President Clinton's National Security Adviser, Sandy Berger, is under investigation after removing classified documents from the National Archives while he prepared to appear before the 9/11 commission, Reuters is reporting. The story is front and center at The Drudge Report, and the blogosphere is abuzz with the news:
Berger said he inadvertently took a few documents and his notes on the material reviewed but immediately returned them when he was told by the Archives that the documents were missing.
"I immediately returned everything I had, except for a few documents that apparently I had accidentally discarded," Berger said in a statement.
"I deeply regret the sloppiness involved, but I had no intention of withholding documents from the commission."
Nothing serious. Mistakes may have been made, but nobody was responsible for any wrongdoing. We especially enjoyed the image conjured by this AP report of bulging pockets and a whistling Sandy Berger sauntering even as he felt like running, trying to project nonchalance as he made his escape from the Archives with the forbidden objects of his search:
Berger and his lawyer said Monday night he knowingly removed handwritten notes he had taken from classified anti-terror documents he reviewed at the National Archives by sticking them in his jacket and pants.
The officials said the missing documents were highly classified, and included critical assessments about the Clinton administration's handling of the Millennium terror threats as well as identification of America's terror vulnerabilities at airports and sea ports.
NewsMax cites comments made by Attorney General John Ashcroft before the commission as a possible explanation of why a former Clinton national security official might not want the information contained in the March 2000 after-action Millennium review to ever see the light of day:
It contained a set of sweeping recommendations on how to combat the al Qaeda threat that were completely ignored by the Clinton White House . . . "Despite the warnings and the clear vulnerabilities identified by the NSC in 2000, no new disruption strategy to attack the al Qaeda network within the United States was deployed [by the Clinton Administration]. It was ignored in the Department's five-year counterterrorism strategy."
At a time like this, wouldn't it be nice to have a MSM we could trust to do their darnedest to get to the bottom of this?
Update: InstaPundit (and everyone else in the blogosphere, it seems), perked up at the realization that Mr. Berger is currently John Kerry's chief foreign policy adviser. In light of those "few documents that apparently I had accidentally discarded," Berger's words -- quoted in a recent Los Angeles Times article posted on Kerry's website -- have a certain hollow ring:
Berger, who was President Clinton's national security advisor, said there was "a profound difference between elevating preemption to a defining strategic doctrine," as Bush has, and "recognizing that no president is going to stand by, if he sees an immediate threat to the United States, and not take action."
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