That was even before the 92 election.
The search, however, found no letter renouncing citizenship. All the State Department officials discovered was a passport application with staple holes and a slight tear in the corner. Though the tear was easily explained by the routine practice of stapling a photo, money order or routing slip to the application, the Bush administration sleuths were not easily discouraged.
Tamposi seized on the ripped page to justify a new suspicion, that a Clinton ally at the State Department had removed the renunciation letter. Tamposi shaped that bizarre possibility into a criminal referral which was forwarded to the Justice Department. Thin as the case might be, the Bush re-election effort now had its official action that meant they could elevate the renunciation rumor into a public issue.
Within hours of the criminal referral, someone from the Bush camp leaked word about the confidential FBI investigation to reporters at Newsweek magazine. The Newsweek reporters involved, especially Margaret Warner, had very close ties to Baker's inner circle, dating back to Baker's years as secretary of state.
The Newsweek story about the tampering investigation hit the newsstands on Oct. 4, 1992. The article suggested that a Clinton backer might have removed incriminating material from Clinton's passport file, precisely the spin that the Bush people wanted. Immediately, Bush took the offensive, using the frenzy over the tampering story to attack Clinton's patriotism on a variety of fronts, including his student trip to Moscow in 1970.
With his patriotism challenged, Clinton saw his once-formidable lead shrink. Quickly, a panicked Clinton campaign sought help from a seasoned political hand, R. Spencer Oliver, who was then chief counsel on the House Foreign Affairs Committee. (Oliver was a veteran of GOP electoral shenanigans. In 1972, his phone at Democratic national headquarters was one of those bugged by Richard Nixon's Watergate burglars.)
Oliver dispatched his own team to the State Department to examine what was behind the mysterious passport criminal referral. When Oliver learned that the evidence consisted only of staple holes, he blew the whistle on what looked like another GOP dirty trick. Within days, the FBI, too, rejected the tampering suspicion. The passport gambit backfired on the Bush campaign.
https://consortiumnews.com/archive/bullet1.html
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