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The Auditor Sunday, May 13, 2007 In an abrupt about-face, President Bush has decided against nominating Noel Hillman, a veteran prosecutor and now federal judge in Camden, to the seat on the 3d U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that was held by Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito Jr. Hillman, a former assistant U.S. attorney in New Jersey and the lead Justice Department prosecutor in the Jack Abramoff Capitol Hill lobby ing scandal, had full White House support and the backing of New Jersey Democratic Sens. Robert Menendez and Frank Lautenberg, and had successfully completed his FBI background check several months...

A spokesman for President Bush says a demand by Republicans for Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to follow through on former White House insider Sandy Berger's promise to take a polygraph test regarding the classified documents he took from the National Archives will be studied. The response from Tony Snow came on a question from Les Kinsolving, WND's correspondent at the White House. "Congressman Tom Davis and 17 other Republican House members have called on Attorney General Gonzales, Department of Justice, to administer the polygraph test that Sandy Berger agreed to in paragraph 11 of his plea agreement. And my question,...

Not convinced that Sandy Berger acted alone in the theft and destruction of top secret documents while on the 9-11 Commission, Rep. Tom Davis (R.-Va.) and seventeen other Republican House members recently called on the Department of Justice to administer a polygraph examination to the one time Clinton National Security Advisor asking him about his admittedly illegal behavior at the National Archives in 2002 and ’03. But George W. Bush’s Justice Department as well as his own White House have given Davis and the other lawmakers the cold shoulder on administering a lie detector test to Berger, who pled guilty...

Fiction: Let’s assume next week that the Democrat controlled Congress calls for a commission to find out if pre-war Intel was hyped and to find out why the Pentagon failed to foresee the insurgency in Iraq in the early days of the war. After the Bi-Partisan commission meets and concludes an extensive investigation going through thousands of pages of documents from the national archives and they determine that there was no Intel hype or no way to have known about the insurgency, in effect exonerating Bush with their findings and determining that no one is guilty of any wrong doing....

Live thread to FReep about the Special

FOX News Special Report 'Socks, Scissors, Paper: The Sandy Berger Caper' Questions Probe of Theft at the National ArchivesFriday, March 30, 2007 By Edward Barnes Rep. Tom Davis, R-Va., is charging a cover-up by the Justice Department in connection with the 2003 theft and destruction of top secret documents by Clinton National Security Advisor Sandy Berger. Davis also told FOX News that he is not convinced that Berger was not acting under direction from the Clinton Administration. "I'm not convinced that he was acting alone," Davis said. "They could have well said, ‘Sandy, do you remember that document way back...

Sandy Berger sent an email to Michael Barone, responding to Michael's column in U.S. News. As we have written extensively on the Berger affair and have been harshly critical of Berger, it seems only fair to reproduce Berger's email in full, as it constitutes his response to his critics. Here it is: Michael: I screwed up. There was nothing sinister about it. I was under serious pressure to digest the entire Clinton record on terrorism for eight years so that we could testify fully to the 9-11 commission. I spent several arduous days at the Archives looking through the files....

"History will be kind to me," Winston Churchill once said, "for I intend to write it." Indeed, he did. His multiple-volume histories of the two world wars are still widely read, though discounted by professional historians as incomplete and in some ways misleading. Churchill is not the only politician who has wanted to write the history of his times; most politicians and political operatives want at least to shape the way history views their actions. Some are better at this than others. In the previous century, Democrats did much better at this than Republicans. Most of us still see the...

President Bill Clinton’s National Security Advisor Sandy Berger has pleaded guilty to stealing classified documents from the National Archives, but the case is still not over. In a curt February 16 letter, the Department of Justice (DOJ) dismissed a 60-page report by the Republican staff of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Affairs that demanded Berger be given the polygraph test he agreed to take in order to determine the extent of his theft of materials from the Archives. “We believe there are no facts that would justify a polygraph of Mr. Berger at this time,” said a letter...

Judge Deborah A. Robinson imposed a stiffer penalty in the case than the Justice Department sought, fining Berger a total of $56,905, canceling his security clearance, and requiring monthly reporting to a probation officer for two years. Breuer said Berger has also picked up trash in Virginia parks for 100 hours to fulfill a community service requirement, and he criticized the renewed attention to Berger's case. "It never ceases to amaze me how the most trivial things can be politicized. It is the height of unfairness . . . for this poor guy, who clearly made a mistake," Breuer said.

