Is this corruption?

April 4, 2005

BERGER'S BURGLARY

April 4, 2005 --

Sandy Berger, the top Clinton national- security official and erstwhile close adviser to Sen. John Kerry, has finally confessed what he spent nearly a year heatedly denying: that he intentionally smuggled classified documents from the National Archives — and deliberately destroyed them.

In pleading guilty to a misdemeanor count Friday — for which he'll get a slap-on-the-wrist $10,000 fine and lose his security clearance for three years (but probably not his law license) — Berger admits to secreting the documents in his suit jacket.

Then, once he got them home, he cut them to pieces with a pair of scissors.

So much for the "honest mistake" Berger last year maintained he'd committed.

Of particular interest to Berger were drafts of an after-action review by anti-terrorism adviser Richard Clarke of al Qaeda's thwarted attempt to attack America during the turn of the millennium in 1999. The memo reportedly identified national-security weaknesses so "glaring" that only sheer "luck" prevented a 9/11-style attack back then.

Berger had told the 9/11 Commission that the review prompted a strong White House response by the Clinton team. But President Bush's first attorney general, John Ashcroft, testified that he'd read the memo, and it indicated that no action was taken by the Clintonites.

That Berger, in other words, lied about the Clinton administration's contempt for national security. (One of his CIA directors, John Deutsch, recall, stored 17,000 pages of top-secret documents and wrote classified memos on a home computer that was also used to surf Internet porn sites.)

Who was right? Well, it wasn't John Ashcroft who stuffed the secret documents down his pants — then claimed he had "accidentally discarded" them.

That in itself would have been a violation of law. What now emerges, by his own admission, is that Sandy Berger was engaged in a clumsy, post-9/11 cover-up of his own third-rate burglary.

Even more disturbing is the cavalier attitude of leading Democrats to this whole sordid affair.

"For all those who know and love him, it's easy to see how this would happen," one former White House colleague told The Washington Post at the time.

As for Bill Clinton himself, he couldn't stop chuckling over the whole thing.

"That's Sandy for you," he said at a Denver book signing last summer. "We were all laughing about it on the way over here."

Who's laughing now, Bill?

Not Sandy Berger.

http://www.nypost.com/postopinion/editorial/42134.htm

LessonInMachismo · April 4, 2005

I heard he snuck them out in his sock.

April 4, 2005

Stealing and destroying classified documents from the National Archives is only a misdemeanor? Seems to me it's more serious than that.

Vyce · April 4, 2005

There were threads about this when it happened. I threw a fit over Berger's actions then, most liberals here responded with a "Eh, it's not that big a deal" attitude.

Special K · April 4, 2005

Really weird situation. I guess we'll never know why he took them now?

SuperJerk · April 5, 2005

I'm not going to defend Berger's actions, but its a leap to somehow use them as proof that the Clinton Administration had "contempt" for national security.

Vyce · April 5, 2005

I'm not going to defend Berger's actions, but its a leap to somehow use them as proof that the Clinton Administration had "contempt" for national security.

Contempt is too harsh of a word. However,

Of particular interest to Berger were drafts of an after-action review by anti-terrorism adviser Richard Clarke of al Qaeda's thwarted attempt to attack America during the turn of the millennium in 1999. The memo reportedly identified national-security weaknesses so "glaring" that only sheer "luck" prevented a 9/11-style attack back then.

Berger had told the 9/11 Commission that the review prompted a strong White House response by the Clinton team. But President Bush's first attorney general, John Ashcroft, testified that he'd read the memo, and it indicated that no action was taken by the Clintonites.

Special K asked why he took them? There's the answer.

Contempt? No. But in the recent past, i.e. post - 9/11 and certainly around the time of the 9/11 Commission, the knock - by and large by Democrats & liberals - was that Clinton had made efforts to stop terrorist attacks from happening while Bush completely ignored all the warnings.

And low and behold we have Berger here stealing / destroying a memo which seems to indicate that maybe the Clinton administration wasn't *that* vigilant in defending us all from terrorism after all.

I'm not a conspiracy theorist, so I'm not gonna cop some bullshit theory that Berger went in there and did what he did because he was taking orders to do so. But I think he did act, on his own but in his role as a friend to Bill, to try and remove some potentially embarassing documents from the records so as to have the previous administration save face. It was just that he was fucking inept as all hell at doing the job.

We should all remember, for the sake of context, that at the time he was pulling this shit, he was one of John Kerry's top advisors during his election bid. I also had a fit about that fact, and no one really seemed to care.