Sandy Burglar, last Friday spoke to the press after he pled guilty to misdemeanor charges in connection with his removal and destruction of certain classified documents from the National Archives.
BURGLAR: I exercised very poor judgment in the course of reviewing the files at the Archives for the 9/11 Commission. I deeply regret it. It was mistaken, and it was wrong.
RUSH: Well that’s it, then! That’s all we care about, that he has remorse and that he regrets it and that he admitted his “mistake.” This is the first step, folks. The first step is admit your mistakes, something the liberals haven’t yet done, but Sandy Burglar has, and for that we embrace him and we love him. We also wonder how in the hell this happened, because we know that if this had been a national security advisor for the Bush administration, say Condoleezza Rice had gone in there to review documents in preparation for her testimony, and documents were missing, it would have been front page headlines for 400 days on the New York Times. They might have moved that story to promote illegal immigrants building up, bolstering Social Security on one day but it would have still been front page news. So… Last night on Special Report with Brit Hume, Brit talked with Michael Isikoff, reporter with Newsweek magazine. We have several bites here. The first is this. Brit Hume said, “Nothing’s been lost as a result of what Berger did,” and Isikoff said, “Well, according to the chief of the Integrity Section at the justice department, he said nothing’s been lost to the US government archives,” and then Isikoff continues.
ISIKOFF: Berger takes five copies back. He tells the archives he didn’t take anything when they contact him the next day. So he lies to the archives and he then proceeds to destroy — with scissors, cuts up — three of the copies and returns the other two, and so that was —
HUME: And then, what? Did he try to slip them back or did he come back and prevent them to the archivists?
ISIKOFF: He brought them. He presented them to the archives. He brought them back to the archives.
RUSH: I’ve always wondered, “What did he put back in?” I’m wondering what he replaced because what he took out of there, folks, were copies. Yes, they were copies, but they had notes, handwritten notes from various Clinton administration officials, and we think that’s what Sandy Burglar was looking for. I think it boils down to this. I think Burglar ended up being a fall guy here, and Burglar… How to put this? I think Burglar was willing to risk these charges and perhaps penalties in order to spare whatever was in those notes being made public about the Clinton administration and terrorism. Somebody made a calculated judgment. He probably got a phone call one night. (Clinton impression) “Hey, hey, Sandy baby! How you doing, pal? You remember…? Can I tell you about a guy named Bob Torricelli? You remember when we had him? Andrew Cuomo, remember him? The two great men in our party. It’s a shame what happened to them, but, Sandy, we got some stuff we have to take care of here.” I mean, we’ll never know, ladies and gentlemen. The next sound bite is this. Brit Hume says, “Well, do we know why Sandy B[urgla]r did this?”
ISIKOFF: Well, you know, it’s hard to get in somebody else’s head. The explanation —
HUME: That did not emerge, did it, at this hearing?
ISIKOFF: Not in open court. Not in open court. But what the government has said, what Berger’s people have said is that he was trying to get straight — get the — get the testimony straight. He wanted to understand it. These five copies were confusing to them, you know, they were largely duplicates, you know —
HUME: Uh huh.
ISIKOFF: — and so he destroyed three. That is the explanation that has been offered.
HUME: That’s not very convincing, is it?
ISIKOFF: It’s not, uh… It certainly… You know, I was skeptical.
RUSH: So finally Brit says, “Of course we don’t know what all was in these documents. We know the gist of them; we don’t know what was in them?”
ISIKOFF: Well, we do know actually from the 9/11 Commission report — and we brought some of it with you — that it’s not any question of IF there’s going to be another attack by Al-Qaeda, it’s an attack [sic–question] of WHEN and there’s got to be a lot more action taken by the government to thwart it.
HUME: So, in other words, it could e arguably be seen as accusing the Clinton administration of doing something that it manifestly did not do?
ISIKOFF: Very similar to the Clarke memos in early 2001 to the Bush White House about, “They’re coming;we’ve got to do something, :and lack of action, lack of response.
RUSH: Okay, so that’s what they think, somebody was warning somebody in the Clinton administration, “we’ve got to do something.” they didn’t do anything about it. they want to get those out of there so that Richard Clarke’s memos would survive as focusing the blame on Condoleezza Rice and the Bush administration. Let’s go back, July 2004. That’s when all this hubbub happened, and let’s listen to President Clinton and what he said at the time this story broke. It’s July 20th, 2004, at a book signing in Denver, and this is what Clinton had to say about the controversy surrounding his former aide, Sandy Burglar.
CLINTON: I believe his explanations. He did a fabulous job against terrorism. All those records were documented, and there wasn’t any question about what he did leading up to the Millennium, where we had no terrorist incidents and we prevented a lot of them. So I think that, you know, he’s just cooperated, said he’s going to — but that man worked his heart out for eight years, and he was there for, you know, all day, ten, 12 hours, four days in a row and he said what happened, and he said what happened, and I have no reason not to believe him.
