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New York State is facing its worst economic crisis in decades - with projected annual budget gaps rising to more than $19.5 billion over the next four years. The challenge is to use this crisis to make New York stronger than ever, as we did during the New York City fiscal crisis in the 1970s, a rescue effort in which I was heavily involved. To do that, the state must approach the current situation more like a business. When confronted with a financial crisis, a responsible business focuses on its customers: What does the customer need? How can we provide...

In its pages, Omar (and his mother) reveal that the Clinton administration failed in a major assassination attempt of Osama bin Laden, just days after the 1998 East Africa embassy bombings. This is something that has often been speculated but never confirmed. Former insiders like Richard Clarke say Omar bin Laden’s account of the assassination failure appears to be credible. And if this is the case, it might explain a little more about what documents Sandy Berger really had stashed away.

U.S. National Security Adviser Jones gave these remarks at the 45th Munich Conference on Security Policy at the Hotel Bayerischer Hof on February 8, 2009. "Thank you for that wonderful tribute to Henry Kissinger yesterday. Congratulations. As the most recent National Security Advisor of the United States, I take my daily orders from Dr. Kissinger, filtered down through Generaal Brent Scowcroft and Sandy Berger, who is also here. We have a chain of command in the National Security Council that exists today.

*snip* The Obama transition team released the names of 13 people on Wednesday who will direct a top-to-bottom review of federal agencies and another six who will lead teams that will review Treasury, State and Defense department policy, budget and personnel issues. *snip* It includes four former lobbyists, three top campaign fund-raisers and two former employees of troubled mortgage giant Fannie Mae, with some overlap among them. Four people in the group have ties to the consultant McKinsey & Co. and two have experience leading high-tech start-ups. Mr. Obama's transition advisers include Tom Donilon, a top lobbyist for Fannie Mae,...

Okay, first a little background for Freepers who haven't been following all of these stories. STORY #1: Coughlin & Islam at the Pentagon Stephen Coughlin was a Pentagon analyst [in fact the ONLY Pentagon analyst] with a specialization in Koranic & Hadithic formulations of Jihad. At the urging of one Hasham Islam [also known as "Hesham H Islam"], in the office of Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England, Coughlin was fired in early January of 2008 [or late December of 2007]. After an enormous uproar in the intelligence community, and with the help of Congresswoman Sue Myrick [R-NC], Coughlin was finally...

Blackwill stays India's key lobbyist17 Dec 2007, 0247 hrs IST, Indrani Bagchi, TNN NEW DELHI: With a firm eye on the nuclear deal and its future passage through the international and US system, the government has renewed the multi-million dollar contract of its favourite lobbyist in Washington. Robert Blackwill's firm Barbour Griffith & Rogers will be India's sole lobbyist in the US for 2008 for the second consecutive year. In 2006, India had added Venable, another law firm engaged in Washington advocacy, to work the US Senate when the Hyde Act was doing the rounds of Capitol Hill. India is...

When Bill and Hillary Clinton did their online "Sopranos" spoof after the HBO show's finale, they may have been trying to tell us something more than we realized. The Clintons, sans the New Jersey accent, subtly yet unmistakably were announcing: "We and our posse are back. Burglars and all." In fairness to the Clintons, Samuel R. "Sandy" Berger is just one burglar, but when we're talking about national-security information, a single thief is all you need to question a candidate's credibility. That the Hillary Clinton campaign would even take Berger's phone calls, never mind hold him close as an adviser,...

Congressmen press Justice to test Sandy BergerStill no polygraph as agreed in plea deal, 'national security' at issue Posted: October 12, 2007 1:00 a.m. Eastern © 2007 WorldNetDaily.com Two years after agreeing to a polygraph in a plea deal, former National Security adviser Sandy Berger still has not taken the test, prompting 23 Republican Congress members to demand action by the Department of Justice. The aim is to determine "what documents were stolen and how our national security was compromised," said the letter by Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, R-Calif., to the acting attorney general. Berger – who was placed on probation,...

