Greg Djerejian at the Belgravia Dispatch fisks today's New York Times story on Sandy Berger's outright thievery with, well, dispatch.
If the Times were your only news source for this huge story, you might believe that the biggest crime of all was not that Berger is a thief and a liar, but that the White House knew about it and said nothing. Harrumph! Imagine that. See, they should have had the common courtesy to leak it much earlier for the benefit of, uh, well, someone, certainly.
I don't care who leaked this thing. It is a huge scandal for several reasons. One, it speaks volumes about Berger's character and his arrogant disregard for the rules and laws governing Top Secret documents. Two, it strongly suggests that Berger pulled a major caper to somehow erase the past and help to exonerate the Clinton Administration. Three, it shows what lying idiots the would-be President Kerry has surrounded himself with to advise him on foreign policy. And four, it may even be that Berger was passing along information to the Kerrion. They need to be asked that question point-blank.
Fuck the New York Times for pretending that the real story is what and when the White House found out about berger's criminality. It's just incredibly dishonest.
By his own admission and on multiple occasions ---making nonsense of the inadvertence argument--- Sandy Berger stole highly-classified documents and dozens of pages of notes he made of those documents ---and then "accidentally" destroyed at least one of the drafts of the document he stole. And what was that document that he was so fucking interested in? The after-action review of his and his colleagues' response to the al-Qaeda threats and attempted bombings made on his watch. Are we really being asked to believe that his multiple thefts of documents and notes, multiple and serious abuses of the National Archives' rules, and destruction of those documents was mere "sloppiness"?
Absolute bullshit.