Posted on 08/05/2004 3:25:13 PM PDT by Libloather
Berger still under investigation
Washington, DC, Aug. 5 (UPI) -- The investigation of former national security adviser Sandy Berger's use of classified material "is ongoing and continuing," a U.S. official said Thursday.
The Justice Department does not acknowledge that Berger is a target of an investigation, but the source told United Press International a report saying Berger has been "cleared" is untrue.
(Excerpt) Read more at washtimes.com ...
I don't either, if you mean like to a foreign agent, and did not mean to imply it. Since Berger took the documents and admittedly "discarded" some, one must wonder what really happened. I was actually thinking more along the lines of being in Clinton's possession for safe keeping or something like that. There was also concerns raised by Republicans that some of the information may have been shared with the Kerry campaign in an effort to give them "inside information". All speculative, but all something that would be investigated, I'm sure.
I hope you are correct.
That would look bad, wouldn't it?
If he skates, I will lose all confidence in our Judicial Sysytem!!
;What the &^#$ is there to 'investigate'?
LOL I'm guessing they need to investigate his fruit-o-the-looms and that as yet no one has the courage to look in there ;-)
Did he take the docs home to CHANGE them?? Add noted to them?? And destroy some?
Hope springs eternal. It's a very American trait.
I am so sick of the double standard, not just on this but on everything.
950+ FBI files
On Aug. 22, 1996, just before the Democratic National Convention,
Ms. Gorelick oversaw a critical Justice Department meeting with the FBI.
mmediately after this meeting, as it happened,
all serious inquiry into the fate of TWA 800 came to an end.
Absolutely.
A blast from the past about the Bergler
For National Security's Sake, Berger Should Resign - National Security Adviser Sandy Berger
Insight on the News, April 19, 1999 by David Dickson
It's time for National Security Adviser Sandy Berger to go. Not only has his knee-jerk reaction to the Chinese espionage scandal -- "We're talking about breaches of security that happened in the mid 1980s," when Ronald Reagan was president -- been tired and old, but his explanation for what happened on his watch after the security breach became known is as disingenuous as any explanation ever offered by the Clinton White House. Which is saying something.
If Berger's performance on NBC's Meet the Press on March 14 is any guide, is it any wonder why the White House is fighting so desperately to keep classified as much of Rep. Chris Cox's select-committee report on China's acquisition of U.S. military technology as possible? That report, endorsed unanimously by Democratic and Republican committee members alike, cataloged China's successful efforts during the last 20 years to acquire -- by legal and illegal means -- the most sensitive U.S. military technology, damaging U.S. national-security interests in the process.
Berger asserted that the initial briefing about Chinese espionage which he received at the White House in April 1996 was "very general" and "very preliminary." According to Berger, that briefing -- which was conducted by a group of senior Energy Department officials, including its chief counterintelligence officer, Notra Trulock -- merely "indicated" that there was "some evidence" that China "may have" obtained "in some fashion" sensitive nuclear-weapons information.
"At that stage," Berger told NBC's Tim Russert, "we did not know who, we did really not know how and we really did not know what." Later, Berger told Russert, "The FBI hadn't even begun its investigation. We did not have a suspect. We did not know at this point what they had gotten."
In fact, however, Trulock had begun his counterintelligence investigation of China's theft of one of the United States' most advanced warheads 12 months before briefing the White House. Moreover, in late 1995 the FBI already had begun its own investigation, poring over travel and work records of lab scientists and building a list of five suspects. By February 1996, two months before briefing the White House, Energy Department counterintelligence officers had identified one particular suspect: a scientist who "stuck out like a sore thumb," as one official told the New York Times.
Before visiting the White House in April, Trulock briefed Paul Redmond, the CIA's chief spy hunter who had unmasked Aldrich Ames. Redmond considered Trulock's briefing, which was replete with charts and graphs, to be anything but "very general," as Berger characterized Trulock's subsequent White House briefing. It is instructive to compare Redmond's anguished reaction -- "This is going to be just as bad as the Rosenbergs," who gave the Soviets secrets to the atomic bomb, he recalled saying at the time -- with Berger's laidback reaction to what he perceived to be a "very general" and "very preliminary" briefing.
Berger also asserted that the FBI began "a thorough formal investigation" within a month and "the CIA was [also] investigating this." In fact, however, by the end of 1996 so little progress had been made by the FBI that Energy Department officials were convinced the FBI had assigned too few resources to the case. And, according to Redmond, the FBI had not been updating the CIA's counter-intelligence office.
