The Sandy Berger issue leaves one disgusted

Look, I am very appreciative – to a point – of the fact that President Bush has strong feelings about protecting the office of the presidency from the taint of scandal, yadda yadda, all very good.

But this situation with Sandy Berger just stinks to high heaven, and I’m disgusted that case begun under the Ashcroft Justice Department and culminating on the watch of Alberto Gonzales has given Berger such a slap on the wrist for stealing and destroying top secret documents from the National Archives.

Again. The man STOLE Top Secret Documents, which purportedly were critical of the Clinton Administration’s handling of terrorism, from the National Archives. And ummm…he DESTROYED them.

And for this, he gets a measly $10,000 fine, and oh, yeah, he has to ADMIT he took them and perhaps go to a federal prison for a year.

He doesn’t even lose his security clearances, just has them Suspended for three years.

Hell, he’ll be back on his feet and ready to go in time for President Hillary.

I don’t get it.

Supposedly the docs he took and destroyed were after-action reports written by Richard Clarke, re millenium security and the capture of a hellbent terrorist at LAX, and supposedly, they were critical of lapses made in alerting airport and other port authorities on what to look for. The documents Berger destroyed contained critical margin scrawlings by who knows whom.

My guess: Hillary had scrawled into a margin, “Bill, you dumb bastard, I TOLD you this needed to be attended to, but you were too busy having a party in your pants!”

Or something.

But really…we’re watching the press do the whole hand-wringing thing, seriously admonishing President Bush (as usual and endlessly) for having faulty intel on which to move re Saddam and WMD (never mentioning the Clinton Administrations banishing of “hard” sources for 8 years previous) but they have nothing at all to say about Berger’s theft or what who and what he was trying to keep from our eyes.

Seems strange, doesn’t it?

The press is all about “gathering and reporting” information, but they display a consistent and rather staggering lack of curiosity about exactly what the previous administration did or did not do regarding terrorism, intelligence, national security….or for that matter about much smaller matters like, who wrote the Document of Dubious Origin they have had such a delightful fortnight referring to as “The GOP Talking Points Memo on Terri Schiavo.” (Which, btw Michelle Malkin is still asking about…because she is curious.)

They’re terribly, terribly curious about the military service of George W. Bush – so curious they go talk to a dentist who cleaned his teeth thirty years ago, but completely incurious as to John Kerry’s unwillingness to sign a standard form 180 to release HIS medical records, even after people who served with him – even on his very swiftboat – raise substantial questions.

Ah, well…it seems the press is not terribly interested in finding out anything about you if your name is Berger or Clinton, or Kerry, or Clinton, or McCain, or Kennedy or Daschle.

But…if your name is Bush…why…they get curiouser and curiouser.

Ed Morrissey has more here, wondering:

They were not exact copies; each memo started off as a copy of an original draft by Richard Clarke, but the memos had handwritten notes from each recipient as comments, requests for revision, and suggestions for possible action. Each document was unique, and their destruction by Mr. Scissors means that we will never know what some did with Clarke’s information. All we know is that it must have reflected badly on Berger, Clinton, or both. Otherwise, why would Berger destroy them?

And Jim Geraghty asks the good question: “Do any Democrats want to confront the unpleasant truths of how the Clinton White House handled terrorism? Because there were some facts out there that were so damning, Sandy Berger was willing to break the law to make sure the public never saw them.”

Michelle: asks:Why would Berger destroy documents if they were merely copies of originals retained by Archives? For that matter, how did he gain access to copies? (I’m assuming he was not given access to a copy machine.) Did the files he was looking at contain multiple identical copies of each document?

Powerline ain’t happy. Ain’t nobody happy about this outcome except, presumably, Sandy Berger and whomever he was protecting.

LaShawn has the helpful round up and tells us that even liberal blogger Kevin Drum is confounded.