About Maura Harty
One of the names being tossed around in Passport-Gate is Maura Harty, former Saudi Arabia consular chief and Assistant Secretary of State for the Bureau of Consular Affairs (appointed in 2002 by the Bush Administration to this post) for at least two of the three passport breach incidents.
Before everyone gets all googly-eyed over the fact that Harty was a Clinton appointee, don’t ascribe too much weight to it without some accompanying evidence of a closer relationship with the Clintons than simply working at State and receiving that appointment. Not all ambassadorships are gifts. Some are earned. Being ambassador to Paraguay was a great career move for Harty, but it’s doubtful that it was a political appointment. More likely to be a career appointment.
I’ve mentioned before that I have a relative who was a career diplomat. Diplomats traditionally resign for each new administration and are reapppointed, just as in other departments. They also have pathways within their areas of specialty that result in Administration appointments. I’m not saying that there isn’t anything to this story, but suggest caution about jumping to a conclusion that being a Clinton appointee has any relationship to the breach of the passport records. Without much more of the story, there’s just no way to know. It is interesting to note her meteoric rise through a usually-sluggish bureaucracy, however. Interesting, but not necessarily relevant.
Here are some recent news items about Harty that might be worth knowing, however:
- She is and was a passionate advocate of the embedded RFID chip in passports.
- She underestimated the number of passport applications in 2007, resulting in delayed passports to millions of travelers, and some sloppy management of the backlog.
- She opened access to sensitive, closed Department of State visa records to the DHS.
- She argued for the detention of Haitian migrants in 2003, arguing that Pakistanis and Palestinians were sneaking into the US via Haiti.
- Her juiciest appointments have come from the Bush Administration, post-ambassadorship.
Technorati Tags: Maura Harty, State Department, passport breach, Obama