Now the headlines have shifted: not just Obama’s, but all three candidates’ passport files were breached. This makes it sound less like political dirty tricks, so they say:

Because the unauthorized intrusions involved all three major presidential candidates, and involved employees at more than one contracting company, State Department investigators at this stage believe the incidents are the product of “curiosity” on the part of contractors’ employees, rather than some kind of political dirty trick.

That sounds reasonable, and is probably why they released the information about Clinton’s and McCain’s passport file breaches. If people were looking at all three files, well, then it’s not partisan, right?

The thing is, when you read further into the details, you realize that, at the very least, this impression is weak, and at the most, the information released may have been engineered to create a very false impression indeed. The Clinton “breach,” in fact, should not even have been included here, as it was not even close to being the same magnitude:

Mrs. Clinton’s passport file was breached last summer during a training session for State Department employees. A trainee was encouraged to enter a family member’s name into the passport database for training purposes, Mr. McCormack said. Instead, the trainee entered Mrs. Clinton’s name. Mr. McCormack said the trainee was promptly admonished.

In other words, there was a trainee under immediate and close supervision, in a situation where they almost certainly had no opportunity to print out or transcribe any amount of useful information–it was just some smart-ass trainee who typed in a name as a gag and was immediately discovered by a supervisor. That “breach” doesn’t belong in this report.

That leaves McCain’s records access:

McCormack said one of the individuals who accessed Obama’s files also reviewed McCain’s file earlier this year. This contract employee has been reprimanded, but not fired. The individual no longer has access to passport records, he said.

This report raises more questions than it answers; the employee accessed McCain’s file on one date, then Obama’s on another later date, and was only reprimanded? This person’s employer was apparently not disclosed, and the reasoning behind the lower level of punishment despite two breaches is not explained–but the impression is that this person’s access was somehow less improper, less liable to raise eyebrows, and perhaps less needful of investigation.

So take the third person out of the picture, at least until we know more about it. Fine. After also removing the Clinton access, what does that leave us?

Two different people, coincidentally working for the same firm, accessing Obama’s records only, on two separate occasions. That they both worked for the same firm, that neither were investigated or reported even after the second improper access of a presidential candidate, and that both were fired and so are now outside of the authority of the inspector to question, only intensifies suspicions, it does not belie them. Nothing about the Clinton or McCain incidents has any relation to these breaches; the suspicion of dirty tricks still remains in full force, and should be stronger, if anything.

And yet now we have even liberal blogs saying that there is less reason to be suspicious now. In other words, this was a well-played gambit–release just enough additional information to obfuscate and confuse the issue, even though at the core, the issue is more suspicious than before.

We still have no idea of the details behind the three Obama and one McCain accesses; we still don’t know what differentiates the person who looked at the two candidate’s files; we don’t know how long or under what circumstances any of those breaches were. Why not? Why were such details released about the Clinton access, but not the later accesses? While there is the very real possibility that this was, in fact, just several different people taking curious peeks for fun, there is too much unexplained for me to accept such an explanation–more now with this current ploy for obfuscation than there was before.