Stuffing Classified Documents into your Pants: "an Honest Mistake"

Today Fox News via the AP reports on Sandy Berger's guilty plea to stealing confidential documents relating to the Clinton Administration's anti-terrorism efforts.

Berger, who was national security adviser in Clinton's second term, was expected to enter the plea Friday in U.S. District Court in Washington, Justice spokesman Bryan Sierra said Thursday.

Berger previously acknowledged he left the National Archives on two occasions in 2003 with copies of documents about the government's anti-terror efforts and notes that he took on those documents.
He said he was reviewing the materials to help determine which Clinton administration documents to provide to the independent commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks. He called the episode "an honest mistake" and denied criminal wrongdoing.

Berger and his lawyer, Lanny Breuer, have said Berger knowingly removed the handwritten notes by placing them in his jacket and pants and inadvertently took copies of actual classified documents in a leather portfolio.

He returned most of the documents, but still missing are some drafts of a sensitive after-action report on the Clinton administration's handling of Al Qaeda terror threats during the December 1999 millennium celebration.

Let's recap. Just for anyone who missed it, this is a senior Clinton Administration member who stole, from the national archives, classified documents about anti-terror activities in the Clinton White House before the 9/11 Commission could see them. He claims that stealing these documents by stuffing them into his pants and never returning (destroying) them was an "honest mistake."

To say that I'm disgusted by this, and this plea bargain for Berger is a disgrace would be an enormous understatement. Let me leave it by showing how the gentlemen at Powerline stated the obvious:

Obviously, he was trying to destroy documents that showed the negligence of the Clinton administration--of which he was a key member--in dealing with the threat of terrorism. Key documents relating to our government's inadequate reaction to the threat of Islamic terrorism prior to Sept. 11 are now gone forever, successfully purged from the historical record by one of Bill Clinton's most loyal servants.