Wednesday, 21 July 2004

Foot fetish. For those who are following the latest scandal from the people who brought you Travelgate, Filegate, Whitewatergate, and dozens of other made-up events that turned out to be all smoke and no fire, the latest accusation is that Sandy Berger, formerly National Security Adviser under the Clinton administration, was caught stuffing secret documents into his pants and socks.

No, seriously, that's what they're accusing him of. Former President Clinton had asked Berger to review thousands of pages of classified documents in the National Archives for submission to the 9/11 Commission; Berger visited the Archives three times, with staff members present on each occasion. He brought with him a leather portfolio, containing business papers and other (non-classified) documents, and he took notes while he was working, which is against the rules.

On one of the visits, apparently, copies of two classified documents got mixed in with Berger's personal papers and ended up in his leather portfolio. He took them home, which is also a no-no, and subsequently the Archives contacted him to inquire about a third document that had gone missing. Berger promptly looked through his papers and returned the two documents he had, as well as the notes he had taken.

The Justice Department investigated, as they should have, and found no evidence of wrongdoing. This was well on its way to becoming a routine non-story, with the investigative equivalent of a police report and a warning…

…until this week, when someone leaked the story and added a few embellishments. In the sexy new version of the tale, Berger had been caught sneaking documents out of the Archives by hiding them in his clothes. The story is not that he left the Archives with his notebook in his pocket and a leather portfolio filled with documents in plain view — that's way too dull, so our friends in the GOP sexed it up. Instead, Berger was pilfering documents by dumping them down the front of his pants; the crack team of National Archive librarians witnessed this act, but chose not to stop him for their own inscrutable reasons; and Berger subsequently destroyed the missing document in order to cover up… the Clinton administration's success in foiling an Al Qaeda plot.

And, just to stretch the truth a bit further, the latest (anonynmous) claim is that Berger was smuggling documents in his socks. How the heck do you smuggle a document in your socks? I can see maybe folding up one piece of paper and stuffing it into a tube sock, but a document? How do you walk out of the National Archives with a binder wrapped around your foot?

I think the silly season is upon us.

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 8:47 am. comments.