As your garden variety mystery writer, I learned long ago to hide your important clues. One of those may be the following sentence I found buried far down in the Washington Post’s coverage of the Berger documents scandal or what I prefer to call “The Follies Berger.” ^[1]

They [the Archives staff] knew he was interested in all the versions of the millennium review, some of which bore handwritten notes from Clinton-era officials who had reviewed them.

Versions of the millenium review supposedly had handwritten notes from Clinton-era officials… hmm… Now that just about puts the kibosh on the idea that these documents were merely copies, doesn’t it? (Unless those unnamed officials wrote the same note on all the copies, about as likely as your reading this post standing on one foot with a bust of DeGaulle on your head). And some of the copies are still missing.

Was Berger spending all that time rummaging through those documents, taking them out of the building twice, etc., to find and get rid of one or two or three notations scrawled in the margins? It fits as well with the strange facts of this case (Berger never saying a word to Kerry, assuming that’s true, etc.) as anything I’ve read.

UPDATE: As for the NYT’s coverage of “The Follies,” no more need be said. ^[2] (via GR ^[3])