The State Department's inspector general says the Bush White House didn't order the "heinous" attempt by department officials to dig up political dirt from Bill Clinton's travel records, but he suspects it knew about the effort.
Acting Secretary of State Lawrence S. Eagleburger, meanwhile, publicly apologized Wednesday "for the department being in this mess" and disclosed he had offered to resign because the episode occurred on his watch. He said President Bush refused the offer.Eagleburger addressed a news conference at which he fully endorsed the report of Inspector
General Sherman M. Funk, who concluded that department officials had rummaged Clinton's passport and travel records for the wholly improper purpose of trying to find something to "influence the outcome" of the Nov. 3 election in favor of President Bush.
Funk's report was based on interviews with 69 people, including James A. Baker III, the White House chief of staff and former secretary of state. It concluded that a handful of department officials - with recently fired Assistant Secretary Elizabeth M. Tamposi foremost among them - were behind the bizarre episode.
"That is a very heinous activity and shame on the Department of State that it happened," Funk said.
His report absolved the White House of directing the search for evidence that Clinton had considered renouncing his citizenship while a student at Oxford University in England in the late 1960s.
But pressed by reporters on whether White House officials knew about the search, which turned up nothing incriminating, Funk replied: "My supposition is there was knowledge at the White House. I suspect it, yes."
He said it would be "sheer speculation" whether the Bush campaign's attack on Clinton's character and patriotism had created a climate for searching the Democratic candidate's records. "I suppose there is some kind of connection there," he said. "But for me to draw that in a document of fact would be beyond my respon-si-bility."
Funk interviewed eight White House officials, including Baker and two of his close aides, Margaret Tutwiler and Janet Mullins, without turning up evidence of impropriety, he said.
Tamposi, a former Republican state legislator from New Hampshire, reportedly has identified Mullins as the White House official who, working through the acting assistant secretary for legislative affairs, Steven Berry, expressed interest in having the Clinton files looked at.
Funk said, "We have not a scintilla of evidence, and believe me we tried to find such evidence, that Ms. Mullins suggested, instructed or did anything to get Mr. Berry to pass on to Ms. Tamposi anything that was improper."
According to the report, Baker, who resigned as secretary of state in August to work for Bush's re-election, said he had not spoken to anyone in the department about Clinton's files, and that the first he had heard about the search was on Sept. 30 or Oct. 1 from Mullins about a day after it began.