Hillary Clinton's Scooter Libby

I just ran across these two stories (at the WSJ and Huffington Post), thanks to the Project on Middle East Democracy (POMED) blog (as an aside, in July POMED cited my post on Sen. Biden's partition plan). The focus of both articles, is on the coterie of foreign policy advisers surrounding Sen. Clinton and Sen. Obama as they push forward in their bid to gain the Democratic party's nomination. The articles, provide a pretty good synopses of the advisers and their positions both, with regards to foreign policy, and more specifically, their views in the run up to the Iraq war. The reason for this post, however, more than anything is because according to both articles, Sen. Clinton counts Sandy Berger as one of these advisers.

As someone who has time and again railed against the Bush administration for the manner in which it has dealt with people like Scooter Libby, who abused his security clearance for political purposes, I feel it necessary to now do so against Sen. Clinton for doing the same with Sandy Berger. This is a man who pleaded guilty to "a misdemeanor charge of unauthorized removal and retention of classified material from the National Archives in Washington." While the lead prosecutor said that Berger only took and destroyed copies of classified material, there has been rampant speculation that he destroyed originals of classified documents concerning "internal assessments of the Clinton administration's handling of the unsuccessful 2000 millennium attack plots". Berger was fined $50,000 and his security clearance was revoked. He also relinquished his license to practice law, as a result of the investigation.

This issue is important. Sen. Clinton was a critic of the administration's handling of the Valerie Plame case, and of Republican support for Scooter Libby. It goes both ways, you can't on the one hand criticize the administration and Republicans for supporting or even commuting Scooter Libby's sentence, while at the same time hiring or relying on another person who abused his security clearance to destroy classified information. It just doesn't work that way. Mr. Berger is Sen. Clinton's Scooter Libby. Will she demonstrate leadership and the type of change we need in Washington, or keep Mr. Berger as an adviser and demonstrate that she is no better than the very administration she has criticized for so long?

Some people will likely argue that the cases of Mr. Libby and Mr. Berger vary in degree, since the former outed a covert CIA operative working on developing intelligence on Iraq's and later Iran's nuclear weapon's programs, while the latter only destroyed documents which may have been classified. However, there is no difference. They both abused their power and their security clearances, that alone disqualifies them from ever being entrusted with nation's highest secrets.