After the cancellation of the western series 'Johnny Nuance' after the 1959 season, CBS turned to the newspaper comic pages to fill its 8 pm Friday night slot. Debuting October 4, 1960, 'That Darn Sandy' featured chubby 9-year old Jay Carruthers in the title role of little Sandy Baxter, the pint-size troublemaker made popular by the Hal Langston comic strip. The series ran four seasons and added several catchphrases to the lexicon, like "gee golly whillikers, Mrs. McGrady!" and "I hope Mom and Dad can get me out of this one!" But by 1964 Carruthers had outgrown the role. At...

During the months of September and October 2003, former Clinton National Security Advisor, Sandy Berger, made at least three trips to the National Archives, ostensibly for the purpose of briefing himself and his former boss, Bill Clinton, for their testimony before the 9/11 Commission. During the time that Berger was given access to highly classified material, he was seen stuffing documents into his trousers, his underwear, and even into his socks. By the time FBI agents arrived at Berger’s home and office he had already destroyed some of the stolen documents. Berger told FBI agents that he had “inadvertently” removed...

Election '08: What does the Clinton campaign's use of convicted and disgraced Sandy Berger as an adviser say about the judgment of someone who wants to be president of the United States? Berger's tie to Hillary through his service as national security adviser to husband Bill is not a compelling reason to seek his counsel. Neither is a Clinton friendship with Berger that goes back 35 years. This is a man who was charged and convicted of the unauthorized removal of classified material from the national archives, not someone with a sparkling resume of success. Clinton can pass off his...

Sandy Berger, who stole highly classified terrorism documents from the National Archives, destroyed them and lied to investigators, is now an adviser to presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton. Berger, who was fired from John Kerry´s presidential campaign when the scandal broke in 2004, has assumed a similar role in Clinton´s campaign, even though his security clearance has been suspended until September 2008. This is raising eyebrows even among Clinton´s admirers. “It shows poor judgment and a lack of regard for Berger´s serious misdeeds,” said law professor Jonathan Adler of Case Western Reserve University, who nonetheless called Clinton “by far the...

ONCE A CLINTON . . . September 15, 2007 -- For Hillary Clinton, it must seem like déjà vu all over again (as Yogi Berra might put it). But for voters, Camp Clinton's panicky move to refund $850,000 (temporarily, anyway) in donations linked to former fugitive con artist Norman Hsu hearkens back to hubby Bill's sordid fund-raising during his 1996 re-election campaign. And the funny money isn't the only ghost from the Clintons' past. Newsweek reports that the senator is relying for foreign-policy advice on a triumverate of her husband's top advisers - including Sandy "Sticky Fingers" Berger. **SNIP** Last...

It’s gotten very little mainstream media coverage (surprise!) but Hillary Clinton’s national security adviser is none other than Sandy “Docs In My Socks” Berger, who pleaded guilty to stealing and destroying classified documents related to the Clinton administration’s anti-terror efforts, immediately before Bill Clinton’s testimony to the 9/11 commission: Hirsh: Battle for the Best and Brightest. "The more experienced Hillary Clinton, meanwhile, has relied largely on her husband and a triumvirate of senior officials from his presidency—former secretary of state Madeleine Albright, former U.N. ambassador Richard Holbrooke and former national-security adviser Sandy Berger (who tries to keep a low profile...

Archived Clinton Records May Go Public Soon BY JOSH GERSTEIN - Staff Reporter of the Sun September 13, 2007 URL: http://www.nysun.com/article/62549 An estimated 10,000 pages of daily schedules from Senator Clinton's tenure as first lady could be made public as soon as December, though Presidents Clinton and Bush could postpone the records' release, a National Archives official said yesterday. "Our hope is to get it done by the end of the year," the acting director of the Clinton Presidential Library, Emily Robison, told The New York Sun. She stressed that she was only referring to the review and redaction of...

You can tell the man who boozes, by the company he chooses ... and the pig got up and slowly walked away. The poem by Clarke Van Ness warns people that they will be judged by the actions of those with whom they choose to associate -- and even a pig has enough sense to walk away from disaster. Hillary Clinton has a big problem with her associates, and it's self-inflicted. Lost in the Norman Hsu shuffle, the news that Hillary has asked former Clinton national-security adviser Sandy Berger to join her campaign should cause even more questions about her...

