Professional expectation
"Government logic... "yes, we gave you the password and it's one of those areas you manage.. but you aren't supposed to look at anything"."
Actually that's not some government-specific thing, as a professional I consider it to be a normal expectation to admin without looking through anything. When I was providing IT support a while ago for a business, I had the admin passwords for the PCs, I had the LogMeIn credentials, I had the admin password for the hosted E-Mail, and the admin password for the Carbonite backup. This means, yes, I *could* have remote desktop'ed in and snooped through documents *or* snooped via the Carbonite backup, and read through the E-Mail via the hosted E-Mail admin login. But, they wouldn't have expected their documents and E-Mail to be snooped on, and as a professional I didn't.
This was of course a little more than glancing at something he wasn't supposed to, it sounds like he disabled an anti-copying system (will he be brought up on some dumb DMCA charge for defeating a copy-protection system?), and attempted to wipe logs indicating his actions.