John Brennan's Original Sin: The Obama Passport Breach

This 2008 Criminal Mischief Likely Got BHO Elected

Former CIA Director John Brennan has a long list of sins to atone for, ideally within the walls of a federal prison, but his original sin in Obama World dates back to March 2008. At the time, Obama was locked in a heated race with Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination, and Brennan was a mere “advisor.”

At the heart of this intrigue was a visit Obama made to Pakistan at the end of his sophomore year at Occidental College in 1981. No one knew about this trip until Obama strategically discussed it during a San Francisco fundraiser on April 17, 2008. “I traveled to Pakistan when I was in college,” boasted Obama as a way of countering Hillary Clinton’s foreign policy experience. “I knew what Sunni and Shia was before I joined the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.”

Jake Tapper, then with ABC, found it curious that he had not heard Obama speak of this adventure, especially “given all the talk of Pakistan during this campaign,” but Tapper went no further. He should have. There was much more to this story that needed to be told.

Among Obama’s biographers, David Remnick provides the most information about what was thought to be a three-week Pakistan sojourn. One friend told Remnick how Obama was “shocked” by what he saw. The subservience of the peasants “blew his mind.” A Pakistani friend who accompanied Obama spoke of Obama’s “striking” experiences, ones that “stayed in his mind.”

Yet for all that he witnessed and learned, Obama mentioned not a word about the trip in either the 1995 memoir, Dreams from My Father, or the 2006 campaign book, The Audacity of Hope. In the latter book, the omission is particularly noteworthy given that Obama used Audacity to establish his foreign policy cred. Although Americans were discouraged from traveling to Pakistan in 1981, there was no formal travel ban. What Obama was trying to hide remains unclear.

This oversight would be of minimal interest were it not for an incident first reported in the conservative Washington Times on March 20, 2008, four weeks before the San Francisco fundraiser. The short article detailed how two State Department employees were fired and a third disciplined “for improperly accessing electronic personal data on Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama.” The New York Times weighed in the following day, adding the misleading detail that the passport files of “all three presidential candidates” had been improperly accessed.

The files contained biographical data and passport applications. Reportedly, Obama’s file had been breached four times beginning in January 2008, a week after the Iowa primary, a primary Obama won. Stanley, Inc., a major contractor with the State Department, promptly fired the two of its employees who were allegedly involved. A third suspect, employer unspecified, was reprimanded but not terminated. State Department spokesman Sean McCormack blamed “imprudent curiosity” for the breach and scolded a Greek reporter who suggested something more sinister.

On the following day, New York Times readers learned that the “reprimanded” employee worked for a smallish DC-area company called The Analysis Corporation (TAC). The thrust of the day-two article was the Bush State Department’s embarrassed apologies to Obama. There was no description of TAC or any reference to its CEO. The article did, however, acknowledge that the files contained “Social Security numbers, addresses, dates of birth and other personal information,” data invaluable to friend or foe.

To its credit, CNN reported on that same March 22 a critical fact the New York Times did not find newsworthy. The president and CEO of The Analysis Corporation just happened to be an Obama donor who “advises the Illinois Democrat on foreign policy and intelligence issues,” yes, the self-professed communist and crypto-Muslim John Brennan. After the election, Obama tapped TAC CEO Brennan to be his chief counterterrorism adviser and, in time, the Director of the CIA.

The passport story got little traction. According to CNN’s source, the unnamed TAC transgressor was considered a “terrific” employee except, of course, for his multiple criminal incursions into Obama’s passport file. A TAC spokesman characterized that behavior as an “aberration.” Given what he now know about Brennan, the spokesman’s claim that “this individual’s actions were taken without the knowledge or direction of anyone at The Analysis Corp,” reads like the punch line to a joke.

Reportedly, the State Department asked Brennan not to discipline the employee while an investigation was underway. He need not have worried about the investigation’s outcome. The State Department’s July 2008 report on the incident was redacted to the point of uselessness. If Brennan’s employee was ever named, let alone punished, that fact did not make the news or the report.

Although the breach occurred in the Washington Post’s backyard, the paper remained notably incurious about the Brennan connection. On March 22, 2008, reporter Glenn Kessler did not name Brennan until the thirteenth paragraph of an article whose very headline shifted the blame for the incident to the Bush administration, “Rice Apologizes For Breach of Passport Data.”

In January 2009, the Post ran a thirteen-hundred-word, front-page article on Brennan’s appointment as deputy national security advisor, but even then it failed to mention the passport incident.

Once again it fell to conservative media to do any real reporting on things Obama. On January 12, 2009, three days after the Post’s article on Brennan’s appointment, Ken Timmerman, then with Newsmax, reported that Obama had been the main target of the passport breach.

According to Timmerman’s unnamed source, the purpose of the breach was to “cauterize” Obama’s file, meaning to remove or doctor any potentially embarrassing information. If true, this revelation helped make sense of Obama’s decision to stay silent about his 1981 Pakistan trip until after his passport file had been properly scrubbed.

In his 2016 book, Deception, Timmerman added some additional information. Five days after the passport story broke in March 2008, Washington DC Police arrested, on a marijuana charge, a 24-year old with the unusual name “Leiutenant [sic] Quarles Harris Jr.” In the versions that bounced around the less reliable corners of the internet, this name was often compressed to “Lt. Quarles Harris” without the various commenters bothering to report what exactly Harris was a lieutenant of.

As Timmerman reported, the alternative media had reason to take interest in Harris’s fate. In addition to the marijuana, police found eight State Department passport applications on the young man when they busted him. According to his charging document, “Harris admitted he obtained the Passport information from a co-conspirator who works for the U.S. Department of State.”

After he agreed to cooperate in the State Department investigation, the DC Police released Harris on his own recognizance. Less than a month later, DC Police found Harris shot dead in the front seat of his locked car, the shots having penetrated the windshield. Reported the Washington Times, “City police said they do not know whether his death was a direct result of his cooperation with federal investigators.”

As with the equally suspicious DC murder of DNC staffer Seth Rich eight years later, the Post chose to know as little as possible about the motive of the shooter. The fact that an employee of Obama’s chief counterterrorism adviser had breached Obama’s passport files did not strike its editors as newsworthy. Nor did the subsequent murder of a DC man under investigation for passport fraud.

It is altogether possible that Harris’s death was unrelated to the breach of Obama’s passport files. If so, Post readers had no way of knowing. Post editors allowed Rich and Harris to die in the darkness while leftist media hacks pilloried those who raised questions about either.

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