Will the privacy champions come to Joe the Plumber’s defense?By Michelle Malkin •
October 25, 2008 11:29 AM There is something in the water in Ohio.

They’ve got a fraud-friendly Secretary of State, infestations of out-of-state students and Obama workers sabotaging electoral integrity, and now…government employees or accomplices thereof rifling through the records of Joe the Plumber immediately after the last presidential debate.



You’ll remember that a national media uproar ensued after it was discovered that State Department contractors had snooped through Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and John McCain’s passports. (Later, it turned out that the CEO of a company whose employee was involved in Passport-gate was a consultant to the Barack Obama campaign.)

Will the privacy champs come to Joe the Plumber’s defense?

The Columbus Dispatch reports:

Public records requested by The Dispatch disclose that information on Wurzelbacher’s driver’s license or his sport-utility vehicle was pulled from the Ohio Bureau of Motor Vehicles database three times shortly after the debate.

Information on Wurzelbacher was accessed by accounts assigned to the office of Ohio Attorney General Nancy H. Rogers, the Cuyahoga County Child Support Enforcement Agency and the Toledo Police Department.

It has not been determined who checked on Wurzelbacher, or why. Direct access to driver’s license and vehicle registration information from BMV computers is restricted to legitimate law enforcement and government business.[b]The paper characterizes a McCain spokesman as “attemping to portrayâ€