Where Sandy socked the docs
Michelle Malkin

Under a trailer. Oh, my:

Former national security adviser Sandy Berger removed classified documents from the National Archives in 2003 and hid them under a construction trailer, the Archives inspector general reported Wednesday.

The report was issued more than a year after Berger pleaded guilty and received a criminal sentence for removal of the documents.

Inspector General Paul Brachfeld reported that when Berger was confronted by Archives officials about the missing documents, he said it was possible he threw them in his office trash.

The report said that when Archives employees first suspected that Berger - who had been President Clinton's national security adviser - was removing classified documents from the Archives in the fall of 2003, they failed to notify any law enforcement agency. ...

The report said that when Berger was reviewing the classified documents in the Archives building a few blocks from the Capitol, employees saw him bending down and fiddling with something white, which could have been paper, around his ankle.

However, Archives employees did not feel at the time there was enough information to confront someone of Berger's stature, the report said.

Brachfeld reported that on one visit, Berger took a break to go outside without an escort.

"In total, during this visit, he removed four documents ...

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Ian Schwartz has more here.

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A Little Song, A Little Dance, National-Security Documents Down Your Pants
Ed Morrissey

The Inspector General of the National Archives has released his report on the security breach committed by Sandy Berger. Unlike the characterization given for the theft of classified data from the Archives by his political allies, the IG clearly accuses Berger of intentionally stealing the documents for their later destruction: ...

Bill Clinton and other former members of his administration claimed at the time that Berger habitually mislaid documents, and that his theft of the documents from the classified area of the Archives was just absent-mindedness. This shows that Berger deliberately lifted the documents. He put them in his pants, took a break without escort, and then hid them under the construction trailer. After he returned to the locked room to officially check out, he then went back and retrieved the documents -- which have all disappeared.

And what were these documents? Copies of reports that dealt with the Clinton administration's handling of Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda, copies that likely had unique handwritten notes from the high-ranking officials to whom they were published. They had direct bearing on the counterterrorism efforts of the administration -- especially regarding Sandy Berger -- at a time when the nation demanded an accounting of the failures that led to 9/11.  ...

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Greg Tinti and Dan Riehl both have interesting takes on the matter.

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Patterico has more here.