Miss Marple, I think you are on the right track. As I'm thinking about this, I'm remembering how the Daniel Ellsberg burglary was used to help bring Nixon down. Ellsberg had once worked for McGeorge and William Bundy ("In 1961, Robert McNamara constituted a task force. . .Ellsberg claimed later that he was a member of the task force; in fact, he said, he jointly represented both the National Security Council and the Defense Department on it. McGeorge Bundy, the national security advisor, had requested that he serve on it."; ""I participated in. . .a planning group on which I was a member under the chairmanship of William Bundy": Tom Wells,
Wild Man: The Life and Times of Daniel Ellsberg, 150, 201, etc.), uncles of Kerry's Yale roommate Harvey H. Bundy, and he was not many degrees removed from some of the same people Kerry was associated with in his VVAW days. Curiously, Kerry's biographer Brinkley speculates that the Ellsberg break-in was related to Kerry's "Lowell Watergate", and quotes Kerry on the subject:
Just as the Kerry campaign was gaining stride, however, a suspicious incident occurred that may have been attributable to the White House Plumbers. . .Recalling the September 1971 break-in at the office of Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist. . .not to mention the far more momentous June 17, 1972 break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters. . .a break-in of a different kind took place that September 18 in Lowell. "It was a strange affair," Kerry recalled. "It wasn't Watergate; it was more like a Watergate in reverse."
Douglas Brinkley, Tour of Duty: John Kerry and the Vietnam War, 416
Indeed. As we have seen over the last week, there are career people with a vendetta against George Bush. I would not be surprised to find that those files had been slipped into an embarassing place, like Ashcroft's office, and then "found" by a "courageous whistleblower."