Daily Ramblings:
Too Much Of Nothing ...04/07/2005 09:42:11 am
From today's NY Post, more background to Sandy's
plea deal with quotes from Noel Hillman, who
of-course is "head of the Justice Department's
Public Integrity Section": Berger
Escapes Liar Fryer.
Berger copped a misdemeanor
plea last week and got off with a $10,000 fine
after admitting he sneaked out of the National
Archives five top-secret memos hidden in his
clothes, ostensibly to review them in his office.
He also admitted using a
scissors to cut three of them into little pieces
to destroy them — his excuse appears to be
that he was afraid of getting caught if he tried
to sneak them back into the National
Archives.
"It's reasonable to
conclude that disposal was a better alternative
than sneaking them back," Hillman said as he
provided new details on questions still swirling
around Berger's deal.
The prosecutor disputed
reports that there were potentially revealing
notations handwritten by Berger in the margins of
the memos, saying, "There were no notations
— none."
He said the originals had been
scanned into an Archives' computer and Berger
only got copies printed from it.
Asked if he's sure Berger
didn't take originals, too, he said there's no
evidence of that.
Meanwhile, the probe
seems to have shifted to whether Clinton
appointees at the Archives tried to cover for
Berger. Archives chief John Carlin, a Clinton
appointee, was bounced soon after the incident.
It's a violation of law to take
classified documents, so Archives staffers should
have called the FBI when they saw Berger do it
— instead, they called Clinton's Mr. Fix-it,
lawyer Bruce Lindsey.
So the major point of whether there were unique
handwritten notations on the copies that Berger
destroyed is here directly addressed by Mr. Hillman -
he says that there were none. And trumping that,
really, is his other assertion that the original
documents had been scanned into a computer, and Sandy
was only dealing with copies printed from that
database. There's "no evidence" that Berger
took any originals (that's comforting indeed).
And now it seems the investigation continues into
a possible cover-up by employees at the Archives.
Oh, and there's 1089 days remaining until Samuel
Berger can regain his security clearance. Since he
copped his plea on 4/1/2005, it would seem that he
will be able to re-apply for permission to thumb
through the nation's secrets on April Fool's day of
2008.
I'd say the joke's on us.
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