Man bites dog! Clinton bites Kerry?

If I worked at Archives, I'd sure as hell hesitate to call a former National Security Adviser a thief. (They may also have wanted to know what he was doing with 'em...)

You said it: if a Republican leaked it, it'd be pretty damned off. The Commission report gets it out of the news quickly, and then the Democratic Convention makes for a bunch of good news for Kerry, so it doesn't work. If a Republican got this, he'd hold onto it till mid-October at the earliest, to sucker-punch the Dems. National Review's Jonah Goldberg points out that Lanny Davis, a spinmeister for the Clinton administration, did just this sort of thing a lot. From a 1999 Washington Post article:

Davis coins the marvelously bureaucratic phrase "deep-background private placement" to describe negative stories about the White House that he leaked to put the least damaging version in play. Davis's favorite outlet was the Associated Press, not only because it is "notoriously fact-oriented and fair" but because once a story was on the wire, such newspapers as The Washington Post and New York Times "would not be inclined to give it front-page play." [. . .]

Thus, Davis called the reporter he deemed most fair, the AP's John Solomon, with documents suggesting that Clinton had made fund-raising calls from the White House residence. The leak occurred on July 3, 1997, so the story would get lost on the Fourth of July holiday.