[Mb-civic] NYTimes.com Article: White House Knew of Inquiry on Aide; Kerry Camp Irked

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White House Knew of Inquiry on Aide; Kerry Camp Irked

July 22, 2004
 By ERIC LICHTBLAU and DAVID E. SANGER 



 

WASHINGTON, July 21 - The White House said Wednesday that
senior officials in its counsel's office were told by the
Justice Department months ago that a criminal investigation
was under way to determine if Samuel R. Berger, the
national security adviser under President Bill Clinton,
removed classified documents about Al Qaeda from the
National Archives. 

The White House declined to say who beyond the counsel's
office knew about the investigation, but some
administration officials, who spoke on condition of
anonymity, said they believed that several top aides to Mr.
Bush were informed of the investigation. President Bush
himself declined to answer a question Wednesday about
whether he had been told, saying: "I'm not going to comment
on this matter. This is a serious matter, and it will be
fully investigated by the Justice Department." 

The disclosure of the investigation forced Mr. Berger to
step down as an informal, unpaid adviser to Senator John
Kerry's campaign on Tuesday, and on Wednesday the campaign
accused the White House of deliberately leaking news of the
investigation and said that Vice President Dick Cheney was
involved in strategies to divert attention from the Sept.
11 report to be issued Thursday. 

"The timing of this leak suggests that the White House is
more concerned about protecting its political hide than
hearing what the commission has to say about strengthening
our security," a statement issued by Mr. Kerry's campaign
said. 

Scott McClellan, the president's press secretary, denied
Wednesday that the White House had anything to do with the
leak, or was seeking a diversion from the report. 

The report is expected to criticize the Bush
administration's handling of intelligence about terrorism,
but it will also contain significant criticisms of the
Clinton administration and the National Security Council
that Mr. Berger ran, in the pursuit of Osama bin Laden. 

The chief mystery surrounding the mishandling of the
documents is the motive. Republican leaders and the
Bush-Cheney campaign have suggested that Mr. Berger sought
to pass classified information to Mr. Kerry. Ken Mehlman,
the president's campaign manager, called on the Kerry
campaign to provide "clear assurance to the American people
that the Kerry campaign did not benefit from classified
documents that were removed from the National Archives by
one of their advisers, Sandy Berger, now subject to a
criminal investigation." 

But Mr. Kerry himself, as a member of the Senate Foreign
Relations committee, would probably have access to any such
documents, and the clearances to read them. On Wednesday
evening, Mr. Berger's spokesman, Joe Lockhart, said: "Mr.
Berger never passed any classified information to the Kerry
campaign. Any suggestion to the contrary cannot be
supported by any facts." 

At the Kerry campaign, officials say they were taken by
surprise by the accusation. It appears that Mr. Berger did
not disclose the investigation to Mr. Kerry's aides. Mr.
Lockhart said that was because "we were dealing in good
faith with the Department of Justice on this matter for
many months, and part of our agreement was that this was
not to be discussed beyond Sandy's legal team." 

On Tuesday, after the information about Mr. Berger emerged,
Mr. McClellan referred questions to the Justice Department
and said, "What we know is what has been reported in the
news media." That seemed to suggest no early knowledge of
the investigation inside the White House. 

On Wednesday, however, Mr. McClellan corrected himself,
saying that the office of Alberto Gonzalez Jr., the White
House counsel, had been informed about the case. 

"The counsel's office is the one that is coordinating with
the Sept. 11 commission the production of documents," Mr.
McClellan said. "And since this relates to some documents,
the counsel's office was contacted as part of that
investigation." 

Mr. McClellan did not specifically cite the Justice
Department as the source of the information, but
administration officials said it was the department that
had informed the White House of the investigation. 

The Justice Department declined to comment. The department
is investigating whether Mr. Berger broke federal law on
the handling of classified material by removing from a
secure government reading room a handful of documents
related to an after-action report on the 1999 millennium
plots, as well as notes he took during his review. 

In preparing for testimony before the Sept. 11 commission,
Mr. Berger viewed thousands of pages of intelligence
documents. He said he removed the documents by mistake, but
Republicans accused him of stashing the material in his
clothes on purpose. They have offered theories about what
that purpose may have been, like an effort to withhold
information that reflected badly on the Clinton
administration. 

Traditionally, law enforcement officials have sought to
maintain a firewall of sorts between criminal investigators
and political appointees on politically sensitive cases. 

Several legal analysts said it would not be unusual or
necessarily improper for the political appointees at the
Justice Department to have let the White House know of the
investigation's existence. But they emphasized that such
communications should be closely held at the White House,
should not involve criminal investigators and should not be
allowed to influence the outcome. 

"There may be a legitimate explanation here because the
White House counsel had responsibility for handling these
documents," said Beth Nolan, White House counsel under
President Clinton. 

"But the better path might have been not to provide the
information to the White House at all,'' she said, "because
of this exact situation - if you have information that was
shared and was then leaked, it creates a whole set of
political problems." 

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/22/politics/22berger.html?ex=1091518171&ei=1&en=6dc26caa73477f0e


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