No Charges to Be Filed in Passport Search Case

The independent counsel who was named to investigate alleged election-year tampering with the passport files of an Oxford University student named Bill Clinton said Thursday that he would not file any criminal charges in the case.

“The investigation is over and there aren’t going to be any indictments,” said Joseph E. diGenova, a former U.S. attorney here who was appointed two years ago to investigate the matter.

His lengthy report on the investigation reportedly will clear several State Department aides who served under President George Bush and were accused of searching through passport records for partisan political purposes.

But diGenova refused to discuss the details of his findings until a special three-judge panel receives his final report.

“I hope to file the report (on the investigation) by the end of the year and, once the court releases it, I can discuss it in detail. But I am authorized to say we won’t be bringing any charges,” he added.

Late in the 1992 campaign, rumors surfaced that Clinton, while studying in England, had traveled to the Soviet Union with the intent of renouncing his U.S. citizenship to protest the Vietnam War. Clinton said during the campaign that the rumors were false.

According to the State Department’s inspector general, several employees at the State Department ordered a search of Clinton passport files from the late 1960s to see if damaging information could be found on the Democratic presidential nominee.

Other reports said that White House officials under former Secretary of State James A. Baker III, who was then running Bush’s reelection campaign, also had inquired whether any damaging details could be found in Clinton’s files.

Several of the accused officials admitted that they had indeed ordered a search of the passport files, but that they did so only because reporters had filed a Freedom of Information request seeking travel information.

After a 21-day investigation, Inspector General Sherman M. Funk concluded that several State Department aides had violated government regulations by ordering the search, but he also said that they did not violate criminal laws. Funk also dismissed the allegation that there was an organized White House effort to dig up damaging information.

Funk reported his findings to outgoing Atty. Gen. William P. Barr, who in December, 1992, appointed diGenova to investigate whether any criminal laws were violated.

Reached by phone, Funk, who is now retired, said that diGenova’s two-year investigation appears to have confirmed his initial inquiry.

“We found there was no organized conspiracy at the White House, that the controls at the State Department had broken down and that people had tried to embarrass the Democratic candidate for political reasons,” Funk said. “But this didn’t violate any particular law.”

He also said he was mystified by reports that diGenova would use his final report to criticize the inspector general for unfairly damaging the reputation of the State Department aides.

“I find that strange. I did what the law required me to do. I turned the information over to the attorney general,” he said. “I also can’t understand why it took him two years to do what we did in 21 days.”