Sandy Berger cops a plea in the matter of walking off with classified documents relating to intelligence failures leading up to 9/11.
WASHINGTON Apr 1, 2005 — Sandy Berger, who was the top national security aide to former President Clinton, has agreed to plead guilty to taking classified documents from the National Archives, the Justice Department says.
The plea agreement, if accepted by a judge, ends a bizarre episode in which the man who once had access to the government's most sensitive intelligence was accused of sneaking documents out of the Archives in his clothing.
Actually he wasn't just accused, he was caught in the act, but of course that's not the real crime here. We get to the heart of it.
The Bush administration disclosed the investigation in July just days before the Sept. 11 commission issued its final report. Democrats claimed that the White House was using Berger to deflect attention from the harsh report, with its potential for damaging President Bush's re-election prospects.
The real story is how the Bush administration would stop at nothing to win re-election, even going so far as to reveal embarrassing criminal behavior on the part of former administration officials. Have they no decency? CBS News chimes in on the same note.
Many Democrats, including former President Clinton, suggested politics were behind disclosure of the probe only days before the release of the Sept. 11 commission report, which Republicans feared would be a blow to President Bush's re-election campaign.
According to the Seattle Times, under the terms of the agreement, Berger admits that his actions were not inadvertent. He will also pay a $10,000 fine and accept a three-year suspension of his national-security clearance. Then he gets it back? Wonderful.
The deal's terms make clear that Berger lied last summer when he said that in 2003 he twice inadvertently walked off with copies of a classified document during visits to the National Archives, then later lost them.
...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.
There's justice and there's justice. Martha Stewart did jail time for lying about a stock transaction. Berger loses his security clearance for lying and shredding top secret documents in an effort to impede investigations into the Clinton administration's actions on intelligence and national security. It's only temporarily, though. Positively breathtaking!
More importantly, this deal removes a potential embarrassment to Hillary's 2008 ambitions well ahead of the presidential campaign season.
Comments