If the networks and major newspapers are seriously interested in getting at the truth, if their mission is to uncover the news not just promote the “progressive” agenda, then surely they will stop at nothing to find out what Sandy Berger was really up to when he stole classified documents, hid them in his pants and under a trailer in a construction site.
Surely, the Times and Post will assign their top investigative reporters. Obviously, Tim Russert and other Sunday hosts will tell Berger: “Come on the show and answer my questions about what happened or don’t expect ever to be invited on the show again.”
The Wall Street Journal today expresses some doubts over the pass it gave Berger in the past:
At the time of the plea, federal prosecutor Noel Hillman assured this newspaper that Mr. Berger was working off of copies of the memos printed from a hard drive, so there was no danger that handwritten notes in the margins of certain copies could have been destroyed. But one doesn’t need to entertain conspiracy theories to be reminded through this tale of how the Clinton Administration had a penchant for abusing the public trust. The Berger story is of a piece with the Travel Office dust-up and the 900 confidential FBI files that the White House somehow managed to collect, some of them pertaining to prominent Republicans. That too was supposed to have been an accident.
To the extent that Mr. Berger’s actions did not affect the completeness of the historical record on the Clinton Administration’s approach to al Qaeda, we’ve argued that his plea agreement did justice to the nature of the crime. But the Inspector General’s account of Mr. Berger’s document-stashing serves as a useful reminder of the Clinton circle’s ethos that all too many rules simply did not apply to them.