Rainman, I’ve already said, if he turns out guilty, fry him. What more could you want from me?
I’m simply waiting for a real verdict instead of claims of stuffing documents into pants and socks.
ya got 20 bucks I could borrow? That’s $20 US.
Coming from the Washington Times and New York Post over the weekend…
Most of the existing drafts of the White House’s After-Action Millennium Plot Review were stolen from the National Archives and destroyed by former National Security Advisor Sandy Berger at least six months before the Sept. 11 Commission dealt with Millennium issues in interim staff conclusions and public hearings.
A chronological review of hearings and staff statement transcripts available on the 9/11 Commission Web site shows that the Millennium plot was not covered in any detail until public hearings in March and April 2004, more than six months after the Berger thefts.
Over four sessions on March 23-24 and April 13-14, Commission transcripts show a total of 96 references to both the Millennium plot and the after-action review.
Before the Berger document destruction in September and October 2003, however, a search through Commission transcripts covering five separate hearings turns up just five mentions of the Millennium plot.
Berger’s attorney, Lanny Breuer, acknowledged to the Washington Post on Sunday that his client’s last visit to the National Archives came on Oct. 2, 2003, two days before archives officials told Berger he was suspected of removing documents.
Those same officials told the Post that they had five or six drafts of the Millennium after-action review in their files, all of which were eventually stolen by Berger. Only two copies were returned, the Post said, noting, “other drafts of the after-action document, [Archives officials] said, were apparently discarded.”
On Sunday, Commission co-chair Lee Hamilton insisted that investigators had reviewed every Millennium Review draft that the Archives had in their files, telling NBC’s “Meet the Press,” We believe we’ve seen all the documents. … We’re quite sure we’ve seen all the documents in full."
But the Commission’s first staff statement on any topic wasn’t released till Jan. 26, 2004 - a full four months after Berger had destroyed most of the copies of the Millennium after-action review stored at the Archives.
While Democrats have argued that the Millennium reports destroyed by Berger were copies, the New York Post reported on Friday, “Officials say it is possible he also got some unique documents directly from the files” - an apparent reference to oringinal handwritten notes made by senior Clinton officials on the draft copies.
Neither Hamilton nor Commission Chairman Tom Kean have given any public assurances that every draft of the Millennium review, complete with original notes, had been seen by investigators before Berger destroyed them.
And again, WHY would a former National Security advisor do something like this? And now it casts light again on the 9/11 Commission report. How accurate is it?
Joe
Lumpy:
Here’s a little speculation on possible Sandy Berger motivation [please follow the link to see all the internal links embedded in the post]:
We have been wondering about possible motivations for the leak of the Sandy Berger investigation, and have previously suggested a connection to the 9/11 Commission itself. Support for this can be found in the report (as we had predicted).
One of Glenn Reynolds’ many intrepid readers found what may be a cryptic reference to Sandy Berger in the 9/11 Commission Report.
Here is another reference that is a lot less cryptic, and might easily prompt many follow-up questions about documents, after-action reports, and Sandy Berger. From the footnotes on p. 482:
- NSC email, Clarke to Kerrick,?Timeline,?Aug. 19, 1998; Samuel Berger interview (Jan. 14, 2004). We did not find documentation on the after-action review mentioned by Berger. On Vice Chairman Joseph Ralston?s mission in Pakistan, see William Cohen interview (Feb. 5, 2004). For speculation on tipping off the Taliban, see, e.g., Richard Clarke interview (Dec. 18, 2003).
And to what does footnote (46) refer? On p. 117, Chapter 4, we find this:
Later on August 20, Navy vessels in the Arabian Sea fired their cruise missiles. Though most of them hit their intended targets, neither Bin Ladin nor any other terrorist leader was killed. Berger told us that an after-action review by Director Tenet concluded that the strikes had killed 20?30 people in the camps but probably missed Bin Ladin by a few hours. Since the missiles headed for Afghanistan had had to cross Pakistan, the Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs was sent to meet with Pakistan?s army chief of staff to assure him the missiles were not coming from India. Officials in Washington speculated that one or another Pakistani official might have sent a warning to the Taliban or Bin Ladin. (46)
How about that? How many times have we heard Clinton say that he missed Bin Ladin by just a few hours? Yet the after-action report is missing, so the Commission relied on Sandy Berger’s testimony.
