Missing documents? That’s not so bad
Please. C’mon. Who among us hasn’t shoved classified documents into his pants and jacket by accident? It happens.
You’re reviewing some notes – OK, classified notes, but it’s not like they’re the secret formula for Coke or anything. Somehow they get in your clothing. Maybe you’re the sort of person who’s always putting things in your pants, and every night you empty out the contents – a gallon of milk, some lawn statuary, some D-cell batteries, one shoe, loose rosary beads. And hey, what’s this? Dang: classified documents.
Well, better do the right thing and return them. But somehow they get cut up and thrown away. You’re bad. But it’s not like you were intending to sell them to the Chinese – or worse, Fox News.
Should you get sent to the Martha Stewart Memorial Wing of the White Collar Timeout Complex? Not if you’re that lovable rapscallion Sandy Berger, who has admitted that those classified papers didn’t leap unaided into his wardrobe.
His verdict: a $10,000 fine and a three-year suspension of his security clearance. Just in time for 2008, when he could be President Hillary’s secretary of – now what was the name of that office? He wrote it down somewhere. Must be in his other pants.
When the story first broke, Bill Clinton himself found it risible: Why, that’s just Sandy, always a pack rat; once we found him yelling for help, buried under 200 pounds of documents he’d carted off from the Folger Library.
Professional chameleon David Gergen suspected the story of Berger’s crime was released to draw attention away from the Sept. 11 commission report. (Apparently Karl Rove made Berger walk off with documents months in advance just to set up the diversion.) No harm, no foul – the real crime was 40 million uninsured caribou in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, etc.
The whitewash continues, somewhat. Berger’s defenders note the Justice Department’s carefully worded conclusions: There was no evidence Berger was “trying to conceal information when he illegally took copies of classified terrorism documents,” as the Washington Post put it. Investigators decided he’d taken them for “personal convenience … to prepare testimony.” (Apparently it’s not so bad to steal the Constitution if you have a quiz on American history the next day.)
Justice concluded that he didn’t really mean to destroy or cover up evidence of Clinton administration failings that might come up in Sept. 11 hearings. But it seems somewhat inconsistent with Berger’s own admission that he scissored the things to shreds, no? Ah, but they were copies, that’s all. Nothing more. But were they copies with damning notes in the margins, perhaps? And that’s why he took five, destroyed three and “misfiled” the other two?
We’ll never know! The cement fist of Official Media Incuriosity has descended, and that’s the end of that chapter.
But imagine the howls if a Bush administration official had admitted to stealing documents about terrorist threat warnings. Air America hosts would get nodes on their vocal cords the size of grapefruits from shouting about the crime and the sentence. And people would listen, for once: It would be news. Big news. Bad news, with all the hot juicy elements of a great political scandal: stolen documents. A lying official. Suspect testimony. Terrorist warnings unheeded. Rumors of pants. But no: It’s lost in the backwash of grief over the pope, never to be mentioned again.
Perhaps the administration sought a lighter sentence to avoid charges that l’affair Berger was politically motivated. If one asserts that Berger tried to eliminate evidence that the Clinton crowd shrugged at terrorist threats, you’ll get hit with charges that the Bush administration not only ignored explicit warnings of Sept. 11, they made up intel to justify invading Iraq for grins ‘n’ giggles. And at the end of the day, we’re all back to our familiar posture: throttling each other while shouting LIAR.
At least we know one thing: Berger did not put the documents in his socks. That was misreported. Surely we can come together and agree on that? Let the healing begin, and let’s move on to more important matters. Is Britney pregnant yet? Maybe by Robert Blake? Oh my.
Scandalous!