RUSH: And that’s because probably I assigned him the duty and the task of removing that incriminating stuff out of there. It is mind-boggling when you stop and think. You wonder what it is that allowed this deal to happen. Could it be a Bush administration wants to look the other way? You know, “Just drop it, we want to move forward.” Could it be, you know, Clinton holdovers in the justice department that were allowed to take some precedent action in this, given the transition from the evil John Ashcroft, according to the left, to the incompetent and inept Alberto Gonzales, according to the left? Could it be that during that transition some liberals in the justice department, holdovers from Clinton, decided to, you know, make deals? Those things still have to be signed off, though, by higher-ups. These deals individual US attorneys just can’t make deals like this without approval, writing, you know, bureaucracy after bureaucracy getting in on the deal. But it’s clear. Martha Stewart, folks, went to jail for practically the same thing. Martha Stewart…well, I mean for much less, actually. Martha Stewart went to jail for lying about something she didn’t do when you boil it all down, and then Sandy Burglar gets a $10,000 slap on the hand, wrist, whatever, a fine, and his security clearance taken away for three years — which is no big deal. Security clearance during the Bush administration worthless anyway but he’ll get thinks security clearance back just in time to serve in the Hillary Clinton administration, if that’s something that eventuates. Governor Bill Richardson, another Clinton associate, added this. This is also on July 20th of 2004. Governor Richardson added that Sandy Burglar was always a sloppy and disheveled kind of guy.
RICHARDSON: Well, obviously Sandy’s admitted to a mistake in that process, but I have known him for 20 years. The guy is honorable. He’s a dedicated public servant. I’m sure it was a careless, sloppy moment. An investigation is going on. But I believe that what Sandy was — I always remember him as disheveled. You know, he had 50 papers running around, his tie was off, sort of like me, and I just think maybe this is a case of sloppiness. I don’t think there was any malicious intent.
RUSH: That’s Governor Bill Richardson of New Mexico. At the time I found that interesting: “To exonerate the guy we gotta portray him as a disorganized, sloppy mess.” He’s running the NSA, a disorderly sloppy mess running the National Security Agency! Fifty papers on his desk; he doesn’t know which is which. But, folks, I don’t care how sloppy or disheveled you are, you’re going in before the big televised 9/11 hearing; you’re looking at documents from your time in Washington at the White House, figure out what you gotta say in answer to some questions. You take some home? You cut three of them up? You take two back? Everybody is asking us just to believe a lot here. But that’s where it is. We can only surmise and wonder, because the investigation is over.
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RUSH: You know, in liberal talk, ladies and gentlemen, when somebody says you’re “sloppy,” they’re generally referring to the fact that you were stupid enough to get caught. Welcome back, Rush Limbaugh, the EIB Network. You remember, by the way — I just want to refresh your memories on this — after Clinton went in and testified behind closed doors, for, what was it, an interminable number of hours, four hours, exhaustive energy on display, blah, blah, blah. The media reported that he went in there all by himself. “He was all alone, answered every question, I’ll tell you, it was just a great performance, young, vigorous presidents! Oh, why couldn’t we have him back,” blah, blah, blah. Then Bush went in there and they said Bush had Cheney.” Bush had Cheney in there, one other guy, and Bush couldn’t do it on his own. Bush, because he wasn’t the architect of anything, he needed big dog Cheney in there because Cheney was Mr. Big,” and we later learn that Clinton also had Sandy Burglar and Bruce Lindsey, White House counsel. He had a lawyer in there with him talking to the 9/11 Commission. The media failed to point this out at the time, seeking only to make Bush look incompetent and helpless.
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RUSH: Here’s Dave in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Nice to have you on the program, sir, with just.
CALLER: Hi. First-time caller, long-time listener.
RUSH: Thank you, sir.
CALLER: Good to hear your voice. Isikoff took a cheap shot with no time remaining. I watch Brit Hume every night and it love him, but listen to this logic. This is lib logic. If Clarke wrote a memo to the Bush administration that was ignored, as Isikoff is implying, guess what? There wouldn’t have been any need for Clarke to have written that memo had Clinton paid attention to Sandy Burglar’s memo!
RUSH: I think I follow what you’re saying
CALLER: — and that was after the fact.
RUSH: Yeah, yeah, here’s what he’s saying is if the Clinton administration archives were full of terrorist warnings and they could say the Bush administration ignored them, there would be no reason for Richard Clarke to write one in 2001.
CALLER: Exactly.
RUSH: And so the fact that Clarke had a memo that they wanted to focus on indicates the Clinton administration wasn’t issuing all these warnings. Is that your conclusion out there?
CALLER: My conclusion is this, Rush. That when the memos were written — and to me I still have qualms about the fact that he destroyed stuff. We’re supposed to have all over the copies. I wonder if we have all the handwritten notes in the archive.
RUSH: No they didn’t that’s clearly what he was spiriting out there, what he wanted to see.
CALLER: Exactly. Exactly. So the handwritten notes are saying that there was full knowledge of what was going on. Nothing was done. Okay, the cheap shot that was taken by Isikoff — “the press will be worth at least 15% to Kerry’s nomination” — was that nothing was done, exactly the same thing as nothing was done in the Bush administration. Well, if something had been done in the Clinton administration, there would be no memo to go to the Bush administration because the problem would have been resolved when it should have been resolved!
RUSH: Or at least attempted to be dealt with.
CALLER: Something.
RUSH: Yeah.
CALLER: A feeble attempt. Anything! Something.
RUSH: Well, look it, common sense tells you — Dick Morris has said this since he has left the Clinton administration. They didn’t care about terrorism. We know from the public record that they didn’t do much on terrorism and they didn’t start till the late nineties when…well, they hit the aspirin factory in the Sudan, and they hit a couple of terrorist camps, one in Iraq, one in Afghanistan, but this is after some embassies were blown up, but up until then they didn’t do much. They didn’t take on anything hard because they didn’t want to upset approval numbers toward the legacy.
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