At a minimum, this can be tied to the Berger leak. My guess is that someone would have asked about that puzzling footnote; once on the subject of Berger and missing after-action reports, the story of the criminal investigation could hardly be kept quiet. Hence, the timing of the Sandy Berger leak last Monday - rather than a Republican dirty trick, it was a pre-emptive leak by someone close to the commission so that the Sandy Berger circus would not distract from the public release of the 9/11 report. (As if!)
Last Tuesday, Josh Marshall was out of ideas, and could only imagine a malicious Administration leak. InstaPundit readers had other, and better, ideas.
Well, I’ll know I am on to something if I don’t see it in the Times tomorrow.
MORE: Ok, the Times might run a headline like “Bush Denies Knowledge of Footnotes”, but that does have a certain “Dog Bites Man” quality.
UPDATE: Just to be clear - the news accounts have talked primarily about missing Millennium after-action reports, not the 1998 cruise missile attack after-action reports, and I suppose I could have emphasized that. But my point is, once people start asking the Commissioners about Sandy Berger and missing documents, an answer along the lines of “that’s a matter of a criminal investigation” becomes almost inevitable, and very distracting.
NOTE: Very slightly revised at Mickey’s prompting, and yes, I wonder what the real lede is, too.
Chuckmanjoe said[quote] On Sunday, Commission co-chair Lee Hamilton insisted that investigators had reviewed every Millennium Review draft that the Archives had in their files, telling NBC’s “Meet the Press,” We believe we’ve seen all the documents. … We’re quite sure we’ve seen all the documents in full." [/quote]
then you later say
Your post says it quotes from 2 different sources, maybe that’s why it directly contradicts itself?
You say you’re a graduate student?
Wall Street Journal
All the President’s Memos
July 27, 2004; Page A16
We’ve all had experience with the office Oscar Madison. Yet notwithstanding Bill Clinton’s transparently insincere effort last week to laugh off the docs-in-socks scandal as a testament to Sandy Berger’s sloppy ways – that Sandy! – the precision with which the former National Security Adviser zeroed in on one specific document in the National Archives suggests focus, not absentmindedness.
Which raises the obvious question: What was in that document that Mr. Berger so badly wanted to keep under his hat, er, trousers? The only way to answer that question is for the Justice Department to release it.
The 9/11 Commission report offers a tease. It records Mr. Berger’s objections to at least four proposed attacks on al Qaeda between 1998 and 2000. A footnote on page 500 puts it this way: “In the margin next to Clarke’s suggestion to attack al Qaeda facilities in the week before January 1, 2000, Berger wrote ‘no.’”
The Clarke in that footnote, of course, is Richard Clarke. He is the author of the document Mr. Berger pinched from the archives, an after-action review of the Clinton Administration’s response to al Qaeda’s 1999 threats against the U.S. In his own testimony to the Commission, Attorney General John Ashcroft – who has the advantage of having read the document – says that in it Mr. Clarke attributes such success as the Clinton Administration had against al Qaeda to luck rather than skill.
That belies the public line taken by both Mr. Berger and Mr. Clarke, which is no small matter given how critical both have been about the Bush Administration these past few months. Certainly their own credibility is an issue, as is that of Mr. Clinton, who has also claimed that he told Mr. Bush how consumed he was with al Qaeda.
Still, the main public interest here has nothing to do with fixing blame on either Mr. Berger, Mr. Clarke or the Clinton Administration for what they did or did not do pre-9/11. To the contrary, it has to do with the single largest question of this election: How America ought to respond to the terror threat.
On Sunday, Commission Chairman Tom Kean said that Mr. Berger’s padded hosiery did not affect the Commission’s final report. Mr. Kean says he believes Commissioners had all the documents. The problem is this: He has no way of knowing for certain what he might not have seen. Remember, it was Mr. Berger who was assigned the task of selecting which documents – and which drafts of which documents with which marginal notations – to send up on behalf of the Clinton Administration.
