Archives show Clinton lied: Obama campaign
White House documents reveal that Hillary Clinton
A trawl through more than 11,000 pages of schedules from Clinton’s time as first lady fueled friction between the two Democratic White House contenders, as they also brawled over holding new contests in Florida and Michigan.
Republican nominee-elect John McCain meanwhile raked in campaign funds during a trip to London, and assailed Obama after the Illinois senator said the Iraq war could cost as much as three trillion dollars.
Obama aides said the schedules, which were released Wednesday after much back and forth between Clinton lawyers and the National Archives, undermined the New York senator’s most contentious claims of foreign policy experience.
Seizing on the controversial North American Free Trade Agreement, they highlighted an ABC News report which cited participants at one White House meeting in 1993 as saying Clinton was "fully supportive" of NAFTA.
"It does make you wonder if this was one of the reasons why there was such a reluctance to get those records out there on a timely basis," Obama strategist David Axelrod said on a conference call.
Before the March 4 primary in Ohio, Clinton had savaged the Obama campaign for its alleged inconsistency on NAFTA and asserted her own opposition to the pact, which her husband Bill had fought hard to get through Congress.
The New York senator carried the economically depressed state, along with Texas, to breathe new life into her faltering campaign.
"There was only one problem: she wasn’t telling the truth to Ohio voters," Axelrod said.
"Misrepresenting your position and carefully parsing your words when you don’t think you’ll get caught are the hallmarks of the kind of politics that Barack Obama is running to change."
Heading into the next Democratic clash on April 22 in another rust-belt state, Pennsylvania, the Clinton campaign denied any mendacity over the trade agreement grouping the United States, Canada and Mexico.
"It is no secret that passing NAFTA was a priority of the Clinton administration, but numerous contemporary accounts make clear that Hillary Clinton was personally opposed to NAFTA, and her position on NAFTA was and remains consistent," it said.
SEE-THROUGH SENATOR
The National Archives yesterday re leased Sen. Hillary Clinton’s sched ules as first lady.
Finally.
While the archives must follow a meticulous process in releasing historical records, the Clinton Presidential Library has been aggressively non-cooperative regarding authorizations.
Earlier this month, the library blocked records related to the end-of-administration pardons lavished by Bill Clinton.
Yesterday it turned out that nearly a month’s worth of Mrs. Clinton’s First Lady schedules are missing.
That hardly gibes with her statement Tuesday, anticipating the release of the schedules: "I think I’m probably the most transparent person in public life."
Perhaps. Certainly it is true - as Sen. Clinton pointed out - that she has been the subject of some 60 books.
But - and we hate to keep bringing this up - a little more transparency regarding the Clinton family finances would go a long way toward answering many lingering questions.
What about those tax returns?
‘CRISIS’ HILL DID TEA SERVICE - FIRST LADY’S FOREIGN TRIPS ALL POMP
Hillary Rodham Clinton boasts on the campaign trail of having had a key foreign-policy role when she was first lady - but newly released records of her travel abroad paint a picture that looks more like an extended vacation of get-togethers and tea parties.
For example, records of Clinton’s official June 1994 trip to Rome, where she accompanied her president-husband, reveal she wasn’t negotiating any arms-control treaties - but did participate in an art history lesson with 15 third-graders, and got to tour the Forum.
On one afternoon, Hillary, who claims to have the experience to best handle a crisis, held an "informal mix-and-mingle with approximately 30 women."
At the same time, a bold notation on her White House schedule reads: "Note: [president] is having bilateral with [Prime Minister Silvio] Berlusconi."
Other trips, to Moscow, Paris and Israel, fit a similar pattern - with Hillary filling a largely ceremonial role, soaking up local culture and tasting fine cuisine, while touring hospitals and engaging in goodwill gestures.
On a January 1994 visit to Moscow, she hit the town with the wife of President Boris Yeltsin, visiting a birthing class and touring the Cathedral of the Assumption. She then lunched with prominent women, dining on blini with caviar and mutton.
In France, after attending ceremonies for the 50th anniversary of D-Day, Clinton flew to Paris, where she toured the Opera House and the Rodin Museum.
In a December 1998 excursion to Israel, President Clinton met with top leaders about the peace process, but the first lady was repeatedly left out, getting serenaded by children and holding separate meetings with leaders’ wives.
Clinton’s schedules reveal curious deletions
The early days of 1996 were tense times inside the Clinton White House. On Jan. 4, the First Couple’s top personal aide reported that she had stumbled upon Hillary Clinton
But anybody looking through Hillary Clinton’s newly released White House records for clues as to how she handled this personal crisis will find … absolutely nothing. The more than 10,000 pages, released by the National Archives in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, purport to be the New York senator’s daily schedules for her entire eight-year tenure as First Lady–the first major "document dump" from the Clinton Library in Little Rock.
