#1: Berger stole original documents and destroyed them
9-11 Commission spokesman Al Felzenberg has stated that the commission is not missing documents. "This is a matter between the government and an individual," he told USA Today. "They were not our documents, and we believe we have access to all the materials we need to see to do our report."
Yet this statement did not end the speculation in The Washington Post and the assertions by Limbaugh, FOX News Channel host Sean Hannity, Coulter, and CNN host Tucker Carlson that Berger removed the documents in order to hide them.
In a July 21 article, Washington Post staff writer Susan Schmidt reported, "The documents that were removed were copies; the National Archives retained the originals." Yet, in the same article, she hinted at the possibility of a cover-up: "Even as Berger acknowledged his actions, it remained unclear the degree to which they stemmed from carelessness or an intentional effort to hide and remove the documents, along with notes of the materials he was reviewing." She did not explain how Berger would have succeeded in hiding anything by removing only copies and not originals.
Media conservatives were bolder, repeatedly claiming that Berger had removed and/or destroyed incriminating documents in order to prevent the 9-11 Commission from seeing them -- claims belied by the commission's own statement and by The Washington Post's report that the documents were "copies." (FOX News Channel host and radio host Bill O'Reilly was an exception here, saying, "I want to stay away from the speculation. But even so, he's not going to cover up anything because the 9-11 Commission had access to all of the original documents. They were going to see what Berger saw, whether he took these copies out or not.")
Radio host RUSH LIMBAUGH: The stuff that was stolen, the stuff that's probably now been shredded, the stuff that he just inadvertently, sloppily can't find, you know what the -- those documents contained? Elements of evidence that Al Qaeda was in the country in 1999. [7/20]
FOX News Channel co-host SEAN HANNITY: The only reason I can imagine that he would do this is to cover something up. And that would be that he found something there that made him, Bill Clinton, his administration, look bad, and that politics is being played here. That is a serious charge. And I don't know if we'll ever be able to get to the bottom of it, because who knows what happened to a lot of these documents.
Hannity's guest and right-wing pundit ANN COULTER: That's right. No, that's right. And if he is going to be engaging in a way, subjecting himself to criminal investigation and probably prosecution, they must have been pretty damning documents, presumably suggesting Al Qaeda may not have been the A-number one priority of the Clinton administration as they have been saying. [FOX News Channel, Hannity & Colmes, 7/20]
CNN Crossfire co-host TUCKER CARLSON: [T]here is nothing random about the documents he took. Berger stripped the files of every single copy of a single memo which detailed the Clinton administration's response to the Y2K terror threat. [7/22]
MSNBC Hardball host CHRIS MATTHEWS also suggested a cover-up: What would be worse, he removed documents to destroy them and keep them from reaching public light as to the role the Clinton administration played or didn't play in fighting terrorism after the millennium incident back in -- back in the -- in the Clinton administration, or that he simply took the documents to help make a case for the Kerry nomination, the Kerry presidency? [7/21]
http://mediamatters.org/items/200407230001
The article goes on with many more lies and distortions. Either the lies were deliberate, or the people repeating the stories were too lazy to ever verify any of their sources. Either way, they put out false information. How many other stories have they distorted?
