Fired Passport Chief Accuses White House : Campaign: Sources close to Tamposi say officials demanded a file search to substantiate charges against Clinton. But aides implicated by her deny wrongdoing.

Fired State Department official Elizabeth M. Tamposi has told investigators that the White House demanded a search of Bill Clinton’s passport records to try to substantiate charges by conservative congressmen that the Democratic presidential nominee had considered renouncing his citizenship during the Vietnam War, sources familiar with her testimony said Sunday.

Clinton, now President-elect, has denied he ever contemplated giving up his citizenship, and no evidence to the contrary has been found.

The sources said Tamposi told an internal State Department investigation that she rejected the White House demand, which she received Sept. 28. However, two days later, she launched a search of Clinton’s records in response to requests from news organizations under the Freedom of Information Act.

The sources confirmed the basic outline of Tamposi’s testimony, which she described in an interview published Sunday by Newsweek magazine.

All of the officials Tamposi implicated denied wrongdoing to Newsweek, and a White House spokesman refused to discuss the latest allegations, which came as various government officials maneuvered to escape blame in the widening controversy. The State Department admits it blundered; some critics contend it did more than that. They call the affair a Watergate-style abuse of government power for partisan political purposes.

“We’re going through the blame-shifting and eating-our-own-children stage of scandal expose,” said Rep. Howard L. Berman (D-Panorama City), chairman of the House Foreign Affairs subcommittee on international operations, which has partial jurisdiction over the State Department.

“On the surface there was serious wrongdoing, potential invasions of privacy and potential violations of the law,” Berman said in a telephone interview Sunday.

Tamposi told associates that Steven K. Berry, chief of the department’s congressional liaison office, telephoned her in Seattle where she was visiting on Sept. 28 to tell her that the White House wanted her to search consular records for a letter by Clinton renouncing his citizenship.

In the days preceding that call, a group of conservative GOP lawmakers, led by Rep. Robert K. Dornan (R-Garden Grove), had claimed in speeches on the floor of the House that Clinton had considered giving up his American citizenship to avoid military service.

According to sources, Tamposi asked Berry to name the White House official who made the request. The sources said Tamposi related that Berry said the demand came from White House political director Janet G. Mullins, his predecessor as the department’s congressional liaison officer, who had accompanied former Secretary of State James A. Baker III to the White House in an unsuccessful attempt to revive President Bush’s reelection campaign.

In the Newsweek interview, Tamposi said she called Margaret Tutwiler, the White House communications director and former State Department spokeswoman, to ask if the request was sanctioned by the White House. She said Tutwiler refused to take the call.

When Tamposi refused to act, the sources said, Berry told her that there was congressional interest in citizenship files controlled by her office. She told him that if lawmakers wanted the information, they should write a letter.

The next day, the sources said, Berry delivered a letter from Rep. Gerald R. Solomon (R-N.Y.) asking for information about citizenship but not mentioning Clinton.

Although Tamposi insists she rejected the request from Berry, on Sept. 30, two days after his original telephone call, three subordinate State Department officials conducted a four-hour search of Clinton’s passport file at the government’s warehouse for out-of-date records in suburban Maryland.

At the completion of the after-hours search, the officials took Clinton’s records with them and delivered the documents to Tamposi’s home. Tamposi has said previously that she wanted to keep the documents to prevent anyone from tampering with them.

Berry and Mullins did not return calls to their homes Sunday. Tutwiler declined to comment.

Newsweek said Berry acknowledged that he had asked Tamposi to respond to congressional inquiries. But he said Mullins did not ask him to pressure Tamposi and that he never invoked the authority of the White House.

The magazine quoted Mullins as saying that when Tamposi called Tutwiler, “We both had the same reaction: Eeeek, you can’t talk to her” about the rumors concerning Clinton.

After the search, Newsweek reported, Berry told Tamposi: “Margaret appreciates everything you’re trying to do, but she says you simply cannot call them at the White House.”

Tamposi told the magazine that the comment “really sent a chill up my spine. How did (Berry) know that I had called Margaret?”

Tamposi was fired last week from her post as chief of the department’s consular affairs bureau, which supervises the passport office. So far, she is the only official to be disciplined for playing a role in the affair.

State Department Inspector General Sherman Funk is expected to issue a report on the incident this week. He has refused to discuss the substance of his investigation in advance of the report.

Doug Davidson, a White House spokesman, declined to discuss the Newsweek account except to note that Funk’s report is expected soon.

Meanwhile, a senior State Department official said that Acting Secretary of State Lawrence S. Eagleburger was informed of the Sept. 30 search of the Clinton file the next day and he immediately ordered a departmental investigation of the incident. But he did not prevent department employees from later combing through the records of Clinton’s mother and independent candidate Ross Perot.

The official, outlining the chronology of Eagleburger’s actions, said the acting secretary immediately raised questions about whether the passport search had improperly dragged the State Department into the November election campaign but he decided not to inform either Clinton or the White House.

However, the official said that Eagleburger concluded that some additional searches would be required because of questions raised by news organizations under the Freedom of Information Act.

Although Berman said he does not suspect Eagleburger of doing anything improper, the lawmaker said: “It was a mistake not to stop it.”

Berman and Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee on international operations, requested on Oct. 22 that the General Accounting Office, an arm of the Congress, conduct an investigation to parallel Funk’s. But Berman said the GAO report is not expected for several weeks.

The official State Department account of the search has not varied from the assertion that it was an overzealous attempt to comply with a Freedom of Information request. But a report prepared by the staff of the House Foreign Affairs Committee is more consistent with the theory that the officials were looking for damaging information.