But the documents include only Hillary Clinton’s public schedules, not her private calendar. And even those appear to be heavily redacted to exclude almost anything that might be of interest to historians and the inevitable posse of "oppo" researchers. The January 1996 records show Hillary Clinton appearing on "The Oprah Winfrey Show" and numerous other TV and radio shows to promote her just-published book, "It Takes a Village." But they show no meetings whatsoever about the Rose Law firm billing records, no sessions with her lawyers to prepare for her grilling by Starr. The calendar for Jan. 26, 1996–the day crowds of reporters and TV cameramen gathered at the courthouse to watch Hillary Clinton enter and exit the grand jury–is totally blank. "NO public schedule," it states simply, wiping out any reference to one of the more embarrassing public episodes of the First Lady’s days in the White House.
The heavy deletions are perhaps not surprising, given that the National Archives staffers who approved the release operated under guidance given by former president Clinton in a November 2002 letter recommending strict restrictions on the types of material that can be divulged. (Among the documents that should be "considered for withholding," were anything related to investigations of the White House and all but "non-routine" communications between the president and the First Lady.) The material the National Archives did decide to release still had to be reviewed and approved by Bruce Lindsey, the president’s longtime loyal aide who serves as chief custodian of the Clinton archives. "This stuff has been sanitized," said Chris Farrell, the chief of investigations for Judicial Watch, the conservative watchdog group that sued the Archives for release of the records. "Our expectations were very low, and they didn’t disappoint." (Clinton campaign spokesman Jay Carson said the Archives released the records under "very strict legal requirements and guidelines that they follow in their redactions as they do for every president’s documents. The National Archives made the redactions." He added that Lindsey, former president Clinton’s official representative, asked the Archives to "put extensive material back in" and "the vast majority" of the remaining redactions were made to protect the privacy of third parties.)
Clinton calendars full of unexplained private meetings
Former First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton’s calendar entries are full of unexplained private meetings on key dates when she and President Clinton were fending off a variety of scandals, the newly released White House records show.
Take Jan. 21, 1998. That’s the day when most Americans first learned, courtesy of the Washington Post, that President Clinton had had a relationship with Monica Lewinsky. Mrs. Clinton’s calendar entry shows that she left the White House at 7:25 pm that evening and returned 25 minutes later. The National Archives, which released the 17,484 calendar pages today, has excised the reason for the brief trip and the names of any of the people whom Mrs. Clinton may have met.
The Archives, working in consultation with President Clinton’s representatives, cite privacy concerns in blacking out all details of the trip.Dec. 22, 2000 also remains a bit of a mystery. That’s the day when Mrs. Clinton and the President met in the White House with a New York rabbi who successfully lobbied President Clinton to commute the sentences of four Hassidic men who had been convicted of massive fraud and conspiracy. The commutations were extremely controversial at the time, and photos of the meeting exist. And yet, there’s no mention of it in Mrs. Clinton’s daily log. The calendar simply lists four separate "private meetings" in the Map Room that day, with no names attached.On Jan. 4, 1996, the calendars also record four "private" meetings that the First Lady held with her chief of staff, Maggie Williams, and undisclosed others. That’s the same day that one of the First Lady’s aides discovered a stack of Mrs. Clinton’s law-firm billing records in the private quarters of the White House. Whitewater investigators had been searching for the subpoenaed documents for months.
A team of NBC News producers, correspondents and researchers pored over the White House logs today. The calendar entries show, as Sen. Clinton has argued on the campaign trail, that as first lady she had a continuing interest in substantive foreign policy matters, including Bosnia and the effort to find peace in Northern Ireland. “These documents are outlines of the First Lady’s activities and illustrate the array of substantive issues she worked on,” Clinton campaign spokesman Jay Carson said. “Her daily schedules also list some of the meetings and travel she conducted to more than 80 countries in pursuit of the Administration’s domestic and foreign policy goals.”
Foreign Policy Experience?
But the calendars also seem to show that, on occasion, Mrs. Clinton was not substantively involved with foreign affairs when a real 3 a.m. crisis hit the White House.
Clinton Facing Narrower Path to Nomination
Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton needs three breaks to wrest the Democratic presidential nomination from Senator Barack Obama in the view of her advisers.
She has to defeat Mr. Obama soundly in Pennsylvania next month to buttress her argument that she holds an advantage in big general election states.
