USPS official: Spanberger's personal information shouldn't have been released

United States Postal Service officials should not have released confidential information about Abigail Spanberger, but their actions were accidental and not malicious in intent, a USPS spokesman said today.

"The Postal Service deeply regrets our mistake in inappropriately releasing Ms. Spanberger’s Official Personnel File (“OPF”) to a third-party, which occurred because of human error," said USPS spokesman David Partenheimer. "We take full responsibility for this unfortunate error, and we have taken immediate steps to ensure this will not happen again."

A conservative political action group – the Congressional Leadership Fund – earlier this week released Spanberger's Standard Form-86 federal security clearance application from 2003. Another conservative PAC, America Rising, had obtained the file July 30 through what it said was a standard Freedom of Information Act request.

Both groups used the information to spotlight time that Spanberger spent as a substitute teacher in 2002 and 2003 at the Islamic Saudi Academy, a Saudi-funded private school in Alexandria, Virginia. They suggested that Spanberger – a Democrat who is challenging incumbent Republican Dave Brat for the Seventh District seat in the U.S. House of Representatives – was trying to hide her time at the school since she had not publicly discussed it. In 2005, a graduate of the school was convicted of conspiracy to kill President George W. Bush.

Spanberger accused the CLF of illegally obtaining the information but provided no evidence of illegal activity. Release of an SF-86 application is illegal according to federal law, but today's announcement from the USPS appears to confirm the accounts provided by the CLF and America Rising.

In a statement this afternoon, Spanberger said that she had a number of unanswered questions and continued to call for the CLF to remove from its website portions of the SF-86 form that it posted earlier this week.

"It is my sincere hope that USPS will provide significantly more detail as to how this major failure occurred, and that CLF and America Rising will put decency and country before politics and comply with USPS’s request that they return all documents received," Spanberger said.

The Postal Service will change its process for handling requests for official personnel files, Partenheimer said. It also will request that America Rising return the information it received erroneously, he said.

"We are continuing our review, but believe the issue began in June of 2018, and that only a small number of additional requests for information from personnel files were improperly processed," he said.

Spanberger still is considering what she termed "potential legal remedies" against the Postal Service, America Rising and CLF, though she declined to provide details about what those might be.

Yesterday, she told reporters on a conference call that she had nothing to hide and had freely included her teaching stint at the school on her SF-86. The CIA later hired her, and she obtained 'secret' and then 'top-secret' clearance during her career as a counterterrorism official.

In 2007, a panel appointed by Congress found that some of the school's textbooks contained language described as intolerant toward other religions and potential violent in nature, according to a 2015 Washington Post article. School officials, the paper wrote, said they would alter the texts.

U.S. soldiers from Ft. Belvoir studied Arabic at the school for a time, according to the same article.