This is reposted from my blog at
Three Guys.
Haven't been able to read too much yet about the Sandy Berger story. Here's the Yahoo news link, and here's Josh Marshall's take. An update on the story is available from Yahoo news here.
Two wrongdoings here, both apparently crimes. [EDIT: Actually, I think I misread the article. Taking notes may not be a crime.]The first is the notetaking, which he must have known was wrong, but seems of a somewhat lesser nature. (Notes in prep for testimony, I assume.) The second is the actual taking of documents from the Archives, which Berger says was inadvertent, but which either way is inexcusable.
I agree with basically everyone that it's incredibly disappointing that Berger would do this, but it certainly sounds as if Berger either was (or believed he was) looking at copies of documents, and not the original documents themselves. Whether his taking of the documents was actually "inadvertent" or not, it certainly doesn't seem to be the case that he was trying to steal the only copy of documents from the Archives. He must have known that he wouldn't be able to do this.
Wait, did I certainly? Cue the hysteria from the right.
I wish that once, just once, the suspicious activity from the Bush administration would get stuck in Instapundit's grill the way that this and Joe Wilson have. But look: trying to destroy copies of the documents, if other copies of the documents exist, will only make things worse. Berger is smart enough to know this. That's not what this was about.
Josh asks,"So even if one imagines the most nefarious intentions -- which I'm certainly not inclined to do -- it's hard to imagine what taking copies of such documents would have been meant to accomplish." Assuming it wasn't just a very stupid accident--just a guess, but he probably wanted to know exactly what was in these five-year-old memos said before he and other members of the Clinton Administration had to testify before Congress, and didn't trust his memory. Doesn't excuse it--Beger just burned his career, he's toast--but Insty's insinuation that Berger was trying to steal and then destroy the only copies of documents that implicated the Clinton Administration seems laughably premature.
Either that, or maybe he intended to steal the documents and then hold for leaking to the press later. But that doesn't sound like Berger, and that especially doesn't sound very smart either; after all, the trail led right back to Berger, who as Marshall says knows classifcation procedures like the back of his hand.
Accident? A very stupid accident? Tentatively, I guess so.
Regardless of the circumstances, though, Kerry should kick Berger off his campaign immediately for his sloppiness here. What he's already admitted to is sufficiently bad for that.
I really don't understand how this could have happened at all, though. There are some books that you can't take out of a university library. How can it even be possible to improperly lift documents from the National Archives? Why aren't there procedures in place to keep this from happening?