That Didn't Take Long

On Day 3 of the Sandy Burglar story, the NY Times places the Kerry campaign fax on their front page and your front doorstep - what did the President know and when did he know it?

Gregory Djerejian performs the full dissection, but I can't let him spoil my fun. Here is the Times headline and lede, from the front page (below the fold):

White House Knew of Inquiry on Aide; Kerry Camp Irked

Kerry's a victim!

WASHINGTON, July 21 - The White House said Wednesday that senior officials in its counsel's office were told by the Justice Department months ago that a criminal investigation was under way to determine if Samuel R. Berger, the national security adviser under President Bill Clinton, removed classified documents about Al Qaeda from the National Archives.

The White House declined to say who beyond the counsel's office knew about the investigation, but some administration officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said they believed that several top aides to Mr. Bush were informed of the investigation. President Bush himself declined to answer a question Wednesday about whether he had been told, saying: "I'm not going to comment on this matter. This is a serious matter, and it will be fully investigated by the Justice Department."

Readers who can endure the pain of learning, yet again, of the crazed abuses perpetrated by this power-mad Administration will eventually get to this exculpatory bit in, I kid you not, the final two paragraphs:

"There may be a legitimate explanation here because the White House counsel had responsibility for handling these documents," said Beth Nolan, White House counsel under President Clinton.

"But the better path might have been not to provide the information to the White House at all,'' she said, "because of this exact situation - if you have information that was shared and was then leaked, it creates a whole set of political problems."

No kidding. The 9/11 Commission might very well have asked the President, or Condaleeza Rice, about irregularities in the handling of documents. In which case, it might have been a good idea if the President had been briefed on that, now wouldn't it?

I would be shocked if Condaleeza Rice and Andy Card had not been briefed on this.

Josh Marshall, on the other hand, can't guess at a reason. Imagine our surprise.

Having made our main point, we continue to ventilate below:

[UPDATE: Okrent explains!]

[UPDATE 2: I seize on this comment from the WaPo to highlight the Administration's need-to-know:

[Berger] was examining the documents to recommend to the Bush administration which papers should be released to the commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

The Times reporters also include this howler, in a mad attempt to define deviancy up:

The chief mystery surrounding the mishandling of the documents is the motive. Republican leaders and the Bush-Cheney campaign have suggested that Mr. Berger sought to pass classified information to Mr. Kerry. Ken Mehlman, the president's campaign manager, called on the Kerry campaign to provide "clear assurance to the American people that the Kerry campaign did not benefit from classified documents that were removed from the National Archives by one of their advisers, Sandy Berger, now subject to a criminal investigation."

But Mr. Kerry himself, as a member of the Senate Foreign Relations committee, would probably have access to any such documents, and the clearances to read them. On Wednesday evening, Mr. Berger's spokesman, Joe Lockhart, said: "Mr. Berger never passed any classified information to the Kerry campaign. Any suggestion to the contrary cannot be supported by any facts."

Mr. Kerry would have "the clearances to read them". Oh, that puts the smackdown on that crooked, lying Republican Attack Machine.

But why won't the Timesmen even read the Republican press release? Is anyone seriously suggesting that Kerry might have taken time out of his busy campaign schedule to pore over documents in the National Archives? The Republicans are worried that this information is being passed to the Kerry campaign, which the Washington Post recently described as an expanding inner circle:

The campaign now includes 37 separate domestic policy councils and 27 foreign policy groups, each with scores of members. The justice policy task force alone includes 195 members. The environmental group is roughly the same size, as is the agriculture and rural development council. Kerry counts more than 200 economists as his advisers.

Perhaps the Times would like to assure us that all of these people have the proper clearances? Or perhaps not.

The WaPo is a bit more serious and focused on the real issue.

Comments

[Paul Zrimsek]

My working theory is that all Marshall's kvetching about timing is just a backhanded way of admitting that his latest Great Big Huge More On This Later Scoop is just as chimerical as all his previous Great Big Huge More On This Later Scoops. If it weren't, the crooked, lying Republican Attack Machine would presumably be trying to distract our attention from IT-- not from what we've been told is the mostly-harmless 9/11 report.

[Paul Zrimsek]

Which reminds me. At the risk of plagiarizing an argument from someone-or-other: If Berger's motive for swiping the documents was innocent, why doesn't he simply dispose of the whole issue by telling us what it was?

[antimedia]

That's not all. The Kerry campaign has now removed their anti-terrorism plan from their website. I just blogged it. See http://www.talonnews.com/news/2004/july/0722_berger_kerry_website.shtml for the details.

[benrand]

Do they do it because they are really lazy, really busy, or just fricking a**h***s?

[Darwin Finch]

You're ALL MISSING THE POINT.

The POINT IS:

Berger REPEATEDLY took and DESTROYED documents related to AL QAIDA and BIN LADEN.

This is a CRIME. Good ole Sandy's stupidity is not an excuse.

[ed]

Hmmm.

What's more interesting to me is that these stolen documents might be unique originals. They're all individual copies of the same draft memo, but they might be unique in that they each have hand written notes by each original recipient.

If the stolen documents aren't photocopies of these individual draft memos then there is the possibility that crucial information, potentially damaging information, might be lost forever.

Frankly I don't know if these were photocopies or not. I damn well hope they are but, from what little is being said, I'm starting to think that they are originals. If the National Archives had to make photocopies of each classified document for each person that wanted to view them, and each time they wanted to view them, they'd be drowning in paper. Especially since a photocopy of a classified document has the same level of classification as the original document.

This tends to support the supposition that what were stolen were *original* and *unique* and thus irreplaceable.

Now I'm really really friggin curious to know what was in those draft memos. Since the stolen ones seem to all have belonged to Richard Clarke, who was tasked with the After Action Review of the Millenium Bomb Plot, I'm thinking that Richard Clarke might have been a LOT more negative about how Clinton handled terrorism. He might also have written any number of notes that could be politically damaging especially if he noted the Sudanese willing to hand over Bin Laden.

Written confirmation of these kinds of things would be absolutely deadly to Clinton's attempt at revising his "legacy" and would probably hammer Kerry's Presidential race flat.

Hmmmm.