Lanny Breuer, one of Bill Clinton’s lawyers during the president’s impeachment trial, is a sharp lawyer and a shrewd pr man. So, I don’t know how he kept a straight face when he gave the following quote to the Washington Post regarding his client, Sandy Berger:
“It never ceases to amaze me how the most trivial things can be politicized. It is the height of unfairness . . . for this poor guy, who clearly made a mistake.”
“Trivial” is one way to describe the unbelievably brazen and illegal act of stealing highly classified documents from the National Archives. “Reckless” and “criminal” are more accurate.
As Tom Bevan of RealClearPolitics observes, “Bill Clinton’s former National Security Advisor went into the Archives to review documents at the former President’s request, stuffed a number of reports and memos with information of potential value to the 9/11 commission down his pants, took them home and shredded them, and he’s now being defended by a lawyer from Clinton’s White House Counsel office who tells us ‘it is the height of unfairness’ to want to know the truth about what Berger took and why he took it.”
What’s really trivial in this scandal is Berger’s slap-on-the-wrist sentence: a $50,000 fine, some community service, and probation. Equally unbelievable is that the Justice Department failed to administer a polygraph, despite the test’s inclusion in the plea bargain that Berger signed. The Justice Department has a lot to answer for and should be forced to disclose why it has not followed the court’s order.
Furthermore, since Berger loses his security clearance for only three years, he could very well be our next national security adviser if Hillary Clinton becomes president. And since that is now a very real possibility, honesty demands that Mrs. Clinton longer remain silent about Bergergate.
