Connecting The Pop-Politics Dots
So, if a’ la Sandy Berger, you can steal highly classified documents from a governmental archives and only get a $10k fine and temporary suspension of your security clearance (warning: Professional Important Person. Do not try breaking this law at home),
and Kerry hasn’t signed the release form for his (unclassified but private) military records, although he said he would,
and guys like Daniel Ellsworth can publish reams of classified info in the papers and nobody puts him in jail,
how much trouble would someone get into for publishing the Kerry records?
Unethical? Certainly.
But I’m just surprised it didn’t happen.
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I don’t know law, so help me where I have no clue on this. Why not sue under the equal protection clause for someone who got a harsher penalty, saying if Berger did something this bad, why does my client go to jail?
4 Responses to “Connecting The Pop-Politics Dots”
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April 7th, 2005 at 10:54 am
I thought Berger took copies of classified documents – my guess was that he was going to destroy them at home and claim they weren’t ever taken. Ah well, whatever. If you want a classification issue, look at Rowan Scarborough’s book “Rumsfeld’s War” – in the appendix are several classified Joint Staff memos and slides, and a classified section of a DIA assessment on future chem-bio capabilities of foreign nations. For some reason, no one wants to address this (or at least, no one returned my call to the FBI and DOD IG). The info was not cleared, some of it was marked TS, and it looked very legit (I worked in the JS on CBRN defense issues). How much trouble do you think Rowan should get into?
April 7th, 2005 at 1:22 pm
Yeah, exactly. In Scarborough’s case it might have been that the docs were overclassified, or that paying attention to them gave them legitimacy that ignoring them wouldn’t have. Same with the no confirm or deny anything in Blind Man’s Bluff…
April 7th, 2005 at 10:52 pm
Berger = Harvard Law School, 1971.
This informs us of two reasons for his light sentence:
Friends who are lawyers in shall we say “high places”?
January 9th, 2006 at 11:03 pm
[...] Earlier I characterized the mindset behind classifying a working document and discussed the unjust double standard between Important People misusing classified information instead of schlubs like me. (Heck, I’ve even posted a training video about *cough* twelve hundred posts ago.) [...]