John Fund is must-reading today (which you’d know if you’d looked at our web-memo thingamajig). An excerpt:
Prosecutors accepted Mr. Berger’s assurance that he had taken only five documents from the archives, even though on three of his four visits there he had access to original working papers of the National Security Council for which no adequate inventory exists. Nancy Smith, the archives official who provided the materials to Mr. Berger, said that she would “never know what if any original documents were missing.” We have only Mr. Berger’s word that he didn’t take anything else. The Justice Department secured his agreement to take a polygraph on the matter, but never followed through and administered it.
The issue is still relevant. Officials of the 9/11 Commission are now on record expressing “grave concern” about the materials to which Mr. Berger had access. A report from the National Archives Inspector General last month found he took extraordinary measures to spirit them out of the archives, including hiding them in his pockets and socks. He also went outside without an escort and put some documents under a construction trailer, from where he could later retrieve them.