Back of the Envelope

Old Post: My previous post on the Sandy Berger story is below.

Captain Ed is following the Sandy Berger story in detail, and has been doing so since it broke. From the information he's collecting, it's sounding more and more like Berger is trying to hide something, rather than just showing blatant disregard for security:

According to this chronology, Berger took the missing documents at issue in September, not October, and returned to take even more documents after that security breach. Not only does this tend to indict NA security officers — who never should have let Berger back in after the first security lapse, but obviously politics played a part in that decision — but it demolishes any notion that Berger's supposedly legendary sloppiness led to an inadvertent theft, a notion ridiculous on its face. As I've described before, classified documents have brightly-colored covers indicating their level of classification, and in any case SCI-classified (codeword) material is never supposed to leave the Archives.
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What exactly did Clinton Administration officials write on those after-action draft memos that Berger and others didn't want the 9/11 Commission to see?

We'll probably never know now, thanks to Berger's theft and the unwillingness of the National Archive's security staff to enforce its procedures.

I wonder. I'm still not clear on whether those copies were the only ones. I mean, if you suspected someone was stealing the documents, as the National Archives people clearly did, would you give him the only copies of a document you thought he might purloin as part of your sting, or would you make back-ups? I suppose making back-ups of secure documents may be problematic, but is it more problematic than letting a suspect get his hands on them?

As you probably already know, Sandy Berger, Clinton's National Security Advisor and a foreign policy advisor to John Kerry, is under criminal investigation for removing classified documents from the National Archives. From the AP report:

Sandy Berger, former President Clinton's national security adviser, is under criminal investigation by the Justice Department after highly classified terrorism documents disappeared while he was reviewing what should be turned over to the Sept. 11 commission.

Berger's home and office were searched earlier this year by FBI agents armed with warrants after the former Clinton adviser voluntarily returned some sensitive documents to the National Archives and admitted he also removed handwritten notes he had made while reviewing the sensitive documents.

However, some drafts of a sensitive after-action report on the Clinton administration's handling of al-Qaida terror threats during the December 1999 millennium celebration are still missing, officials and lawyers told The Associated Press.

Berger and his lawyer said Monday night he knowingly removed the handwritten notes by placing them in his jacket and pants, and also inadvertently took copies of actual classified documents in a leather portfolio.
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The Archives, which is the nation's repository for presidential papers, is believed to have copies of some of the missing documents. [Emphasis added.]
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Breuer said Berger believed he was looking at copies of the classified documents, not originals. [Which implies that they were originals.]
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Gergen said he thought that "it is suspicious" that word of the investigation of Berger would emerge just as the Sept. 11 commission is about to release its report, since "this investigation started months ago." [As usual, blame the messenger.]
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The missing documents involve two or three draft versions of the report as it was evolving and being refined by the Clinton administration, according to officials and lawyers.
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Breuer said the Archives staff first raised concerns with Berger during an Oct. 2 review of documents that at least one copy of the post-millennium report he had reviewed earlier was missing. Berger was given a second copy that day, Breuer said.

Officials familiar with the investigation said Archive staff specially marked the documents and when the new copy and others disappeared, Archive officials called Clinton attorney Bruce Lindsey to raise concerns.

Is this a big deal? Yes, and no. He broke the law, and he admits that he deliberately took the handwritten notes out without submitting them to the proper review process. The inadvertant removal of drafts of highly classified documents is suspicious, although I expect it's not so easy to prove that it wasn't inadvertant. (I'm still not clear whether there are other copies. There are quite a few copies floating around in the story, and I don't think AP was particularly clear on what's really missing and what are only missing copies. I take it that the truly missing documents are drafts of a later report, of which there are plenty of copies, but as I know from writing papers that sometimes require five to ten revisions, sometimes there's information in the draft that doesn't make the final report.) So legally, there's a case against him.

Is Berger trying to cover-up something? That I'm not so certain about. The notes were notes he was making for himself while reading over the classified documents in preparation for the 9/11 Commission interview. You can make an argument that he was just avoiding the inconvenience by slipping them out unnoticed. And as I said earlier, the inadvertant removal of other documents might really be inadvertant. So I'm not convinced it's a cover-up, and if they are mistakes, or can be made to seem mistakes, it's the sort of thing the public might let slide. The unquestionable scandal, as Instapundit has pointed out already, is his blatant disregard for the security measures to protect classified documents. Sandy Berger was the National Security Advisor, and it's simply atrocious that he would show so little concern for security. For that reason, although I won't cry cover-up and try to implicate the Clinton administration and the Kerry campaign in this, I do want to see Berger prosecuted to the full extent of the law.

Update: Captain Ed smells a cover-up. As I said before: Criminal negligence, certainly. Malicious intent, I'm not so certain. That's a pretty good description of the entire Clinton White House.

New Post: The malicious intent is looking more likely, above.