Some clown with former Clinton National Security Adviser Samuel L. "Sandy Burglar" Berger.
"It's politics." stated former president Bill Clinton.
Posted on 04/04/2005 9:17:19 PM PDT by RWR8189
Sandy Berger: Guilty as Charged
Last Friday, in U.S. District Court in Washington, former Clinton National Security Adviser Samuel L. "Sandy" Berger pled guilty to charges that he removed and destroyed classified materials from the National Archives on two occasions in 2003--presumably to keep out of the hands of the 9/11 Commission embarrassing marginalia that he or some other official had scribbled on a 2000 memo critical of the Clinton administration's inattentiveness to terrorism threats.
The New York Times--which often disapproves of lawbreaking, document destruction, and cover-ups by high government officials--went notably easy on Berger. "Ex-Clinton Adviser to Admit Taking Classified Papers," read their headline. (The Washington Post headline made the more obvious point: "Berger Will Plead Guilty.") According to Times reporter Eric Lichtblau, Berger had "agreed" to plead guilty, had "agreed" to "give up his security clearance for three years," and would pay a $10,000 fine. Lichtblau's walk-up piece bent over backward to minimize Berger's criminal activities, while stressing his reputation as "a respected figure in foreign policy circles for years."
The Scrapbook suspects Berger had a lot less discretion in the matter than the Times's careful choice of verbs suggests, but then we don't have its sources: Berger's lawyer Lanny Breuer, who said Sandy "regrets the mistakes he made during his review of documents at the National Archives," and "associates of Mr. Berger," who said Berger stole the documents because he "was just too tired and wasn't able to focus enough, and he felt like he needed to look at the documents in his home or his office to line them up. He now admits that was a real mistake."
It was. It was a mistake when, on September 2, 2003, Berger took from the archives a long, detailed "after-action" report written by counterterrorism guru Richard Clarke that criticized the Clinton administration's response to the (thwarted) terrorist plot on Los Angeles International Airport in 1999. And it was undoubtedly a mistake when, a month later, Berger removed four additional drafts of the document, stuffed them into his coat and pants pockets, and, once he "realized" that the documents were "essentially the same" as the one he had already stolen, cut three of them into teeny, tiny pieces, which he then destroyed. We've all made that kind of mistake.
It was also a real mistake when he improperly removed his handwritten notes from the archive and lied about it to Archives personnel, the Justice Department, and the media. (Those lies were even told to Lichtblau's colleagues at the Times, something he is too much of a gentleman to bring up. "Mr. Berger returned all of the documents and notes to the archives in October, within a week of his learning they were missing, his lawyers said"--New York Times, July 20, 2004.)
Berger is not alone in having a sketchy memory. Lichtblau reports that "Republican leaders seized on" the Berger story last year--Berger at the time was the top foreign policy adviser to John Kerry, and likely to become secretary of state in a Kerry administration--but the reporter forgets to mention any of the sundry fulminations that emanated from prominent Democrats at the time. The omission prompted us to go back to the original reporting on the Berger investigation, and we found the Democrats were outraged that Republicans thought Berger guilty of wrongdoing.
Some dismissed the story outright. "This is much ado about nothing," said Dee Dee Myers, former Clinton mouthpiece. "The Republican hyperventilating is overdone," pronounced the New York Times editorial page. Joe Lockhart, another ex-Clinton spokesman who briefly flacked for Berger, told reporters that his client felt "a sense of injustice that after building a reputation as a tireless defender of his country that many Republicans would try to assassinate his character to pursue their own ends."