The War on Weldon Gets Scarier, Part II © Jack Cashill WorldNetDaily.com August 21, 2007 This the second in a four part series detailing how and why a collaboration of Democratic activists conspired to unseat Pennsylvania congressman, Curt Weldon, in the November 2006 elections. Read Part 1. I met Congressman Curt Weldon for the first (and only) time in July 2006. He graciously consented to assist me in some research I was doing. I, in turn, was able to help connect some of the dots in the chain of forces aligned against him. All dots led to former national security...

The CIA's top leaders failed to use their available powers, never developed a comprehensive plan to stop al-Qaida and missed crucial opportunities to thwart two hijackers in the run-up to Sept. 11, the agency's own watchdog concluded in a bruising report released Tuesday. Completed in June 2005 and kept classified until now, the 19-page executive summary finds extensive fault with the actions of senior CIA leaders and others beneath them. "The agency and its officers did not discharge their responsibilities in a satisfactory manner," the CIA inspector general found. "They did not always work effectively and cooperatively," *snip* Yet the...

Iran: The Conspiracy that Wasn't July 20, 2007 The New York Post Amir Taheri . . . THOUGH IT DOES SEEM A FINE IDEA Esfandiari: Hardly a "foreign plotter." EVER since its creation in 1979, the Islamic Republic in Iran has been obsessed with conspiracy theories, especially "foreign plots" to topple it. This paranoia was demonstrated again Wednesday with the televised confessions of two U.S. citizens of Iranian origin arrested in Tehran and accused of working for the "Great Satan." To most Iranians who watched the sordid show, the two "enemies of Islam" seemed unlikely heroes of an international conspiracy....

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Former National Security Adviser Sandy Berger was sentenced Thursday to community service and probation and fined $50,000 for illegally removing highly classified documents from the National Archives and intentionally destroying some of them. Berger must perform 100 hours of community service and pay the fine as well as $6,905 for the administrative costs of his two-year probation, a district court judge ruled.>p> "I deeply regret the actions that I took at the National Archives two years ago, and I accept the judgment of the court," Berger said outside the courthouse after his sentencing.

The Incredible Judicial Disparity: Berger v. Libby June 8, 2007 at 5:23 am · Filed under Vox Populi If you needed any more proof that the American judicial system is completely and alarmingly subjective – beyond Paris Hilton's early release – look no further than the disparity between the sentences imposed on Sandy Berger and I. Lewis ‘Scooter’ Libby. In Washington DC’s version of The Peoples’ Court, it would seem that the deciding factors in how severe a sentence one gets depends on political party affiliation, the severity of the crime be damned. This past Tuesday US District Judge Reggie...

USA Today: Did Sandy Berger 'Steal' Secret Docs? We're Debating That Still Posted by Ken Shepherd on June 8, 2007 - 10:24. You know, it seems pretty cut-and-dried to me. Stuffing secret documents down your pants and removing them from a secure room in a federal facility, that constitutes stealing.USA Today's "On Deadline" blog isn't sure, though. (bold/italics are USA Today's): Sandy Berger, the national security adviser under former President Clinton, was disbarred yesterday in the District of Columbia.The Washington Post says Berger agreed last month to give up his law license in order to avoid a prolonged investigation that...

If you needed any more proof that the American judicial system is completely and alarmingly subjective – beyond Paris Hilton's early release – look no further than the disparity between the sentences imposed on Sandy Berger and I. Lewis ‘Scooter’ Libby. In Washington DC’s version of The Peoples’ Court, it would seem that the deciding factors in how severe a sentence one gets depends on political party affiliation, the severity of the crime be damned. This past Tuesday US District Judge Reggie B. Walton, a Bush 43 appointee, sentenced former Vice Presidential Chief of Staff I. Lewis ‘Scooter’ Libby to...

