But I don't agree with your scenario.
I think it was a sting operation set up by this administration. First, let us agree that they got Berger on video. He wouldn't be admitting to deliberately stuffing crap in his underwear if they couldn't flip a switch and show him in the act. As for the brief case, well I don't think they got this on tape which is why he is saying "inadvertantly". They know what documents are missing and they know they've been missing since Berger did his burglary. They've got a "before" and "after" inventory for this deed. I don't understand about the briefcase. Would they let him take a brief case in that room? Maybe he had a plant inside the archives and somehow he marked the documents to be pulled when he went through them but couldn't stuff them in his underwear because of the size. The plant might have pulled the documents Berger somehow indicated.
Sounds to me like the Bush admins figured something like this might go down and had a plan. Which doesn't make me unhappy by the way. It's no secret that this 9/11 commission was orchestrated to blame the attacks on Bush and deflect it from the Clinton administration.
Okay, so now, why did this factoid get leaked now? Could it be that the 9/11 commission is ready to release the final report and the time was rife for a convenient leak of this sort to be forthcoming?
It's amazing the warrant to search Berger's house has been kept secret this long. The leak of the info was intentional and was done for this timing, whatever it is-the Dem convention or the commission's report.
This will be big news soon enough. No way it will be kept under wraps.
Shock and awe comes in many forms.
Fishtalk, You are right... The timing is good. Can you say "HARDBALL"?
That's okay, because I don't agree with my scenario anymore myself. I went for my evening walk and kicked the thing around pretty good - the Rats have way too much political and emotional capital invested in the 9/11 kangaroo court to just scuttle it in so cavalier a manner. Besides, my scenario flunks Occam's Razor miserably.
I'm thinking now that I agree with your point about the Rats having someone inside, probably a low-level flunky on the commission staff who just happened to have access to the reading room VCR. This guy was probably given a few hundred bucks to snag the tape on a certain day when he was told to do so. Something went wrong and the tape was not recovered.
My guess would be that someone in the Bush Administration finally had enough of the spewing by the leftists, and leaked out the fact that they had hard proof of Berger's document theft - a video tape showing him stuffing documents down the front of his pants would be pretty convincing. Once that word got out, spiking the story would be like trying to conceal a sunrise - a fool's errand.
So the media did what they could - waited until as late in the day as possible to break the story. The Slimes and the Compost will have already filled their front pages with the latest Abu Ghraib stories and the latest photos of John Kerry, Superstud, so they could get away with running small wire service blurbs below the fold or maybe even inside the A section. That gives the Rats a full day to get their best spin teams mobilized and on the same page with the best focus-grouped explanation they can come up with, so that when the papers and the networks have to lead with the story, they can push the Rat version of events and downplay their culpability as much as possible.
Frankly, I wouldn't be the least bit surprised to see them get away with it yet again.