Experience tells us that tiny differences in drafts can be critical. After all, the Iran-Contra case exploded when then-Assistant Attorney General Brad Reynolds discovered a paragraph in one draft of an Ollie North memo on diverting funds to the Contras. This was a paragraph that did not appear in other drafts of the same memo. At the very least, given Mr. Berger’s role as point man for the Clinton-era documents, Justice needs to assign someone to review his selections and ensure the integrity of a process he so grossly compromised.
While this might mean nothing to Mr. Kean, surely it has some implications for voters in this election. The Bush Administration has been taking knocks for not having made al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden the priority Mr. Berger said it was during the Clinton years. Yet neither Attorney General Ashcroft nor National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice even saw this Clarke report until after the 9/11 terrorists had struck.
Perhaps if they had, America would have been on a more aggressive footing earlier on. At the least, releasing the Clarke after-action report now would provide better context for weighing such ongoing political accusations as the charge that the Bush Administration’s concern about Iraq was simply a fantasy of a “neoconservative” cabal.
Toward that end we can’t help but note page 134 of the Commission report, which documents a proposal early in 1999 to send a U-2 mission over Afghanistan to gather intelligence on where bin Laden was hiding out. Mr. Clarke objected on the grounds that Pakistani intelligence would tip bin Laden off that the U.S. was planning a bombing mission. “Armed with this knowledge,” the Commission quotes Mr. Clarke as saying, “old wily Usama will likely boogie to Baghdad.” Is that the same secular Baghdad that we are told would never cooperate with Islamist al Qaeda?
The entire justification for the highly contentious exercise known as the 9/11 Commission has been to provide Americans with a full accounting of that terrible day, let the chips fall where they may. Now we learn that Mr. Berger wanted to keep some of those chips hidden. Whatever Mr. Berger’s legal liabilities, the largest interest here is less what he did than why a sophisticated ex-National Security Adviser would do it. And for that we need to see what he was hiding.
Great synopsis – follow the link for all the embedded links in this detailed summary of L’Affaire Berger thus far:
http://windsofchange.net/archives/005295.php
Security Breach: The Real Follies of the Berger Affair
by Trent Telenko at July 30, 2004 05:36 AM
The Blogosphere has heavily covered Sandy Berger’s security breach of the National Archives, and the many angles that the mainstream media and particularly the Washington Post and New York Times have avoided. Yet for all that there are no real evaluations of:
- How badly the National Archives screwed up the security of code letter secret documents;
- How badly the system of notification of security breaches was abused; and
- How badly Sandy Berger screwed over American national security. Cell phones are not secure, and Berger’s security breach using a cell phone from a secure document vault is the kind of thing that could result in tens of thousands of preventable American civilian deaths if my worst fears bear out.
None of these issues are trivial - and unfortunately, the scenario for #3 isn’t a big stretch.
Blogosphere Reactions
Here at Winds of Change Sandy Berger affair has been addressed once already with Celeste Bilby’s post: “Sandy Berger: Inadvertent My Foot.” She did well to capture the anger felt by of those of us in the federal government or defense & intelligence related industries, about the security abuses Sandy Berger was allowed to perpatrate.
Glenn Reynolds “Flooded the zone” with more then a half dozen posts:
* 24th: Horse, Barn. Door. New security measures at the National Archives
* 23rd: Berger was an obstacle to action Against Bin Laden
* 22nd: A reference to Berger in the 9/11 Commission Report may explain a lot
* 22nd: Should Berger be the issue?
* 22nd: Lileks' column
* 22nd: What did Kerry know, and when did he know it?
* 22nd: The New York Times' shameless spin and denial, vs. other media reactions
* 21st: Rules in the National Archives not the same for everybody, it seems
…setting the pace for the Blogosphere.
I think Roger L. Simon understood exactly what Berger was up to in his post The Follies Berger ? Clue No. 304 when he made the point that Berger was systematically eliminating drafts of Millennium Terrorist Bomb Plot after action report that had hand written notes from Clinton Administration officials, his own specifically, and that this elimination fatally compromised the record of events. The Pittsburgh Tribune- Review added its own twist on that here.
It gets worse. From the NY Post:
"Urgent complaints that the FBI could not decipher bugged conversations between members of a Brooklyn mosque and Afghan terrorists because it lacked translators were included in the documents former National Security Adviser Sandy Berger removed from the National Archives, The Post has learned."
