I didn't mention last night that Brit Hume did cover the Sandy Scissorhands story, both in an interview with Michael Isakoff, and as one of the segments with the "Fox All Stars" panel, so at least someone is tryng to keep it alive. Unusually, the panel was weighed liberal last night, with Bill Sammon vs Jeff Birnbaum and Mara Liasson. Mara said that Berger "...had a distinguished career." Really?

What distinguished it more than this incident? I can't think of a single thing that he accomplished. I suspect that she means that he had a long career, and served in the Clinton administration. Unfortunately, there are so many people who meet these criteria that the linguistic currency of the word becomes extremely devalued, even if one ignores that many Clinton appointees and employees distinguished themselves mostly with scandal and prevarication (something that Berger at least managed to avoid until recently).

Bill Sammon was incredulous (though you'd think he'd be used to it by now) at the limitless capacity of his co-panelists to extend the benefit of the doubt to his actions, and their unwillingness to consider the possibility of anything nefarious about it.

But at least Brit attempted to keep the topic alive.

The real problem, of course, is that the Justice Department seems to be brain dead (as, unaccountably, it almost always seems to be when it comes to investigating wrongdoing on the part of its predecessor administration). It's going to be very difficult to get the media to follow up on this, when the message from the Justice Department itself seems to be "...move along folks, nothing to see here." Even though the notion that he was just preparing for testimony by destroying documents is laughable, no one in the press is going to challenge it, because it's just what they want to hear, at least when the beneficiary is a Clinton Dem.

If the blogosphere is to keep this alive and find out what really happened, perhaps that's where the pressure should be placed--to get Gonzales' people to be more forthcoming.

[Update a few minutes later]

I should add, in light of the comment below, that I was still confused even after the discussion. The story now seems to be that the Justice Department claims that only "copies" of the documents were taken, and that the originals were untouched. But what does this mean? Do they mean that no information was lost, including handwritten notes in the margins, or do they just mean that the five that Sandy Scissorhands purloined were all copies of a single document, of which the original still exists. If the latter, then as suggested in comments, and other places, what he was clearly destroying was the only copy of unique notes of individuals, and if he did, we now will never know the nature of what he destroyed, or his purpose in doing so, by definition, because he destroyed the evidence (which was obviously the intent, to anyone not in love with Democrats in general, and Clintonistas in particular).

Of course, evidence destruction, from Vince Foster on, was apparently a daily, almost recreational activity with these folks for eight years...

[Update at noon EDT]

The Washington Times thinks it knows the answer:

What was Mr. Berger doing with the documents? And why did he destroy only three? The likeliest answer is that he sought to conceal comments he or other Clinton administration officials wrote on them when they were circulating in January 2000. He couldn't have been trying to erase the document itself from the record, since copies besides the five exist elsewhere. What's likelier is that jottings in the margins of the three copies he destroyed bore telling indications of the Clinton administration's approach to terrorism. Mr. Clarke's document reportedly criticizes the Clinton administration's handling of the millennial plots and mostly attributes the apprehension of a would-be bomber headed for Los Angeles International Airport to luck and an alert official.

If that turns out to be the case, Mr. Berger erased part of the historical record on terrorism. The Clinton administration's cavalier attitude toward terrorism is by now well-established; it's likely to be evident in the archival records and will crop up in official communications. An after-action report like Mr. Clarke's, written nearly two years before the September 11 terrorist attacks, is as good a candidate as any for the telling aside in the margin.

Still waiting for an answer that makes more sense, and the "I destroyed the documents so that I could prepare for testimony" line doesn't qualify. Of course, the biggest mystery remains why the Justice Department is playing dumb here, and they don't have an answer for that one:

We can only speculate as to why the Department of Justice would agree to such lenient terms for the offense. Perhaps career employees or holdovers with ties to Democrats are responsible. Perhaps the Bush administration went soft. Whatever the reason, we can be reasonably sure it wasn't done for reasons of national security, justice or truth.

Yup. I wonder what the New York Times thinks?

[crickets chirping]

I was screaming at the Fox all-stars last night when none of them picked up on the reason Sandy Burgler cut up only some of the documents and left the rest. It had to have been not the documents themselves, but what was written on them. These were (as reported at the time) early drafts of a terror report. These would have been circulated around the Clinton administration and officials and staff members would have written corrections and comments in the margins. I'll wager Sandy went into the archives just to review the papers when he came upon these drafts. When he saw what was written on them he freaked. Must have been something that would have embarassed or exposed Bill & Co as not paying enough attention to the war on terror.

This also explains why we keep hearing about him cutting them up with "sissors" rather than just running them into a scredder. He may have tried to just snip out the offending notes to start and found he couldn't.

Does anyone have any idea how to go about finding out which scenario is true?

Scenario 1: The Clark Millenium Report had some number of copies, each with a unique set of marginalia. Call them CMRa, CMRb, CMRc, etc, The archive staff made a copy of CMRa, gave it to Berger, keeping the original of CMRa. Then the archive staff made a copy of CMRb, gave it to Berger, keeping the original of CMRb. And so on for CMRc, CMRd and CMRe, and the archives never gave him originals. Berger stuffed these copies of CMRa, CMRb, CMRc, CMRd, CMRe into his undies. He cut up the copies of CMRa, CMRb and CMRc and returned the copies of CMRd and CMRe. The archives still has the originals of all five of those versions with the original marginalia. (Berger's actions are not insane in this scenario. Perhaps he did not realize that he was dealing with copies, and he took out his black pen and started making additional marginal notes to invent an alert and diligent Clinton administration response. After he had doctored 3 of the packets, he realized that he was dealing with copies, and that anyone comparing them with the originals would immediately know what had been added in 2003. So the smuggling and destruction would have been about covering up his aborted fraud attempts.)

Scenario 2: Originally, Clark's report came out of a government laser printer, and 4 copies were made of it on a photocopier. All five packets were sent around and collected unique marginalia. The archives has the original electronic file of the report before any marginalia was added, and they have the 5 packets with marginalia, but they only have the one original copy of each one. Berger checked out all 5 of the original packets, each with it's unique marginalia, and destroyed 3 of them, destroying forever the marginalia which was upon them. When the archive staff says that he had "copies" they are being deliberately misleading and covering up the fact that Berger destroyed the only record of the marginalia on those "copies."

It seems to me that this could be cleared up by the archive staff pretty quickly. But who will question them? Does Fox have any reporters willing to step up to the plate? Can conservative radio go after them?

I was under the impression that most archival documents got microfilmed or in these days, scanned into document management systems.

That should include annotated copies. Does anyone know if they do *not* do this?

Originals are historical and eventually bound for presidential libraries, but it seems nonsensical in this day and age that they are not filed in an EDS.