BERGER'S ETERNAL SECRET May 27, 2007 -- It now looks like the American people will never learn how - and why - Bill Clinton's national security adviser, Sandy "Sticky Fingers" Berger, stole and destroyed classified documents from the National Archives. That's because Berger - in a significant, but little-noticed, move - has short-circuited the last investigation into his sordid little burglary. As Byron York reports at National Review Online, Berger last week voluntarily surrendered his law license. Now, that's hardly as serious a step as it sounds, since - as Berger freely admitted - "I have not [practiced law] for...

The Auditor Sunday, May 13, 2007 In an abrupt about-face, President Bush has decided against nominating Noel Hillman, a veteran prosecutor and now federal judge in Camden, to the seat on the 3d U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that was held by Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito Jr. Hillman, a former assistant U.S. attorney in New Jersey and the lead Justice Department prosecutor in the Jack Abramoff Capitol Hill lobby ing scandal, had full White House support and the backing of New Jersey Democratic Sens. Robert Menendez and Frank Lautenberg, and had successfully completed his FBI background check several months...

"After a thorough reading of the report it would not be unreasonable to conclude as I have that there was a cover-up at high levels of our government and, it appears to have been substantial and coordinated...The question is why? And that question regrettably will go unanswered. Unlike some other cover-ups, this one succeeded.” – Independent Counsel David M. Barrett on the censoring of The Barrett Report. If you have been experiencing a sneaking suspicion that there is a lot of one-sided interest where investigations into political malfeasance are concerned at the US Justice Department, you’re not alone. From the...

A spokesman for President Bush says a demand by Republicans for Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to follow through on former White House insider Sandy Berger's promise to take a polygraph test regarding the classified documents he took from the National Archives will be studied. The response from Tony Snow came on a question from Les Kinsolving, WND's correspondent at the White House. "Congressman Tom Davis and 17 other Republican House members have called on Attorney General Gonzales, Department of Justice, to administer the polygraph test that Sandy Berger agreed to in paragraph 11 of his plea agreement. And my question,...

Not convinced that Sandy Berger acted alone in the theft and destruction of top secret documents while on the 9-11 Commission, Rep. Tom Davis (R.-Va.) and seventeen other Republican House members recently called on the Department of Justice to administer a polygraph examination to the one time Clinton National Security Advisor asking him about his admittedly illegal behavior at the National Archives in 2002 and ’03. But George W. Bush’s Justice Department as well as his own White House have given Davis and the other lawmakers the cold shoulder on administering a lie detector test to Berger, who pled guilty...

Fiction: Let’s assume next week that the Democrat controlled Congress calls for a commission to find out if pre-war Intel was hyped and to find out why the Pentagon failed to foresee the insurgency in Iraq in the early days of the war. After the Bi-Partisan commission meets and concludes an extensive investigation going through thousands of pages of documents from the national archives and they determine that there was no Intel hype or no way to have known about the insurgency, in effect exonerating Bush with their findings and determining that no one is guilty of any wrong doing....

Live thread to FReep about the Special

FOX News Special Report 'Socks, Scissors, Paper: The Sandy Berger Caper' Questions Probe of Theft at the National ArchivesFriday, March 30, 2007 By Edward Barnes Rep. Tom Davis, R-Va., is charging a cover-up by the Justice Department in connection with the 2003 theft and destruction of top secret documents by Clinton National Security Advisor Sandy Berger. Davis also told FOX News that he is not convinced that Berger was not acting under direction from the Clinton Administration. "I'm not convinced that he was acting alone," Davis said. "They could have well said, ‘Sandy, do you remember that document way back...

Sandy Berger sent an email to Michael Barone, responding to Michael's column in U.S. News. As we have written extensively on the Berger affair and have been harshly critical of Berger, it seems only fair to reproduce Berger's email in full, as it constitutes his response to his critics. Here it is: Michael: I screwed up. There was nothing sinister about it. I was under serious pressure to digest the entire Clinton record on terrorism for eight years so that we could testify fully to the 9-11 commission. I spent several arduous days at the Archives looking through the files....

