To say Sandy Berger's M.O. was Clintonian is, I suppose redundant. Or perhaps just obvious. You get caught pretty much red-handed breaking the law and showing contempt for the trust and authority vested in you by the citizenry; you lie about it and deny doing whatever it was you just got caught doing; you trot out colleagues and media types to vouch for your character and good intentions; you have a good laugh about it and then accuse your political opponents of dirty tricks and politically motivated leaks; you stall long enough to allow the publicity to die down, usually with the help of a cooperative press corps; your lawyers negotiate a slap-on-the-wrist penalty and you walk away without so much as a hair out of place; the public is kept in the dark about the details of the crime that you got away with.
We spent tens of millions of taxpayer dollars on the 9/11 Commission to try to ascertain what went wrong in the decade or so before the 9/11 attacks. A huge part of the story related to what the Clinton administration terrorism policy was for the eight years leading up to 2001. Sandy Berger has now admitted that he violated federal law by stealing copies of documents from the National Archives which contained handwritten notes by Clinton administration national security officials relative to their strategies and actions on the terrorism front, and destroyed them in the days immediately preceding his testimony to the 9/11 Commission. He admitted that he lied to investigators and to the American people in the aftermath of these events when he said the lifting of the documents was "inadvertent".
His penalty? A midemeanor conviction. A suspension of his security clearance for three years, after which it can presumably be reinstated. In other words, a joke. A farce. A finger in the people's eye.
Here's an excerpt from the WaPo account:
The terms of Berger's agreement required him to acknowledge to the Justice Department the circumstances of the episode. Rather than misplacing or unintentionally throwing away three of the five copies he took from the archives, as the former national security adviser earlier maintained, he shredded them with a pair of scissors late one evening at the downtown offices of his international consulting business.The document, written by former National Security Council terrorism expert Richard A. Clarke, was an "after-action review" prepared in early 2000 detailing the administration's actions to thwart terrorist attacks during the millennium celebration. It contained considerable discussion about the administration's awareness of the rising threat of attacks on U.S. soil.
Archives officials have said previously that Berger had copies only, and that no original documents were lost. It remains unclear whether Berger knew that, or why he destroyed three versions of a document but left two other versions intact. Officials have said the five versions were largely similar, but contained slight variations as the after-action report moved around different agencies of the executive branch.
It wasn't really "unclear" at all why Berger destroyed three copies of one document and returned the other two copies intact. The ones with margin notations by Clinton officials that would be embarrassing to the Clinton people were destroyed, and the ones without them were not.
As you might imagine, the blogosphere is brimming with reaction. As John Cole says in his neat little wrapup, Berger's admission necessarily calls into question the veracity of his 9/11 Commission testimony and that of Richard Clarke, for starters.
More from Glenn, Power Line, and this from Jim Geraghty:
Now... what about this deafening silence that we have heard on this from Berger's associates, since this story first surfaced? Will we be seeing any criticism of him from former President Clinton, Madeline Albright, Hillary, John Kerry, or any other prominent Democrat? Is the perception that this is no big deal, standard operating procedure for that White House, and is something to be swept under the rug?Do any Democrats want to confront the unpleasant truths of how the Clinton White House handled terrorism?
Because there were some facts out there that were so damning, Sandy Berger was willing to break the law to make sure the public never saw them.
I think it's important to remember that, then as now, Sandy Berger was just another stooge for the Clintons. He was the National Security Advisor for our nation at a time when the Clintons were altering longstanding national security policies in order to allow million dollar political donors like Bernard Schwartz of Loral Corp to transfer previously restricted missile technologies to the Communist Chinese government in exchange for a few million dollars of laundered cash for the 1996 Presidential campaign. Anyone with a shred of integrity or concern about our country's actual security would have resigned in protest then.
Posted by dan at April 1, 2005 09:59 PM