WAS KERRY THE ONLY ONE WHO DIDN’T KNOW? I found this quote from the otherwise-unimpressive New York Times story interesting, and it gets more interesting as I think about it:

On Wednesday evening, Mr. Berger’s spokesman, Joe Lockhart, said: “Mr. Berger never passed any classified information to the Kerry campaign. Any suggestion to the contrary cannot be supported by any facts.”

At the Kerry campaign, officials say they were taken by surprise by the accusation. It appears that Mr. Berger did not disclose the investigation to Mr. Kerry’s aides. Mr. Lockhart said that was because “we were dealing in good faith with the Department of Justice on this matter for many months, and part of our agreement was that this was not to be discussed beyond Sandy’s legal team.”

So Berger knew he was under investigation. As we’ve seen earlier, Bill Clinton says that he knew months ahead. And, I guess, so did Joe Lockhart, serving as Berger’s “spokesman.” (Hence the “we” and “our” — and who else might be included in those terms? And why does a retired government official have a spokesman, anyway? Beats me.) Yet John Kerry says that he “didn’t have a clue.”

If I were Kerry, I’d worry about what else my staff wasn’t telling me.

UPDATE: Reader Jim Geraghty emails:

There’s one element strangely missing from this story. Kerry has said he didn’t know, and high-level Kerry advisors with good records of veracity have said the campaign didn’t know until the story broke.

So where’s the anger?

I’m not expecting Kerry himself to snarl, “No, that [BAD WORD]ing two-faced son of a [ANOTHER BAD WORD] didn’t tell me about a FBI investigation, even though he found the time to tell Bill [REALLY BAD WORD]ing Clinton!” But where are the anonymous quotes from Kerry’s supporters trashing Berger? Where are the “how could Berger do this to our guy” comments?

According to Kerry’s version of events, Berger just stabbed his party’s man in the back by not telling him about the FBI investigation. Doesn’t anybody in the Democratic party want to call Berger a jerk?

This is a dog that has been very, very quiet lately.

Good point. They let him go swiftly, but didn’t act all that upset for what by any measure is a major blow to their campaign. That would tend to support Kevin Drum’s Democratic leaker theory.

MORE: “Bill Clinton may be laughing, but I’ll bet John Kerry isn’t.” I’m not sure.