Berger also asserted that, upon learning of China's nuclear espionage, the administration "imposed and forced the strictest controls on China of any country except those for which we have embargoes, such as Libya." In fact, the administration did the opposite. In February 1998, the same month President Clinton belatedly ordered greater security measures at the nation's weapons labs, he ignored strenuous objections from the Justice Department, which was investigating Loral Space & Communications Ltd. for an unauthorized technology transfer to China. Overruling the Justice Department, the president granted Loral a waiver for official transfers of essentially the same missile technology to China that the company was being criminally investigated for giving to the People's Republic without authorization in 1996. This expertise would help China build rockets that could carry multiple, independently targetable warheads -- the very type of warhead whose design China had stolen and about which Berger had been briefed nearly two years earlier.
Berger's interference with the Justice Department's criminal investigation of Loral for its unauthorized transfer of missile-guidance technology to China is an illustration of just how far the National Security Council, or NSC, has become politicized on Berger's watch. As it happens, Loral Chairman Bernard Schwartz was the Democratic Party's largest individual softmoney contributor during the 1995-96 cycle. In 1995, he shrewdly hired former NSC spokesman Tom Ross, who helped lobby the White House to transfer satellite-waiver authority from the State Department to the Commerce Department. Against the recommendations of the State Department, the Pentagon, the CIA and the National Security Agency, the president transferred the waiver authority in March 1996. Two months later, without approval, Loral shared its report on the causes of a failed Chinese rocket launch with China. By doing so, Loral helped China to design long-range missiles carrying nuclear warheads aimed at U.S. cities.
In February 1998, while the Justice Department was investigating Loral, Ross was placing urgent calls to his former NSC colleague Gary Samore. Loral needed another waiver. The State Department warned the NSC that Loral's earlier actions were "criminal" and "knowing and unlawful" and that Loral was "likely to be indicted." Berger nonetheless recommended that the waiver be issued, and it was. He did so, it is now clear, knowing that China had been accused of stealing nuclear secrets enabling it to design powerful miniature warheads that could, as a result of Loral's unauthorized technology transfer, be launched in multiple numbers on a single missile and aimed at multiple U.S. targets.
Berger also told Russert on March 14 that the order signed by Clinton in February 1998, which mandated increased security measures at the labs, "made the changes I believe are necessary." But many of these changes, including recommendations made by the FBI long before Clinton's February 1998 directive, were not instituted until October 1998, after Bill Richardson became secretary of energy. Moreover, there is a serious question even today whether security at the labs sufficiently has been strengthened. "Security at the Department of Energy [which runs the labs] has not improved," a recently retired U.S. counterintelligence official told Bill Gertz of the Washington Times. "Counterintelligence is poor." Cox told Gertz that there is a "lack of adequate counterintelligence at our national laboratories and, frankly, throughout the government." Indeed, it was Hazel O'Leary, Clinton's first secretary of energy, who slashed the department's security and counterintelligence budgets. "Hazel O'Leary hated intelligence and security [efforts]," the recently retired counterintelligence official told Gertz. "She had this naive view there were no threats."
Berger also rejected the claim by Congress that the administration failed to inform it in an adequate and timely fashion of China's espionage at the labs. "Congress was informed, I believe, before I was in '96," Berger told Russert. "And I believe [Congress] has been briefed more than 16 times since then." That's the White House version. Here is what Rep. Norman Dicks of Washington, the ranking Democrat on both the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and the Cox panel, told the New York Times: "Porter Goss," the former CIA official who chairs the House select-intelligence committee, "and I were not properly briefed about the dimensions of the problem. It was compartmentalized and disseminated over the years in dribs and drabs so that the full extent of the problem was not known until the Cox committee."
Indeed, it was Dicks who, having become so impatient at the administration's inadequate response to the Los Alamos laboratory spy scandal, approached Richardson and told him action needed to be taken immediately. Finally, the suspect who "stuck out like a sore thumb" three years earlier was given a polygraph test and found to be deceptive in February. On March 6, the New York Times reported the details of the scandal, and the suspect was fired two days later. Earlier, the Energy Department had for more than a year disregarded an FBI recommendation that the suspect's access to classified information be restricted. Here is Berger's disingenuous take on this: "[T]he secretary of energy made a decision based on various factors relating to this employee that he should be terminated," he told Russert on March 14.
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Poor Vince Foster....he thought the Clintons were his friends!
Yes. One thing that puzzles me is that it was reported that once the Archives realized Berger was taking documents, they went to the Clinton Library, which at this time has copies (?) of the documents and is under the Archives administration, and made more copies to lure him in the sting. I do not understand, if the Clinton Library had the documents, why was he stealing them? There is more to this.
Duh.
I'm glad you guys are here. And thinking. It's about time I send out another round of emails and letters to the media to let them know I do not appreciate the fact that they are not trying to get to the bottom of the Berger criminal behavior.
I have a friend that is running Bush/Cheney for a rather large southern state. I told him to pass along that we better not see that they let Berger off....... He said he passed it on.
I think the second shoe drop in this scandal will be the de-classification of the document that Berger pillaged followed by the discovery that Kerry's February policy statement on port security contains verbatim paragraphs lifted from the, then, Top Secret document.
nice to hear that...
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