Shedding Light on Bergers Classified Document Handling

Check out this article on Sandy Burgler's version of handling confidential government documents:

"WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Clinton's national security adviser removed classified documents from the National Archives, hid them under a construction trailer and later tried to find the trash collector to retrieve them, the agency's internal watchdog said Wednesday.
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Berger took the documents in the fall of 2003 while working to prepare himself and Clinton administration witnesses for testimony to the September 11 commission. Berger was authorized as the Clinton administration's representative to make sure the commission got the correct classified materials.
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Brachfeld's report included an investigator's notes, taken during an interview with Berger. The notes dramatically described Berger's removal of documents during an October 2, 2003, visit to the Archives. Berger took a break to go outside without an escort while it was dark. He had taken four documents in his pockets.
"He headed toward a construction area. ... Mr. Berger looked up and down the street, up into the windows of the Archives and the DOJ [Department of Justice], and did not see anyone," the interview notes said. He then slid the documents under a construction trailer, according to the inspector general. Berger acknowledged that he later retrieved the documents from the construction area and returned with them to his office.
"He was aware of the risk he was taking," the inspector general's notes said. Berger then returned to the Archives building without fearing the documents would slip out of his pockets or that staff would notice that his pockets were bulging.
The notes said Berger had not been aware that Archives staff had been tracking the documents he was provided because of earlier suspicions from previous visits that he was removing materials. Also, the employees had made copies of some documents.
In October 2003, the report said, an Archives official called Berger to discuss missing documents from his visit two days earlier. The investigator's notes said, "Mr. Berger panicked because he realized he was caught." The notes said that Berger had "destroyed, cut into small pieces, three of the four documents. These were put in the trash." After the trash had been picked up, Berger "tried to find the trash collector but had no luck," the notes said. Significant portions of the inspector general's report were redacted to protect privacy or national security."

I'll bet Sandy "Burgler" was panic-stricken when he got caught. I'll bet he was having visions of Fort Marcy Park all morning.

I thought his story was that he got the papers "mixed up with his own" and t00k some of them home. This sounds more like conspiracy to me. [Bill] Clinton initally laughed the whole thing off, as though it were some stupid joke.

Hillary is no better; after years of "searching" for her Rose Law Firm billing records, a great big box of them mysteriously "appeared" on a table in the White House.

More on that fiasco here, here, and here.

Quote:

"Prosecutors are trying to determine if Mrs. Clinton, while a private Arkansas attorney, assisted a series of fraudulent S&L land transactions in the mid-1980s carried out by her business partner, the late James McDougal. They're also investigating whether she lied about her work or tried to conceal documents in the Whitewater investigation that was begun during her husband's presidency. On Thursday, Mrs. Clinton's private lawyer described the second set of billing records, which were found last summer by Foster's widow, Lisa, in the attic of their Arkansas home. "These Rose Law Firm billing records for Madison Guaranty Savings & Loan, which were discovered by Mrs. Foster at her home in July of 1997, are virtually identical to the records produced by me" to Whitewater prosecutor Kenneth Starr, attorney David Kendall said. "There are a few additional handwritten notations, and fifteen additional pages, in the set produced two years ago," Kendall said. Foster and former Associate Attorney General Webster Hubbell were partners with Mrs. Clinton at the Rose Law Firm in Little Rock. They directed the firm to print the billing records in 1992 when questions about Whitewater arose during Clinton's first presidential campaign. But when prosecutors subpoenaed them later on, the records had mysteriously disappeared. In January 1996, more than two years after they had been first subpoenaed, the records were turned over after a presidential secretary found them on a table in the White House living quarters. The 100-plus pages of billing records outline Mrs. Clinton's legal work for McDougal's Madison Guaranty S&L, including more than a dozen meetings with Hubbell's father-in-law, Seth Ward, an S&L employee who was paid more than $300,000 in disputed commissions. The first lady and Ward say they recall nothing of the meetings. Hubbell has testified that Foster was the last one he saw handling the billing records. "

Consider this a belated "Retro Wednesday Posting" for this week.