Bergermeister Meisterberger

'Tis the season for Christmas TV specials.

Santa Claus is Comin' to Town does not rate as one of my favorites. It's a Rankin/Bass stop motion animated special, the same team that brought us Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.

I think it's really rather strange and kind of creepy.

Fred Astaire makes for a pleasant enough narrator, but the other characters in the special are weird. Red-haired Kris Kringle and that trampy-looking Jessica and the villainous Burgermeister Meisterburger are odd players in the bizarre story of the origins of Santa Claus.


Burgermeister Meisterburger

If you're looking for a story that has a creepy character and a strange plot, you don't need to look to a decades old Christmas special.

New details have been made available in the Sandy Berger "Dox in Sox" affair.

It's not a Christmas story, but it does have Sandy Bergermeister Meisterberger.

And if it weren't so serious -- dealing with national security, obstructing the work of the 9/11 Commission, covering up for the Clinton administration -- it would be a much more entertaining tale than Santa Claus is Comin' to Town and offering many more laughs, too.


Sandy Berger(meister Meisterberger)

From The Washington Post:

On the evening of Oct. 2, 2003, former White House national security adviser Samuel R. "Sandy" Berger stashed highly classified documents he had taken from the National Archives beneath a construction trailer at the corner of Ninth Street and Pennsylvania Avenue NW so he could surreptitiously retrieve them later and take them to his office, according to a newly disclosed government investigation.

The documents he took detailed how the Clinton administration had responded to the threat of terrorist attacks at the end of 1999. Berger removed a total of five copies of the same document without authorization and later used scissors to destroy three before placing them in his office trash, the National Archives inspector general concluded in a Nov. 4, 2005, report.

After archives officials accused him of taking the documents, Berger told investigators, he "tried to find the trash collector but had no luck." But instead of admitting he had removed them deliberately -- by stuffing them in his suit pockets on multiple occasions -- Berger initially said he had removed them by mistake.

Incredible, isn't it?

What was Berger thinking?

The fact that Berger, one of President Bill Clinton's closest aides from 1997 to 2001, illicitly removed the documents is well-known: A federal judge in September 2005 ordered him to pay a $50,000 fine for his actions and forfeit his security clearance for three years.

Right. It is well-known, but the lib media don't seem to have much interest in digging deeper.

There's little investigative reporting on the incident.

Here is some information on the efforts by the Landmark Legal Foundation to find out more details about what the Bergermeister stole from the National Archives.

What Berger did, and the ham-handed and comical methods by which he did it, are freshly detailed in the National Archives report, which the Associated Press obtained first under a Freedom of Information Act request.

Although the report reiterates that Berger's main motive was to prepare himself for testifying before a commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks, it makes clear that he not only sought to study the documents but also destroyed some copies and -- when initially confronted -- denied he had done so.

It's as though AP obtained the report to make it appear as if it were on top of the story.

I think the intention is really to bury it, a "let's move on" tactic, nothing to see here.

His lawyer, Lanny Breuer, said in a statement yesterday that Berger "considers this matter closed, and he is pleased to have moved on."

The matter isn't closed. Naturally, Berger wants it to be closed, but the Landmark Legal Foundation doesn't look at it that way.

...In the statement, Breuer emphasized that the Justice Department concluded that other copies of the documents at issue existed and that they were provided to the Sept. 11 commission. He also said the Justice Department affirmed that Berger had no intent to hide the contents.

Huh?

No intent to hide the contents?

He certainly intended to hide the documents. He went to extreme lengths to sneak out docs, destroy them, and lie about what he did.

Why did Berger stash "highly classified documents he had taken from the National Archives beneath a construction trailer at the corner of Ninth Street and Pennsylvania Avenue NW so he could surreptitiously retrieve them later and take them to his office"?

Why did he cut up documents with a scissors?

He was doing a lot of sneaking around considering he supposedly had nothing to hide.

...In September and October, Berger was able to sneak papers -- slight variations of a report titled "Millennium Alert After Action Review," which looked at U.S. vulnerabilities to terrorists, as well as the notes he took from other classified documents -- into his pockets, the report said, because an unnamed senior official left the room while Berger made or took phone calls.

Although one archives official claimed to have seen Berger fiddling with what appeared to be a piece of paper "rolled around his ankle and underneath his pant leg," Berger told investigators he was merely pulling up his socks, which he said "frequently fall down." He said "this story was absurd and embarrassing."

Can't Berger afford longer, better fitting socks?

What about sock garters?

Berger said that after spending hours at the archives on Oct. 2, he took a walk outside past a construction fence to leave four classified copies of the millennium document beneath a trailer. He later explained that he needed to return to the building for several additional hours of work and was worried that guards would see the documents bulging in his suit.

So Bergermeister, are those classified documents in your suit or are you just happy to see me?

Who puts classified documents beneath a trailer???

UNBELIEVABLE!

Berger got caught partly because suspicious archives employees secretly numbered the millennium document copies they showed him in October. When an official challenged him by telephone on Oct. 4, he turned over two copies of the millennium document that he said he had accidentally kept.

I don't know why Berger isn't in jail.

I bet he wouldn't be bending over to pull up his socks there.