ASHINGTON, July 20 - Samuel R. Berger, the former
national security adviser to President Bill Clinton, resigned abruptly
Tuesday as a senior adviser to John Kerry's presidential campaign after the
disclosure that he had improperly removed classified material on terrorism
from a secure government reading room last year.
The decision came after Mr. Berger endured a day of furious criticism
from Republican leaders, who accused him of breaching national security
and possibly passing classified material to Mr. Kerry's campaign.
Democrats, in turn, accused the Bush administration of leaking word of an
F.B.I. investigation of Mr. Berger as a way of diverting attention from
the release of the Sept. 11 commission's final report Thursday.
Mr. Berger told reporters Tuesday evening outside his Washington
office: "Last year, when I was in the archives reviewing documents, I made
an honest mistake. It's one that I deeply regret."
Associates of Mr. Berger said that although his mishandling of the
classified material was inadvertent, he had decided late in the day to
step down at least temporarily from the campaign because he did not want
to detract from the Kerry effort.
"With that in mind, he has decided to step aside as an informal adviser
to the Kerry campaign until this matter is resolved," said Lanny A.
Breuer, a lawyer representing Mr. Berger in the investigation.
Mr. Berger's aides acknowledged that when he was preparing last year
for testimony before the Sept. 11 commission, he removed from a secure
reading room copies of a handful of classified documents related to a
failed 1999 terrorist plot to bomb the Los Angeles airport. Republicans
accused him on Tuesday of stashing the material in his clothing, but Mr.
Breuer called that accusation "ridiculous" and politically inspired. He
said the documents' removal was accidental.
The departure of Mr. Berger was at least a distraction for the Kerry
campaign, which had hoped to gain political advantage from the Sept. 11
commission's anticipated criticisms of the Bush administration's handling
of terrorism intelligence.
For months, Mr. Berger has consulted regularly with Mr. Kerry on the
Iraq war, Middle East relations, terrorism and other foreign policy
matters, helping to formulate speeches, prepare op-ed articles and brief
reporters on the candidate's positions, campaign officials said.
"Sandy Berger is my friend, and he has tirelessly served this nation
with honor and distinction," Mr. Kerry said Tuesday in a statement. "I
respect his decision to step aside as an adviser to the campaign until
this matter is resolved objectively and fairly."
Associates said he would probably try to rejoin the campaign after the
Federal Bureau of Investigation had concluded an investigation that began
in earnest in January after the National Archives discovered that
classified material Mr. Berger had reviewed was missing.
But for Mr. Berger the damage may be difficult to overcome. Some
Democrats suggested on Tuesday that the episode could severely hurt his
chances of becoming secretary of state or taking another cabinet position
in a Kerry administration, jobs his name has been linked to.
Law enforcement officials said that the F.B.I. was continuing to
investigate Mr. Berger's handling of the classified material and that the
Justice Department had made no decisions about whether to seek criminal
charges.
One crucial legal issue will be whether the evidence indicates that Mr.
Berger's removal of the classified documents was inadvertent, as he and
his lawyer assert. "That's clearly a question at the center of all this,"
said a law enforcement official who spoke about the investigation on
condition of anonymity.
Though prosecutions for the mishandling of classified information are
relatively rare, senior officials have become embroiled in such cases. In
2001, Mr. Clinton pardoned John M. Deutch, the former director of central
intelligence, as he was negotiating a plea agreement with prosecutors over
accusations that he had downloaded classified intelligence onto his
unsecured computer.
Mr. Berger spent about 30 hours over three days in the summer and fall
of 2003 reviewing classified material in a secure government reading room,
his associates said.
Among those documents, officials said, were lengthy classified versions
of an "after-action" report on the so-called millennium plots, which
included a failed Qaeda effort to bomb Los Angeles International Airport
in December 1999.
The report on the plot, according to a final version that was
summarized in a staff report from the Sept. 11 commission earlier this
year, concluded that American-led counterterrorism efforts "had not put
too much of a dent" in Osama bin Laden's overseas network and that
"sleeper cells" might have taken root in the United States.
Mr. Breuer, the lawyer, said Mr. Berger inadvertently put three or four
versions of the report on the plots in a leather portfolio he had with
him. "He had lots of papers, and the memos got caught up in the
portfolio," he said. "It was an accident."
Mr. Berger also put in his jacket and pants pockets handwritten notes
that he had made during his review of the documents, Mr. Breuer said.
Officials at the National Archives realized late last year that several
documents were missing and turned the matter over to the F.B.I., which
later searched Mr. Berger's home and office, officials said. Mr. Breuer
said that Mr. Berger had returned two of the documents, but that he had
apparently discarded several others inadvertently.
Mr. Breuer said the removal of even Mr. Berger's notes was a "technical
violation," but he denied Republicans' assertions that Mr. Berger had
removed the material intentionally to hide information that could be
damaging.
J. Dennis Hastert, the House speaker, asked, "What information could be
so embarrassing that a man with decades of experience in handling
classified documents would risk being caught pilfering our nation's most
sensitive secrets?"
And the House majority leader, Tom DeLay, said: "That is not sloppy. I
think it is gravely, gravely serious what he did, if he did it, and it
could be a national security crisis."
Mr. Breuer responded, "If there's a suggestion that he's shoving things
down his pants, that is categorically false and ridiculous."
Democrats spent much of the day defending Mr. Berger as a man of
integrity and asserting he had no reason to steal material already widely
available to the Sept. 11 commission.
But late in the afternoon, Mr. Kerry's campaign announced that Mr.
Berger was stepping down.
