Ohio employee was ordered to snoop on Joe The Plumber

It keeps getting uglier. The Columbus Dispatch is reporting tonight that an Ohio state employee is contradicting her superiors; the worker says she was ordered to rummage through Joe The Plumber’s records — and she stated the blindingly obvious truth that such searches had never been done before simply because a citizen had come to public light.
Any outrage yet from the left-wing privacy champions? No, I still just hear chirping crickets. Will Democrat Gov. Ted Strickland stand by his specious claim that there’s nooooooo reason to believe the raids were political?

Read:

Vanessa Niekamp said that when she was asked to run a child-support check on Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher on Oct. 16, she thought it routine. A supervisor told her the man had contacted the state agency about his case.
Niekamp didn’t know she just had checked on “Joe the Plumber,” who was elevated the night before to presidential politics prominence as Republican John McCain’s example in a debate of an average American.
The senior manager would not learn about “Joe” for another week, when she said her boss informed her and directed her to write an e-mail stating her computer check was a legitimate inquiry.
The reason Niekamp said she was given for checking if there was a child-support case on Wurzelbacher does not match the reason given by the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services.
Director Helen Jones-Kelley said her agency checks people who are “thrust into the public spotlight,” amid suggestions they may have come into money, to see if they owe support or are receiving undeserved public assistance.
Niekamp told The Dispatch she is unfamiliar with the practice of checking on the newly famous. “I’ve never done that before, I don’t know of anybody in my office who does that and I don’t remember anyone ever doing that,” she said today.