The John Kerry Post of the Day

My latest discovery about my favorite cheese-eating surrendermonkey-looking Ketchup King cum Presidential candidate:

First, an apology. I didn't get a chance to do this yesterday, mostly due to laziness. Well, that and I was trying to figure out whether it's possible to stuff documents into my socks and walk out of the office with them.

For those who haven't heard (i.e., New York Times readers) former Clinton National Security Advisor and now-former John Kerry campaign advisor Sandy Berger is under investigation for essentially purloining documents from the National Archives during his review of said docs for the 9/11 Commission. Here's how the Washington Post reported on the story today:

Last Oct. 2, former Clinton national security adviser Samuel R. "Sandy" Berger stayed huddled over papers at the National Archives until 8 p.m.
What he did not know as he labored through that long Thursday was that the same Archives employees who were solicitously retrieving documents for him were also watching their important visitor with a suspicious eye.

After Berger's previous visit, in September, Archives officials believed documents were missing. This time, they specially coded the papers to more easily tell whether some disappeared, said government officials and legal sources familiar with the case.

...The documents that Berger has acknowledged taking -- some of which remain missing -- are different drafts of a January 2000 "after-action review" of how the government responded to terrorism plots at the turn of the millennium. The document was written by White House anti-terrorism coordinator Richard A. Clarke, at Berger's direction when he was in government.

...The government source said the Archives employees were deferential toward Berger, given his prominence, but were worried when he returned to view more documents on Oct. 2. They devised a coding system and marked the documents they knew Berger was interested in canvassing, and watched him carefully. They knew he was interested in all the versions of the millennium review, some of which bore handwritten notes from Clinton-era officials who had reviewed them. At one point an Archives employee even handed Berger a coded draft and asked whether he was sure he had seen it.

At the end of the day, Archives employees determined that that draft and all four or five other versions of the millennium memo had disappeared from the files, this source said.

This source and another government official said that archivists gave Berger use of a special room for reviewing the documents. He was examining the documents to recommend to the Bush administration which papers should be released to the commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

...There was bitterness among Berger allies this week in the timing of the disclosure and the wealth of detail -- inaccurate detail, they say -- about the allegations.

"This is a terrible experience for him, and he's embarrassed by his mistakes," [Berger spokesperson Joe] Lockhart said, "but I think he also feels a sense of injustice that after building a reputation as a tireless defender of his country that many Republicans would try to assassinate his character to pursue their own ends."

Okay, let me get one thing straight -- the guy was walking out of the National Archives with classified documents stuffed in different parts of his clothing -- and it's the GOP's fault that he looks bad? I guess we should be grateful, since this is the first instance of people getting upset with a Clinton Administration official for keeping something in his pants. Maybe all those years of lying on behalf of Bill Clinton permanently damaged Lockhart's brain.

But here's the funny part. Bill Clinton knew about the investigation, which has been going on since late last year. John Kerry? Well, we'll let him tell you, from his interview with Tom Brokaw yesterday:

Brokaw: "Did you know that [Berger] was under investigation?"

Kerry: "I didn't have a clue, not a clue."

Brokaw: "He didn't share that with you?

Kerry: "I didn't have a clue."

You know, Kerry's been looking for a campaign theme; "I didn't have a clue" sounds pretty catchy, and it has the added benefit of being true.

Jokes aside, you'd think an important policy advisor would be someone whom you would trust to provide you with information that, if it became public, might prove damaging to your campaign. In the past week, two "advisors" of Kerry, Berger and the King of Yellowcake, a.k.a. Joe Wilson, have been proven to be untrustworthy and blatant liars. In Berger's case, he has committed a serious national security breach, if not a federal crime, and we can only guess at the motives for removing all copies and drafts of an important classified document and stuffing them in his pants (I don't think he was trying to impress the girls by augmenting his groinal area).

In any case, the New York Times emphasized that Berger was an "unpaid, informal advisor" to Kerry. I guess you get what you paid for, Senator.