One of the comments over on Belgravia Dispatch also explained why Berger was given that access to those records for the 9/11 Commission, and noticed something else:
"The Justice Department should have informed the White House Counsel's office ASAP because the matter had to do with documents belonging to the Office of the Presidency, the Executive Branch. The context that the NYT "journalists" failed to convey is that Berger was the Executive Branch's and Bill Clinton's agent in reviewing the former administration's holdings for documents that met the 9/11 Commission's criteria.
Here's what happened. Berger was on a mission for the executive branch ? the 9/11 commission wanted papers that may have qualified for executive privilege. The commission contacted either Bill Clinton or his attorney, Bruce Lindsey, who delegated Berger to review the former administration's holdings for documents that met the commission's criteria.
That's why when National Archives employees noticed irregularities in Berger's handling of the documents, they notified Lindsey, as Clinton's lawyer and representative to the NA. The NA's inspector general was probably involved immediately.) When NA IG determined that documents were missing, it notified the Justice Department. Justice should have immediately notified the counsel for the current administration because any crime that may have been committed might be against the office of the president. Justice would properly conduct the investigation, but the executive branch has an interested based on the constitutional separation of powers."
3 Critical Points
There are several points here. In addition to destroying documents, Sandy Berger was acting as an agent of the executive branch for the 9/11 Commission and was screening the information that was to be provided to them. The Bush Administration did not choose Berger to do this. The 9/11 Commission did. Then the Commission saw only what Berger wanted them to see via hiding behind the Executive Privilege implied by constitutional separation of powers. This makes the 9/11 Commission report worthless. The Commission did not see what Berger, Gorleck and Ben Veniste did not wish them to see, with the cooperation of Co-Chairmen’s Kean and Hamilton.
Second, the National Archives saw multiple egregious security violation occur and DID NOTHING. They did not call security to stop and search Berger for the classified documents he stuck in his pants, his socks and his leather folder. They did not stop him from taking and keeping notes on those classified documents. Then they let it happen twice. The first time Berger did it and the second time during their “sting.”
Third, there were multiple and repeated breakdowns in the reporting of this security breach. “The Kid” already mentioned the one between the Justice Department and the White House Council. There were others. This is from Representative Chris Cox on the breakdown between the 9/11 Commission and Congress’s Intelligence Committees over what Berger did:
"Established protocols for informing the congressional intelligence committees of the security breach were not followed. Nor, at Tuesday's briefing to the House Leadership by the Commission, could Chairman Tom Kean and Co-Chairman Lee Hamilton say whether the specific documents destroyed by Mr. Berger had at any prior time been inspected and reviewed by commission staff. Yet the documents involved, written by former National Security Council aide Richard Clarke, have been at the center of the controversy over the adequacy of the Clinton administration's response to the growing al Qaeda threat.
While many are concerned with which laws may have been broken, a more fundamental question is why Mr. Berger, by any objective reckoning a subject of the Commission's investigation, was reviewing sensitive materials in order to determine which Clinton administration documents would be provided to the Commission. The destroyed documents reportedly contained more than two dozen recommendations for action against Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda network -- a measuring stick for the Clinton administration's response."
So, we have the following happening in relation to Sandy Berger:
-
The 9/11 Commission used Sandy Berger as its representative of the Executive Branch in the search for counter terrorism documents from the Clinton Administration.
-
Both it and the National Archives chose not to inform the Congressional intelligence committee’s of Sandy Berger’s security breach for months most likely in order to protect the credibility of the 9/11 Commission’s just published report.
This smells to high heaven and should be the subject of Congressional investigations with all parties involved under oath.
Further, it is plain fact that everyone in the National Archives involved in setting up that vaunted “sting” of Sandy Berger still knowingly let unique code letter secret level classified documents be stolen and destroyed. Every decision maker involved in letting Berger leave the national archived unsearched, twice, should be fired for cause.
Les Folies Berger: The National Security Angle
That is not the least of the National Archive’s sins. Mr. Berger was allowed to make cellular telephone calls while alone in the secured document vault and likely during his unmonitored rest room breaks at the Archives. See this article from the New York Daily News:
Guards left Berger alone, sources say Ex-security adviser reportedly told monitors to violate rules as he took breaks, took files.