She needs to lead in the total popular vote after the primaries end in June.
And Mrs. Clinton is looking for some development to shake confidence in Mr. Obama so that superdelegates, Democratic Party leaders and elected officials who are free to decide which candidate to support overturn his lead among the pledged delegates from primaries and caucuses.
For Mrs. Clinton, all this has seemed something of a long shot since her defeats in February. But that shot seems to have grown a little longer.
Despite Mrs. Clinton’s last-minute trip to Michigan on Wednesday, Democrats there signaled that they are unlikely to hold a new primary. That apparently dashed Mrs. Clinton’s hopes of a new showdown in a state she feels she could win, and it left the state’s delegates in limbo.
The inaction in Michigan followed a similar collapse of her effort to seek another matchup with Mr. Obama in Florida, where, as in Michigan, she won an earlier primary held in violation of party rules.
Without new votes in Florida and Michigan, it will be that much more difficult for Mrs. Clinton to achieve a majority in the total popular vote in the primary season, narrow Mr. Obama’s lead among pledged delegates or build a new wave of momentum.
Hillary Clinton a long way from the White House at key foreign policy moments
On the day that dozens of US cruise missiles rained down on Serbia in an attempt to punish Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic for the country’s onslaught against ethnic Albanian separatists in Kosovo, first lady Hillary Clinton
In her bid for the Democratic presidential nomination, Hillary Clinton has touted her experience in the Clinton White House as preparation to lead the nation in a time of crisis. "Ready on day one" has been her slogan.
But an initial reading of some of the more than 11,000 pages of Clinton’s schedules from her days as first lady, released today by the National Archives and the William Jefferson Clinton Presidential Library, shows that she was often far from the site of decision-making during some of the most pivotal events of Bill Clinton’s presidency.
Clinton, who was an accomplished attorney and first lady of Arkansas before moving to the White House, frequently claims more than 30 years experience in public life, contrasting herself with Barack Obama’s slimmer resume - he served several years in the Illinois legislature and was elected to the US Senate in 2004.
The Clinton campaign claimed on Wednesday that the release of the papers would show Clinton to have been an influential advocate at home and around the world on behalf of the US. But the documents from her office in the White House threaten to undermine her claim to have played a major role in Clinton’s foreign policy decisions.
For instance, Clinton has said she helped negotiate the April 1998 Good Friday agreement between warring factions in Northern Ireland. But while Catholic and Protestant figures hashed out last-minute details of a power-sharing agreement in Belfast, Clinton was at the National Press Club in Washington at a party honouring Bella Abzug, a congresswoman from New York City who had died recently. While President Clinton phoned major participants in the peace talks, she met with Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel and joined a farewell party for Democratic operative Karen Finney. On the day the agreement was actually signed, she met with Philippine first lady Amelita Ramos.
When Nato launched air strikes against Serbia in an attempt to punish Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic for the country’s onslaught against ethnic Albanian separatists in Kosovo, Clinton toured ancient Egyptian ruins, including King Tut’s tomb and the temple of Hatshepsut. She dined at the Temple of Luxor, and stayed overnight at the Sofitel Winter Palace Hotel there.
Send in the Clowns — Obama, Hillary, Pelosi
Whenever I behold the antics of the once great Democratic Party as its members cavort across the political stage I think of the final line of the song "Send in the Clowns" that concludes "Don’t bother, they’re here."
Almost from the moment the Democrats assumed control of Congress and Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid took charge of their respective chambers it was evident that the Marx Brothers were loose on the Hill.
Solemn campaign pledges to shake up the existing order of things, repeated by Madam Pelosi in the earliest days of her speakership, seemed quickly forgotten as such goals as ending the scandal of earmarks slowly vanished in the mists and its champions such as John Murtha leapt into a powerful subcommittee chairmanship and gobbled up the pork.
Was it Harpo or was it Groucho who scripted Mrs. Pelosi’s attempt to install her pal Murtha as the new House majority leader that was frustrated when Maryland’s Steny Hoyer beat Murtha for the job thus publicly embarrassing the speaker. As the Washington Post noted ominously, the episode exposed "a deep political divide even before the party takes control."
From that point forward it has been all downhill.
The outnumbered Republicans with only 202 members in the House to the Democrat’s 233 members continued to run circles around Mrs. Pelosi’s and her Democratic majority, ravaging the much ballyhooed Democratic legislative agenda.
It had to be the zany Marx brothers who convinced House and Senate Democrats that it would be good politics to pledge to increase everybody’s taxes by promising to allow the Bush tax cuts which had revived the economy to expire.
