Buddy, I also was watching the story closely, and everytime I read the archive director’s quotes in that WSJ story I look for a hidden meaning. (To be honest, his snide tone pisses me off and makes me suspicious!) But he said “printed out from a hard drive” and I don’t see any wiggle room there at all.

There is still one small detail that no one has explained (or at least I haven’t seen any explanation)… Is the file on that hard drive simply the document that was printed out originally in 2000 and circulated? Or is it a scanned-in image of the document, with any annotations, after it circulated?

My guess would be that it is the former — what’s on the disk is the five .doc files written by Clarke, and if there was any reaction to the info that was scribbled in the margins of the 2000 printouts, it got destroyed when those physical pieces of paper got destroyed.

If it’s the latter situation — scanned-in images — then I have another theory for what Berger was doing. Suppose he didn’t realize that he was dealing with printouts rather than the originals. (If the marginalia was in black rollerball and it’s a good resolution scan, it may not have been obvious.) Suppose Berger decided to doctor the reports by adding all sorts of marginalia which would make him and the Clinton administration look better. (If they had been originals, he could have gotten away with it — his marginalia would be expected to be in his handwritting, right?) The reports were that he kept finding excuses to send his archive “minder” out of the room — so he was using those breaks to “alter” what he thought were originals. Then he realized, too late, that they were just printouts, and if anyone saw his “doctored” versions then the gig would be up. So he snuck them out to destroy the evidence…

Anyway, I think that second thing is probably not what happened. It’s the result of me grasping at straws, still completely mystified as to just what Berger was up to!

cathy