By James Gordon Meek New York Daily News
Washington ? Former national security adviser Sandy Berger repeatedly persuaded monitors assigned to watch him review top-secret documents to break the rules and leave him alone, sources said Wednesday.
Berger, accused of smuggling some of the secret files out of the National Archives, got the monitors out of the high-security room by telling them he had to make sensitive phone calls.
Guards were convinced to violate their own rules by stepping out of the secure room as he looked over documents and allegedly stashed some in his clothing, sources said.
"He was supposed to be monitored at all times but kept asking the monitor to leave so he could make private calls," a senior law enforcement source told the Daily News.
Berger also took "lots of bathroom breaks" that aroused some suspicion, the source added. It is standard procedure to constantly monitor anyone with a security clearance who examines the type of code-word classified files stored in the underground archives vault."
The high level security monitoring of code level secret documents that should have happened did not. Perhaps Berger had a digital camera equipped cell phone. We don’t know, because the National Archives so-called security did not examine it, because if they did they would have seized it like they should have seized the documents Berger stuffed into his cloths.
Consider for a moment that he may have taken photos/videos of classified documents and transmitted those over an insecure wireless line. The damage if he did is incalculable.
Washington D.C. is the capitol of the most powerful nation-state on the face of the planet. Every embassy in the D.C. area has a roof filled with antennas that are not there for satellite dish television. They are there to listen to our telephones, computers and other data transmissions. If Democratic operatives can bug then Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich’s cell phone and have one of their House members give their recordings to the media. It is a certainty that hostile foreign powers are monitoring every cell phone call Sandy Berger makes on the off-chance of “striking it rich.”
The War on Terrorism has taught us one bitter lesson that both Democrats and the Bush Administration have repeatedly refused to learn, admittedly for different reasons – OUR ENEMIES COOPERATE. What one terrorist supporting state knows, the whole terrorist network soon learns.
This has horrible implications. My “worst case scenario” is as follows:
-
Sandy Berger photographs and e-mails Richard Clark’s Millennium After Action Report that included a list of America’s port security vulnerabilities
-
The Syrian Embassy’s signals intelligence equipment (or that of another unfriendly embassy) intercepts the document or documents.
-
Clark’s list of port vulnerabilities is passed on to al-Qaeda via Iran’s Mullahs (or another hostile intermediary).
-
In the months since Berger’s visits to the National Archives, Iranian and Syrian agents under cover of diplomatic immunity have used that document to case vulnerable American ports for al-Qaeda.
-
al-Qaeda’s sleeper cells here in America were passed this detailed targeting information for a terrorist attack before the November Presidential election.
If we do have another mass casualty attack on America before the November election’s, it may have happened with Sandy Berger’s unwitting assistance.
What Now?
At this point we cannot undo what has been done, but we can take steps to make sure it doesn’t happen again. First, Republicans need to read every Republican politician or staffer involved in the 9/11 Commission out of any leadership roles in the party and of any future Republican administration. They cannot be trusted not to be fools or back stabbers.
Second, the Republican controlled House Government Reform Committee needs to hold hearings on the Berger security breach to pinpoint the security breakdowns and fill the lives of all concerned with lawyers. Above all, it is clear Sandy Berger’s cell phone records from several weeks before this security breach to date needs to be subpoenaed and investigated.
It is clear that the so-called “bi-partisan” House and Senate Intelligence committees cannot be trusted to do this job. Their very “bi-partisan” nature makes it impossible for them to function given the power Democrat’s have on those committees and their overwhelming partisan interest in burying the subject in torrents of hate speech and delay.
Last, the Bush Administration needs to start disciplining the Federal bureaucracies when they fail. Bush has steadfastly refused to fire anyone in the Federal bureaucracies for incompetence and by doing so has made their incompetence his own. The retention of Tenet at CIA and the chief of FBI counter-terrorism after 9/11/2001 is proof enough of that. Bush has only fired people when they openly challenged him and displayed disloyalty he could not ignore, as Treasury Secretary O’Neil and US Army Chief of Staff Shinseki demonstrated.
America needs to protect its secrets from its foreign enemies before it is too late, and only Presidential leadership can make it happen.
