John Roberts: The Missing Years

Last summer, during the pre-confirmation body-cavity search of Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, a Roberts-related file at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library went missing. The file was marked “affirmative action” and presumably contained something on that topic written by Roberts—who is known to be extremely hostile  to affirmative action—when he worked in the Reagan White House counsel’s office. Although the file disappeared after a White House employee and two assistants vetted the Roberts-related files, National Archives officials assured reporters  that no one had been permitted to bring bags into the room with the documents and no one was left alone with the documents. (We know the visitors were a White House employee and two assistants because that’s how they’re described in a separate document  from the inspector general’s office.)

That turns out not to be true. The Web site The Memory Hole (www.thememoryhole.org) has now posted a report  from the National Archives’ inspector general, vast portions of which have been blacked out prior to its public release. The report clearly states that the White House visitors were allowed to bring personal items into the room where they examined the documents, and further were left alone whenever they needed to talk to the White House about what they were finding. One of these Bush White House employees, the report says, was the last known person to see the missing file. But the Bushies deny they pinched it.

If this all sounds a little familiar, that’s because a year ago Sandy Berger, Bill Clinton’s national security advisor, pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of removing and destroying documents (about the Clinton administration’s response to terrorist threats in 2000) from the National Archives. In that instance, the material was classified. Berger ended up paying a $50,000 fine. There’s reason to suspect that history repeated itself with the Roberts file, but the Bush administration, which took great delight in exposing Berger’s malfeasance, won’t let us know who the possible lightfingers were. To read footnotes to the excerpts from the inspector general’s report (below and on three successive pages), roll your mouse over the passages highlighted in yellow. To read the document in its entirety, click here.

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