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He was willing to risk it because he's an arrogant SOB and he knew that if he got caught his liberal cohorts and the MSM would make excuses for him.

Just thinking out loud here, but maybe the missing stuff isn't all that bad, it's just stuff he was too lazy or cheap to make copies of, and he just thought he wouldn't get caught, because hey, he's Sandy Berger.

Before you flame me to a crisp, and insinuate that I am a troll from DU, my reasoning for this theory is rather simple: there should be a crapload of stuff in the archives about the Clinton Admin and national security. There's the Wall, the refusal to take bin Laden, the Cole, Flight 800, the embassy bombings, the aspirin-factory missiles, and a whole bunch of other stuff I can't recall at 11:00 at night.

Plus, there's the other things that we don't even know if NSA had a role. The OKC bombing comes to mind.

If Berger really wanted to clean the files, he would have needed to bring a U-Haul.

I would not flame you at all. I think you are on to something. Berger is an ambitious troll who was clearly in over his head as NSA, but thanks to Kerry actually thought he had the inside track on being Secretary of State. He therefore needed to be sure that those memos were scrubbed of anything that would make him look weak on terrorism. One possibility is that the early draft of the Millenium Memo, written by Richard Clarke, called for an immediate invasion of Afghanistan and possibly even Iraq or Iran, and Berger's own notes in response said "hell, no" - a reply that would be quite embarrassing to him in today's context. I believe Berger probably quashed any notion of any major military response to cripple Al Qaeda.

Another possibility is that Berger knew that the Bush people had never seen this memo, so he need to look at all the drafts of it again to recall what was in it that he may have failed to brief Bush's NSC staff about. Surely he knew that Bush, Cheney, Rice, and Ashcroft were going to tell the 9/11 Commission exactly what he had briefed them on. He needed to make sure he had the right recollection of what kinds of options the Clinton administration considered but never told the Bush people about, so he and Clinton would not trip themselves up in their own testimony.

Either of these scenarios would make it important enough for Berger to risk apprehension and prosecution by taking the documents and making notes of them. It doesn't have to have been a suicide mission for the Clintons, just his own ass-covering.

"maybe the missing stuff isn't all that bad"

And .. you think a man would ruin his political career for "stuff" that "isn't all that bad" ..??

What I want to know is this: What information does Bill and Hillary have on Berger that would cause Berger to do something so stupid as stealing (and destroying) classified documents ..??