If Bush doesn’t beak his bad leadership habits soon, before the next major domestic attack by al-Qaeda, he will find out that the American people are nowhere near as forgiving of incompetence as he is.
Sandy Berger will not have a career in public service after this episode, and rightfully so.
To BB
Oh boy. Too many points to go over everything. But your 2nd “blog” post quotes the NY Post (tabloid owned by Rupert “Fox News” Murdoch) and Pittsburgh Tribune-Review (a political hatchet paper owned by Richard Mellon Scaife) and is not to be taken seriously, IMO.
As far as security witnessing Berger take documents and doing nothing, it seems far-fetched that security would say nothing and do nothing, if they actually witnessed Berger “stuffing his socks” (which is plainly ridiculous). But yes they should be fired.
The idea that Berger would do something that would enable an Al Qaeda attack on an American port is ridiculous, because our ports are basically all unguarded, even 3 years after 911. Al Qaeda could close their eyes and pick a port randomly.
From the WSJ article, which I can take more seriously than your blog citation: [quote] …neither Attorney General Ashcroft nor National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice even saw this Clarke report until after the 9/11 terrorists had struck.
Perhaps if they had, America would have been on a more aggressive footing earlier on. [/quote]
There’s always an excuse for Dubya, isn’t there. It’s always somebody else’s fault.
Forget that John Ashcroft told Richard Clarke that he didn’t want to hear any more mention of Al Qaeda, or the August 6th memo “Bin Laden Determined to Attack Within the United States” (a historical document, yes… it SUMMED UP something like 40 other memos that discussed the Al Qaeda threat).
There are countless other examples that Team Bush totally dropped the ball during the “Summer of Threat”, and no amount of deflection and no amount of excuses can change that!
Another story from prior to the election returns – an update on Sandy Berger and the documents he stuffed in his pants – I’d been wondering what had become of this story – President Bush sure didn’t seem interested in following it up:
JURY PROBES EX-BILL AIDE’S ‘SOCKS DOCS’
By DEBORAH ORIN
January 11, 2005 – EXCLUSIVE
WASHINGTON ? The criminal probe into why former Bill Clinton aide Sandy Berger illegally sneaked top-secret documents out of the National Archives ? possibly in his socks ? has heated up and is now before a federal grand jury, The Post has learned.
The “Socks Docs” probe forced Berger, who was President Clinton’s national security adviser, to step down as Democrat John Kerry’s top foreign-policy adviser last summer.
“It may have been off the front pages, but the investigation has been active,” said a source with knowledge of the probe.
“[Berger] has been interviewed several times by federal agents ? FBI and prosecutors.”
Berger admits removing 40 to 50 top-secret documents from the archives, but claims it was an “honest mistake” made while he vetted documents for the 9/11 commission’s probe into the Twin Towers attacks.
Berger has also acknowledged that he destroyed some documents ? he says by accident.
It’s unclear if he destroyed documents with handwritten notations that don’t appear on other copies.
Some Republicans, such as House Speaker Dennis Hastert, have charged that Berger pilfered the documents because they were embarrassing to Clinton and Clinton aides such as Berger.
Asked if Berger has gotten a letter formally notifying him that he is the target of a criminal probe, a source close to him said, “He has not received any such letter.”
So far, Berger hasn’t testified under oath to the grand jury, the same source said.
The probe is being conducted by career prosecutors at the Justice Department, sources say.
The documents include multiple drafts of a review of the 2000 millennium threat said to conclude that only luck prevented a 2000 attack.
That story conflicts with Berger’s own testimony to the commission, in which he claimed that “we thwarted” millennium attacks by being vigilant ? rather than by sheer luck, as the review reportedly suggests.
The probe was touched off last spring when stunned archives staffers reported seeing Berger sneak classified documents out of a top-secret reading room in his pants and socks while vetting Clinton-era items for the commission.
They then ran a sting operation in which they coded some documents and confirmed they were missing when Berger left.
The documents were classified Code Word, the highest security classification, above Top Secret.
The commission report makes clear that Berger had a habit of writing candid notes in the margin of memos, sometimes flatly rejecting plans for action.
He nixed a plan to capture Osama bin Laden with one word: “No.”