"History will be kind to me," Winston Churchill once said, "for I intend to write it." Indeed, he did. His multiple-volume histories of the two world wars are still widely read, though discounted by professional historians as incomplete and in some ways misleading. Churchill is not the only politician who has wanted to write the history of his times; most politicians and political operatives want at least to shape the way history views their actions. Some are better at this than others. In the previous century, Democrats did much better at this than Republicans. Most of us still see the...

The debate over the verdict in the Lewis “Scooter” Libby obstruction of justice and perjury trial will go on for years. The fact that the catalyst for the investigation – whether Valerie Plame was classified as a covert agent at the time of the so-called “leak” – is but one of the contentious issues. But if we allow this adjudication to become politicized, if we allow revisionists like Harry Reid to rewrite the actualities of the case, we are not only doing a disservice to our country we would be complicit in its degradation. Harry Reid and the politically opportune...

President Bill Clinton’s National Security Advisor Sandy Berger has pleaded guilty to stealing classified documents from the National Archives, but the case is still not over. In a curt February 16 letter, the Department of Justice (DOJ) dismissed a 60-page report by the Republican staff of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Affairs that demanded Berger be given the polygraph test he agreed to take in order to determine the extent of his theft of materials from the Archives. “We believe there are no facts that would justify a polygraph of Mr. Berger at this time,” said a letter...

Judge Deborah A. Robinson imposed a stiffer penalty in the case than the Justice Department sought, fining Berger a total of $56,905, canceling his security clearance, and requiring monthly reporting to a probation officer for two years. Breuer said Berger has also picked up trash in Virginia parks for 100 hours to fulfill a community service requirement, and he criticized the renewed attention to Berger's case. "It never ceases to amaze me how the most trivial things can be politicized. It is the height of unfairness . . . for this poor guy, who clearly made a mistake," Breuer said.

On July 6, 2006, Stonebridge International, a global strategy firm, announced that it had added a new member to its high-profile, five-member advisory board—former Democratic Congressman Lee Hamilton. True to form, the major media ignored the Hamilton appointment. They should not have. Hamilton, who had served as Vice-Chairman of the 9/11 Commission, had just joined a firm headed by the man who had criminally undermined that very Commission, Stonebridge chairman and founder, Samuel "Sandy" Berger.

I thought Washington area Freepers would get a kick out of this tidbit attached near the end of today's very disturbing article about Berger's document theft and subsequent investigative bungling by archive staff. "Judge Deborah A. Robinson imposed a stiffer penalty in the case than the Justice Department sought, fining Berger a total of $56,905, canceling his security clearance, and requiring monthly reporting to a probation officer for two years. Breuer said Berger has also picked up trash in Virginia parks for 100 hours to fulfill a community service requirement, and he criticized the renewed attention to Berger's case."So Sandy,...

In a chandeliered room at the Justice Department, the longtime head of the counterespionage section, the chief of the public integrity unit, a deputy assistant attorney general, some trial lawyers and a few FBI agents all looked down at their pant legs and socks.

On July 6, 2006, Stonebridge International, a global strategy firm, announced that it had added a new member to its high-profile, five-member advisory board – former Democrat Rep. Lee Hamilton. True to form, the major media ignored the Hamilton appointment. They should not have. Hamilton, who had served as vice chairman of the 9/11 Commission, had just joined a firm headed by the man who had criminally undermined that very Commission, Stonebridge chairman and founder Samuel "Sandy" Berger. In the words of a recent House Committee report, Berger had perpetrated "a disturbing breach of trust and protocol that compromised the...

Paper Chase Did investigators turn a blind eye to the seriousness of the Sandy Berger scandal? Washington scandals are curious things. Sometimes special prosecutors are appointed and the media provide saturation coverage of their doings. An example would be the Valerie Plame episode, which led to this month's perjury trial of Scooter Libby, the former White House aide accused of lying about who first told him Joe Wilson's wife worked for the CIA. Then there are the barely noticed scandals, which prosecutors pursue quietly and professionally. Take the case of Donald Keyser, a former State Department official who last week...