On July 6, 2006, Stonebridge International, a global strategy firm, announced that it had added a new member to its high-profile, five-member advisory board—former Democratic Congressman Lee Hamilton. True to form, the major media ignored the Hamilton appointment. They should not have. Hamilton, who had served as Vice-Chairman of the 9/11 Commission, had just joined a firm headed by the man who had criminally undermined that very Commission, Stonebridge chairman and founder, Samuel "Sandy" Berger.

I thought Washington area Freepers would get a kick out of this tidbit attached near the end of today's very disturbing article about Berger's document theft and subsequent investigative bungling by archive staff. "Judge Deborah A. Robinson imposed a stiffer penalty in the case than the Justice Department sought, fining Berger a total of $56,905, canceling his security clearance, and requiring monthly reporting to a probation officer for two years. Breuer said Berger has also picked up trash in Virginia parks for 100 hours to fulfill a community service requirement, and he criticized the renewed attention to Berger's case."So Sandy,...

In a chandeliered room at the Justice Department, the longtime head of the counterespionage section, the chief of the public integrity unit, a deputy assistant attorney general, some trial lawyers and a few FBI agents all looked down at their pant legs and socks.

On July 6, 2006, Stonebridge International, a global strategy firm, announced that it had added a new member to its high-profile, five-member advisory board – former Democrat Rep. Lee Hamilton. True to form, the major media ignored the Hamilton appointment. They should not have. Hamilton, who had served as vice chairman of the 9/11 Commission, had just joined a firm headed by the man who had criminally undermined that very Commission, Stonebridge chairman and founder Samuel "Sandy" Berger. In the words of a recent House Committee report, Berger had perpetrated "a disturbing breach of trust and protocol that compromised the...

Paper Chase Did investigators turn a blind eye to the seriousness of the Sandy Berger scandal? Washington scandals are curious things. Sometimes special prosecutors are appointed and the media provide saturation coverage of their doings. An example would be the Valerie Plame episode, which led to this month's perjury trial of Scooter Libby, the former White House aide accused of lying about who first told him Joe Wilson's wife worked for the CIA. Then there are the barely noticed scandals, which prosecutors pursue quietly and professionally. Take the case of Donald Keyser, a former State Department official who last week...

As I watched these events unfold two years ago, I presumed that the Bush DOJ chose not to exploit these stories for reasons of national security. Although seemingly unrelated, both of these stories lead to the same larger secret, a secret that Berger risked his career to conceal, a secret that if revealed had the potential to destabilize the nation during a time of war. As I have since learned, however, the Bush White House is not fully in control of its own Justice Department and FBI. In truth, the decision to protect Berger may have more to do with...

Former Washington Post reporter Carl Bernstein, who, along with colleague Bob Woodward, exposed the Watergate affair, has been grumbling that the Bush administration has done "far greater damage" than President Nixon. But perhaps the intrepid reporters of "All the President's Men" fame should turn their attention to a modern-day conspiracy of truly epic proportions. When Sandy Berger, national security advisor under President Clinton, was caught stealing and destroying documents from the National Archives prior to appearing before the 9/11 Commission in 2003, there was barely a peep in the Democrat-dominated mainstream media. And the near silence has continued to this...

I guess 3,500 classified documents would be too many to stuff into your clothing if you were a high-ranking government official and wanted to take them home for leisure reading. Perhaps that explains why this week one of the State Department's most knowledgeable experts on China, Donald Keyser, a foreign service officer with three decades of experience, was sentenced to a year in the hoosegow after these documents were found in his Fairfax County residence. Keyser claimed he had just been "careless." Without the comic touch of stuffing the documents into one's clothing, being "careless" with classified materials is apparently...

Eighteen House Republicans have urged the Justice Department to proceed with a polygraph test for Samuel R. Berger, the former national security adviser who agreed to take the test as part of a plea of guilty of stealing documents from the National Archives.

As the FNC story points out, the document-filching Clinton aide did agree to take a polygraph test as part of a plea deal reached in September 2005. Now, some GOP lawmakers want to know why the Justice Department won't follow through: The Justice Department should administer a polygraph test to former National Security Adviser Sandy Berger to find out what documents he took from the National Archives in 2002 and 2003, Rep. Tom Davis wrote in a letter to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales dated Monday. Davis, ranking Republican on the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, is leading a group...