Inside the Beltway

Berger files

Of the many letters received from readers surrounding Samuel R. Berger lining his trappings with classified documents, none reads as well as Phil Christenson‘s.

“In an election season that has become far too acrimonious, Sandy Berger has injected a delightful note of humor. He should be pardoned just for making us laugh again,” Mr. Christenson notes.

“Caught stashing top-secret, code-word documents in various parts of his clothing, Berger gets help from his old boss when Bill Clinton comes to his defense with a claim, ‘Oh, that’s just Sandy’s way,’ and says that he’s just disorganized.

“You can just imagine what it was like in the Clinton White House when they were having an all-night pizza party to discuss foreign affairs. Clinton asks National Security Adviser Berger for the presidential decision memo on North Korea, and [the] rumpled Berger stands up, checks his armpits for the memo, then reaches into his trousers and … pulls out the NAFTA policy paper, the memo on NATO expansion, plans to deal with Burma human rights, but no Korean paper.

“Finally someone says, ‘Sandy, have you checked in back?’ Sandy fumbles around, reaches down the back of his trousers … and lo and behold out comes the Clinton policy on North Korea. I knew this is where they got their foreign policies.”

Timed leak?

Radio talk-show host Linda Chavez, former director of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, got right to the point when grilling Lanny Davis, former special White House counsel to President Clinton, about former Clinton National Security Adviser Samuel R. Berger swiping government papers.

Q: Did you leak this?

A: I wrote a chapter in my book about one of the great reporters who covered the White House, John Solomon for the Associated Press … But I’m afraid if I asked John Solomon, “Who leaked this to you?” he would give you the same answer that he’s always given me when I asked that question, which is, “None of your business.”

Q: OK, Lanny. But [the caller] was asking you … did you leak this information to John Solomon in order to get the bad news out of the way?

A: Oh, did I? Well, let me put it this way. Had I been asked last October by my old friend Sandy Berger — who is a great man, an honest man and has done something that he sincerely regrets — I would have suggested to Sandy that we call John Solomon and that he sit down with John Solomon and tell him the whole story and get the story out last October. Because as sure as the sun rises in the East, Linda, there were enough people who knew about this that this particular week out of 52 weeks in 2004 is not surprising as the week that somebody chose to leak the story.

Out-tigered

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