A little update –
Some questions that remain unanswered:
Why did Berger destroy these documents? What did they reveal – or not reveal – about the administration. We’ve never gotten clear answers about this.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A16706-2005Mar31.html
Berger Will Plead Guilty To Taking Classified Paper
By John F. Harris and Allan Lengel
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, April 1, 2005; Page A01
Samuel R. “Sandy” Berger, a former White House national security adviser, plans to plead guilty to a misdemeanor, and will acknowledge intentionally removing and destroying copies of a classified document about the Clinton administration’s record on terrorism.
Berger’s plea agreement, which was described yesterday by his advisers and was confirmed by Justice Department officials, will have one of former president Bill Clinton’s most influential advisers and one of the Democratic Party’s leading foreign policy advisers in a federal court this afternoon.
The deal’s terms make clear that Berger spoke falsely last summer in public claims that in 2003 he twice inadvertently walked off with copies of a classified document during visits to the National Archives, then later lost them.
He described the episode last summer as “an honest mistake.” Yesterday, a Berger associate who declined to be identified by name but was speaking with Berger’s permission said: “He recognizes what he did was wrong. . . . It was not inadvertent.”
Under terms negotiated by Berger’s attorneys and the Justice Department, he has agreed to pay a $10,000 fine and accept a three-year suspension of his national security clearance. These terms must be accepted by a judge before they are final, but Berger’s associates said yesterday he believes that closure is near on what has been an embarrassing episode during which he repeatedly misled people about what happened during two visits to the National Archives in September and October 2003.
Lanny Breuer, Berger’s attorney, said in a statement: “Mr. Berger has cooperated fully with the Department of Justice and is pleased that a resolution appears very near. He accepts complete responsibility for his actions, and regrets the mistakes he made during his review of documents at the National Archives.”
The terms of Berger’s agreement required him to acknowledge to the Justice Department the circumstances of the episode. Rather than misplacing or unintentionally throwing away three of the five copies he took from the archives, as the former national security adviser earlier maintained, he shredded them with a pair of scissors late one evening at the downtown offices of his international consulting business.
The document, written by former National Security Council terrorism expert Richard A. Clarke, was an “after-action review” prepared in early 2000 detailing the administration’s actions to thwart terrorist attacks during the millennium celebration. It contained considerable discussion about the administration’s awareness of the rising threat of attacks on U.S. soil.
Archives officials have said previously that Berger had copies only, and that no original documents were lost. It remains unclear whether Berger knew that, or why he destroyed three versions of a document but left two other versions intact. Officials have said the five versions were largely similar, but contained slight variations as the after-action report moved around different agencies of the executive branch.
National Archives officials almost immediately suspected that Berger had removed materials after his Oct. 2, 2003, visit. They called Bruce R. Lindsey, a former White House lawyer and Clinton’s liaison to the archives to complain. Lindsey, sources said, called Berger, who soon acknowledged to archives officials that he had removed documents – by accident, he told them – and returned notes that he made, as well as the two documents he had not destroyed.
A criminal investigation, which eventually brought witnesses before a grand jury, was soon underway. The probe came to light last July, prompting Berger’s resignation as a senior foreign policy adviser to 2004 Democratic nominee John F. Kerry.
Berger’s archives visit occurred as he was reviewing materials as a designated representative of the Clinton administration to the national commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The question of what Clinton knew and did about the emerging al Qaeda threat before leaving office in January 2001 was acutely sensitive, as suggested by Berger’s determination to spend hours poring over the Clarke report before his testimony.
The Berger associate authorized to speak with reporters described the chronology the former national security chief gave to the Justice Department in his negotiations with the Justice Department. On Sept. 2, 2003, the associate said, Berger put a copy of the Clarke report in his suit jacket. He did not put it in his socks or underwear, as was alleged by some Republicans last summer. On Oct. 2, 2003, he again spent hours at the archives and took four more versions of the document. Back in his office, he studied them in detail, realized they were largely identical, and took the scissors to three of the copies, the associate said.
Berger friends regarded the agreement as fair, given the circumstances, and Breuer’s statement praised the “professionalism” of the lawyers he worked with at the Justice Department.
Holy crap, BB - I’d forgotten all about this little episode.
Way to pull one out of the archives and put a finish on it.
BTW - It was fun reading some of the lumpster’s old posts.