Others cast conspiratorial looks at the Bush White House. The Kerry campaign was deeply suspicious about "the timing of this leak." Lanny Davis, who as Berger's spinmeister may very well have leaked the news of Berger's pilfering himself--an art form perfected by Clinton aides for heading off damaging stories--chimed in on the same theme: "It's a week before the Democratic convention, and they know Kerry will get a bounce. They're doing everything they can to try to undermine that bounce." Ditto then-DNC chairman Terry McAuliffe: "The criminal investigation only came to light three days prior to the release of a report expected to be critical of the Bush administration's lack of focus on the events leading up to the 9/11 attacks." Likewise Hillary Clinton: "The timing speaks for itself," she said. Finally, there was the master of spin himself, Bill Clinton, who took a moment to comment on the Berger investigation during a book signing in Denver, Colorado, last July. "We were all laughing about it on the way over here," said Clinton, "People who don't know" Berger "might find it hard to believe" he'd make a mistake with classified materials. But "all of us who've been in his office have always found him buried beneath papers."
Don't hold your breath waiting for any reporters to notice that Berger's Republican critics have been vindicated. As the Washington Post went out of its way to note, Berger "did not put it in his socks or underwear, as was alleged by some Republicans last summer."
___Who's Bashing Bolton?
____John Bolton, undersecretary of state and current Bush nominee for ambassador to the United Nations, is "receiving so much bipartisan criticism that there is a widespread question about whether or not the administration was expecting the nomination to pass the Senate." So noted CBS News foreign affairs analyst Pamela Falk in a report last week on a letter opposing Bolton's appointment, signed by 59 former U.S. diplomats and sent to Senator Richard Lugar, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
Much of the news coverage of the letter inanely treated the group as "bipartisan," noting that the former diplomats had "served in both Democratic and Republican administrations"--as is true of any Foreign Service officer with a career of normal duration. Which is to say, this fact tells you nothing special about the political views of the diplomats. As it happens, their politics run the gamut from left to farther left, and their letter is thus an ordinary partisan swipe at the nominee of a president they dislike. (Among other objections, they complain of Bolton's "exceptional record of opposition to efforts to enhance U.S. security through arms control." And we all remember how enhanced U.S. security was by efforts like SALT II. Don't we?)
The Scrapbook deputized an army of assistants (an army of one, actually) to tell us more about the signatories, because, while Senator Lugar surely recognizes each of the 59 names, Google struck out on quite a few. Our researcher told us the best source for biographical information on the 59 turned out to be a website called politicalgraveyard.com, specializing in political has-beens. Here one can learn, for example, that former senator Carol Mosley Braun, whose name we did remember, had also defended the interests of this country in both New Zealand and Samoa--a fact that we had forgotten and that does qualify her as a former ambassador, though not a particularly bipartisan one.
Further nuggets on the 59: Ambassador Henry Kimelman did a bang-up job as a Carter appointee in Haiti, but is perhaps better known for his work as chairman of the McGovern presidential committee in 1972. Ambassador William J. vanden Heuvel, Carter's ambassador to the U.N., has the distinction of having fathered Katrina, editor in chief of the Nation. Then there's the Honorable Terrell E. Arnold, another Carter appointee who later rose to deputy director of the State Department's Office of Counterterrorism. Arnold contributed an op-ed piece to the Washington Post in 1988 with this memorable recommendation: "We must develop an open, restrained endurance of terrorist incidents."
Our advice to Sen. Lugar? Don't take advice from this lot.
I just like saying that.
Sandy Burglar...hehehe
"Samuel L. "Sandy" Berger pled guilty to charges that he removed and destroyed classified materials from the National Archives..." April 1, 2005
You liar.
The Sandy Berger settlement ...a complete travesty and a disgrace to the much touted "Rule of Law".
The icing on Sandys cake...he can get his sorry ass security clearances back THREE YEARS from now...just in time for the next admin I suppose.
Whats up with that?
Some clown with former Clinton National Security Adviser Samuel L. "Sandy Burglar" Berger.
"It's politics." stated former president Bill Clinton.
Wouldn't that make the stealing doofus a double-dipper? Maybe they should adjust the fine and include some jail time...
How's about putting the POC here.
"Lemme outta here."
Now we know why and how.
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