As I watched these events unfold two years ago, I presumed that the Bush DOJ chose not to exploit these stories for reasons of national security. Although seemingly unrelated, both of these stories lead to the same larger secret, a secret that Berger risked his career to conceal, a secret that if revealed had the potential to destabilize the nation during a time of war. As I have since learned, however, the Bush White House is not fully in control of its own Justice Department and FBI. In truth, the decision to protect Berger may have more to do with...

Former Washington Post reporter Carl Bernstein, who, along with colleague Bob Woodward, exposed the Watergate affair, has been grumbling that the Bush administration has done "far greater damage" than President Nixon. But perhaps the intrepid reporters of "All the President's Men" fame should turn their attention to a modern-day conspiracy of truly epic proportions. When Sandy Berger, national security advisor under President Clinton, was caught stealing and destroying documents from the National Archives prior to appearing before the 9/11 Commission in 2003, there was barely a peep in the Democrat-dominated mainstream media. And the near silence has continued to this...

I guess 3,500 classified documents would be too many to stuff into your clothing if you were a high-ranking government official and wanted to take them home for leisure reading. Perhaps that explains why this week one of the State Department's most knowledgeable experts on China, Donald Keyser, a foreign service officer with three decades of experience, was sentenced to a year in the hoosegow after these documents were found in his Fairfax County residence. Keyser claimed he had just been "careless." Without the comic touch of stuffing the documents into one's clothing, being "careless" with classified materials is apparently...

Eighteen House Republicans have urged the Justice Department to proceed with a polygraph test for Samuel R. Berger, the former national security adviser who agreed to take the test as part of a plea of guilty of stealing documents from the National Archives.

As the FNC story points out, the document-filching Clinton aide did agree to take a polygraph test as part of a plea deal reached in September 2005. Now, some GOP lawmakers want to know why the Justice Department won't follow through: The Justice Department should administer a polygraph test to former National Security Adviser Sandy Berger to find out what documents he took from the National Archives in 2002 and 2003, Rep. Tom Davis wrote in a letter to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales dated Monday. Davis, ranking Republican on the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, is leading a group...

WASHINGTON — The Justice Department should administer a polygraph test to former National Security Adviser Sandy Berger to find out what documents he took from the National Archives in 2002 and 2003, Rep. Tom Davis wrote in a letter to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales dated Monday. Davis, ranking Republican on the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, is leading a group of 18 lawmakers who say the Justice Department has been "remarkably incurious" about Berger's decision to remove documents relating to the Sept. 11 commission's inquiry into his role in helping prevent terror attacks during the Clinton administration.

Bill Bennett ran a song parody contest which clearly stated that lyrics be sent in. The contest was for the best Sandy Berger song parody. So what happened? The people who FOLLOWED the stated rules sent in lyrics and got PENALIZED because the winner of the contest also sent in a recorded version of his song. Sorry, Bill, but this is just WRONG. If you wanted people to send in recorded songs, you should have stated so instead of penalizing the entrants who sent in just lyrics as they were asked to do so in the RULES. In case anybody...

Damage from Berger's theft understated, Davis saysBy Jerry Seper THE WASHINGTON TIMES January 10, 2007 Samuel R. Berger's theft of documents from the National Archives compromised national security "much more than originally disclosed" and resulted in "incomplete and misleading" information being given to the September 11 commission, says the former chairman of the House Government Reform Committee. "It is now also clear that Mr. Berger was willing to go to extraordinary lengths to compromise national security, apparently for his own convenience," Rep. Thomas M. Davis III, Virginia Republican, said yesterday. "No one ever told the commission Mr. Berger had access...

The Secret Sandy Risked His All For © Jack Cashill January 18, 2007 - WorldNetDaily.com If not the most skillful of embezzlers, Samuel “Sandy” Berger is a far more formidable character than the media would have us believe. When he made his now storied sorties into the National Archives, he risked his career and his reputation in so doing, and he knew it. Rest assured, he would not have done so were the secrets to be preserved not worth the risk of pilfering them. True to form, the major media refuse to even ask the most fundamental question: just what...