State Department says notes calling for fast action on journalists’ requests were unauthorized.

The State Department on Thursday blamed low-level clerks for the decision to search Democratic candidate Bill Clinton’s passport records on a rush basis and said the action was “a mistake.”

Spokesman Richard A. Boucher said the clerks took the action on their own, with no instructions from above, and that it was a clear violation of department policy.

Several clerks in the department’s Freedom of Information Office marked journalists’ requests for Clinton’s records with instructions to handle them “expeditiously,” he said.

“That . . . (was) clearly a mistake,” Boucher said. “The notations were made by low-level people working on the cases, trying to reflect the urgency which the requesters in the media had placed on their requests. They were not done with any instructions.”

The State Department launched the search of Clinton’s records while President Bush was accusing the Arkansas governor of unpatriotic acts during 1969 and 1970, when Clinton was a Rhodes scholar at Oxford University.

Officials looked for records in Washington, London and the Norwegian capital of Oslo, but turned up no evidence of unusual conduct by Clinton.

One clerk wrote on a memo that the search should be “done by Nov. 3, because we’ve got an election coming up,” Boucher said.

That memo came to the attention of senior officials at the State Department only when it was reported by the Washington Post on Thursday, an official said--raising the question of whether some evidence was hidden from the department’s initial inquiry.

But Boucher said the department’s inspector general, Sherman Funk, was satisfied that no further inquiry was necessary.

Funk asked several officials involved whether they had acted under instructions from the Bush campaign or the White House, where former Secretary of State James A. Baker III is now chief of staff, Boucher said. All replied that they had not acted under such instructions, Boucher said, so the department considered the case closed.

Individual passport records cannot be released without the consent of the person in question under the Privacy Act, which carries criminal penalties for violations. But Boucher said State Department policies required officials to examine Clinton’s records anyway, in case they included material not covered by the act.

Aides to Democrats in Congress said they consider the department’s explanation of the policy violation unsatisfactory, and said the Senate Foreign Relations Committee may investigate the issue after the presidential election.

Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) and Rep. Howard L. Berman (D-Panorama City), chairmen of the subcommittees with jurisdiction over the issue, said the department was not cooperating with their initial inquiries. “We have asked to interview the principals who requested that the file be examined and we have been denied access to those individuals,” they said in a joint statement.

One Democratic aide noted that the top State Department officials involved in the issue are all former Republican Party activists: Undersecretary John Rogers, who oversees the FOI office, is a longtime Baker aide; Assistant Secretary Elizabeth Tamposi, who oversees the Passport Office, is a former GOP fund-raiser from New Hampshire; and Inspector General Funk, who investigated the issue, is a former GOP activist from Maryland.

Meanwhile, in an unrelated development, Sen. Bob Dole (R-Kan.) asked Clinton to release all of his personal documents relating to his draft status during the Vietnam War.

In a letter to Clinton, dated Thursday and simultaneously released to reporters, Dole said: “Governor, you cannot resolve this issue by ignoring it, or talking around it. You could go a long way toward answering them--and removing this cloud on your integrity--by releasing all documents in your possession, custody, or control bearing upon your draft situation.”