Document No. 217
John Fund of The Wall Street Journal writes today about Sandy Berger, notorious thief and liar (emphases mine):
Officials of the 9/11 Commission are now on record expressing “grave concern” about the materials to which Mr. Berger had access. A report from the National Archives Inspector General last month found he took extraordinary measures to spirit them out of the archives, including hiding them in his pockets and socks. He also went outside without an escort and put some documents under a construction trailer, from where he could later retrieve them.
After archives staff became suspicious of Mr. Berger during his third visit, they numbered some of the documents he looked at. After he left, they reviewed the documents and noted that No. 217 was missing. The next time he came, the staff gave him another copy of 217 with the comment that it had been inadvertently not made available to him during his previous visit. Mr. Berger appropriated the same document again.
This wasn’t so much a search-and-destroy mission as it was a grab-anything-you-can-stuff-in-your-trousers-and-destroy mission.
What was so damned important about that document and the others that Berger would have stolen and destroyed them?
The Inspector General’s report found that the papers Mr. Berger took outlined the adequacy of the government’s knowledge of terrorist threats in the U.S. in the final months of the Clinton administration–documents that could have been of some interest to the 9/11 Commission, before which Mr. Berger was scheduled to testify. The Washington Post buried news of the Inspector General’s report on page 7; the New York Times dumped it on page 36.
The Clinton Administration’s knowledge of the perpetrators of the attack on the USS Cole was perfectly adequate. That is to say, they knew full fucking well who did the deed.
Still, they did nothing. Clinton was probably too busy thinking of criminals he could pardon for the benefit of himself and his family.
Now he can think more about his legacy —and how Sandy Bergler’s thievery will always be a part of it.
