No Bias Here

Quick quiz.  If a Republican leader had gone into the National Archives and stolen classified material, material which detailed the actions of a Republican administration after a terrorist attack,  do you think the left would be calling for a investigation and a Special Counsel to be appointed?

You bet your ass they would be.  Impeachment would be thrown around even more then it is now.  Think about this for one minute.  In the Plame case we had a desk jockey at the CIA outed after her husband lied to everyone and their mother about Iraq wanting to buy uranium from Niger.  For that a special prosecuter was appointed and millions was spent all to indict one man for perjury. 

In the case of Sandy Berger we have a VERY high level Democrat, close confidant to Bill Clinton, going into the National Archives to prepare himself for his 9/11 Commission testimony.  During this "preparation" he steals classified documents and then hides them under construction trailers:

Mr. Berger said he did not want to take the risk of bringing the documents back in the building and the possibility (blank) might notice something unusual. Mr. Berger said he placed the documents under a trailer in an accessible construction area outside Archives I. He returned to (blank) office to finish his review. He said he removed the notes, about fifteen pages, near the end of the day. Mr. Berger said he then left Archives I, retrieved the documents from the construction area, and returned to his office.

Not only that, Mr. Berger was granted "sole" access to these documents:

But do we see this on the front page of the New York Times? Do we see it spread far and wide across the blogosphere?  No.  The MSM and the liberals just shrug their shoulders and say "well, I’m sure there is a good explanation for his conduct"….

And your telling me there is no bias?

Millions was spent on a silly ignorant investigation over the outing of a desk jockey but when it comes to high level Democrat stealing classified documents related to a terrorist attack all we hear is crickets chirping.

Richard Miniter has some questions that need to be answered:

A few questions emerge on the first reading for which answers would, we believe, be telling and valuable to the public’s understanding of the deeper roots of 9/11.

Among these are:

What was role of Omar Bashir, President of the Sudan, and his relationship to Berger and President Clinton during the days when he offered to cooperate in the capture of Osama Bin Laden?

What was in the ten to twenty pages of notes Berger is believed to have taken out of the reviewing room against regulations during his first session?

Who was the person or persons Berger contacted during the numerous “private cell phone calls” he was allowed to make during his active review of the classified documents?

Exactly what was in the documents Berger stole from the archives, some of which he has confessed to destroying?

Scott at Powerline also has some questions also:

It seems clear that the main focus of Berger’s concern was the After-Action Report that was done following the capture of the Millenium Bomber around the beginning of 2000. Here is the main thing that puzzles me about the OIG report: is it possible that Berger was destroying the only copies of these documents? And if not, how could it possibly be worth his while to go to the trouble and risk of destroying them?

In any normal document management system, the documents would be scanned and numbered. Electronic files would be maintained in various locations and no one would work with anything except redundant paper copies. It sounds, however, as though the National Archives may have been working with an antiquated system. When employees there first began to suspect that Berger was stealing documents, they had no easy way to keep track of the documents, so they hand-numbered them sequentially. This later enabled them to prove that documents were missing.

So it’s possible, I guess, that the Archives really didn’t have duplicates, or, more likely, that duplicates or electronic files existed somewhere but were not easily retrievable.

If these documents were in fact the originals, with no copies being made, then this case gets even murkier.  Mr. Berger would have had to known this fact.  Why else would he steal the documents?  If he thought there were copies on file then stealing the originals would be just plain stupid. 

So in the end we have a very high level Democrat with close ties to Bill Clinton stealing documents related to their actions after a terrorist incident and what do we get from the MSM and the liberals?  A big fat yawn.

Doug Ross wonders if it would be the same if Condi had been the one implicated:

Aware that mere possession of the documents could incriminate her, she shredded the classified material and placed it in the trash.

Rice had access to National Security Council (NSC) numbered documents, printed copies of e-mails, and staff member office files (SMOFs). The SMOFs contain working papers of NSC staff members, including Rice, and their content is not inventoried by the Archives at the document level. The SMOFs given to Rice during her first two visits contained only original documents.

Therefore, there appears to be no way to determine whether original documents related directly to the 9/11 Commission’s investigation were stolen or destroyed.

Once this shocking news broke, the media piled on. The New York Times ran a series of nine straight, "above-the-fold" front page stories on the Rice scandal and how the documents could have served as evidence of the Bush administration’s prior knowledge of 9/11.

CNN’s Wolf Blitzer devoted an entire week of shows to the scandal, filming his show in front of the National Archives, and interviewing noted experts Paul Begala, Jack Cafferty, and James Carville.

MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann also pilloried the Bush administration, accusing the president of advance knowledge of 9/11 and a subsequent coverup. In a series of shows captioned, "What did Bush know about 9/11 - and when did he know it?", Olbermann began a campaign to have Bush impeached over the incident. He stated that the destruction of the documents, "cast a dark shadow over everything that this administration has ever done."

The Democratic leadership in Congress also hammered the Bush administration. They demanded a harsh prosecution of Rice, noting that a typical sentence for the destruction or theft of classified documents was in the range of ten to twenty years.

Democrats also formed a committee to explore the impeachment of the President.

As expected, the talk shows ran wild with the story. David Letterman ran two top-ten lists on the topic over the course of a single week. One centered around a John Kerry guest appearance. Kerry read the "Top Ten Documents that the Bush administration ‘Lost’

Back to reality.  A reality where our MSM will use fraudulent Iraqi police officers to spread fake news while at the same time ignoring the fact that a high level Democrat stole classified documents to hide President Clinton’s conduct prior to 9/11. 

Nope, no bias here.

Other’s Blogging:

• The Conservative Voice
• Roger L. Simon