Perhaps Sandy Bergler wasn’t just trying to cover up incompetence for the Clinton administration’s handling of terrorism (or lack thereof), but maybe there’s more to this story than originally thought:

A former national security adviser to President Clinton, Samuel Berger, stashed highly classified documents under a trailer in downtown Washington in order to evade detection by National Archives personnel, a government report released yesterday said.

The report from the inspector-general for the National Archives, Paul Brachfeld, said Mr. Berger executed the cloak-and-dagger maneuver in October 2003 while taking a break from reviewing Clinton-era documents in connection with the work of the so-called September 11 commission.

“Mr. Berger exited the archive onto Pennsylvania Avenue,” the report says, recounting the story the former national security chief told investigators. “He did not want to run the risk of bringing the documents back in the building. … He headed toward a construction area on 9th Street. Mr. Berger looked up and down the street, up into the windows of the archives and the DOJ, and did not see anyone. He removed the documents from his pockets, folded the notes in a ‘V’ shape, and inserted the documents in the center. He walked inside the construction fence and slid the documents under a trailer.”
…
A leading authority on classification policy, Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists, said Mr. Berger’s behavior was reminiscent of a “dead drop,” when spies leave records in a park or under a mailbox to be retrieved by a handler.

It’s still amazing that the same MSM that claims its the public’s right to know every national security secret of the Bush administration has virtually ignored this still incomplete story of a former National Security Advisor stealing, destroying… and now apparently “dead dropping” classified documents relating to the government’s response to terrorist acts.

Think they’d be as quiet if this had been Condi Rice or Stephen Hadley? I guess they’re too busy with the real stories that affect our nation.

UPDATE:
Here’s the official final report on the investigation. It concludes Bergler wasn’t passing the info off to others, which would seem to bolster the idea that this was simply an act of Clinton administration officials trying to cover up their actions related to dealing with terrorism. If the media would consider this as much of a public’s right to know as a discolored mole on the leg of a First Lady, I bet this case would make for an interesting piece of investigative journalism.