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.

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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’s long-lost Rose Law Firm billing records–documents that had been requested by Whitewater prosecutors two years earlier. Ken Starr quickly subpoenaed the First Lady to testify before a federal grand jury, leading to her historic four-hour appearance at the U.S. District Courthouse in Washington on Jan. 26 of that year.

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.)

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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.

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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.

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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 was far from the White House war room: instead she was touring ancient Egyptian ruins, including King Tut’s tomb and the temple of Hatshepsut. And on the day before the signing of the Good Friday agreement in Belfast she was at an event called "Hats on for Bella" in Washington.

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.

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One interesting event in Sen. Hillary Clinton’s just-released schedules from the 1990s comes on Nov. 10 1993, when the former first lady was to serve as the closing act during a briefing on NAFTA, the trade agreement she now assails.

11:30 am -
11:45 am

NAFTA BRIEFING DROP-BY
Room 450, OEOB
CLOSED PRESS

PARTICIPANTS: Approx 120 expected to attend
(See briefing book for further info)

FORMAT:
- Alexis Herman intros HRC for brief remarks
-HRC concludes program

(pp. 1375 and 1376)

Two attendees of that closed-door briefing, neither of whom are affiliated with any campaign, describe that event for ABC News. It was a room full of women involved in international trade. David Gergen served as a sort of master of ceremonies as various women members of the Cabinet talked up NAFTA, which had yet to pass Congress.

"It wasn’t a drop-by it was organized around her participation," said one attendee. "Her remarks were totally pro-NAFTA and what a good thing it would be for the economy. There was no equivocation for her support for NAFTA at the time. Folks were pleased that she came by. If this is a still a question about what Hillary’s position when she was First Lady, she was totally supportive if NAFTA.

That first attendee recalls that the First Lady’s office in the East Wing put together "the invitation list, who was invited authorizations and all that stuff."

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A majority of Democratic voters say it would be unfair for Hillary Rodham Clinton to win the presidential nomination through the support of "super delegates" if she lags among the convention delegates elected in primaries and caucuses, according to a USA TODAY/Gallup Poll.

If that happens, one in five say they wouldn’t vote for the New York senator in the general election.

The findings in the survey, taken Friday through Sunday, underscore some of the perils ahead for Democrats as the closely fought nomination battle between Clinton and Illinois Sen. Barack Obama continues.

By 55%-37%, Democrats and independents who "lean" Democratic say an outcome in which Clinton lost among pledged delegates but prevailed with the help of super delegates would be "flawed" and unfair" — including 77% of Obama supporters and 28% of Clinton supporters.

Read it all at USA Today

In a speech on Iraq policy delivered Monday at George Washington University, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton recalled facing “sniper fire” on her 1996 trip to Bosnia to visit U.S. troops on a peacekeeping mission. But reporters traveling with the then-First Lady made no reference to any “sniper fire” at the time, and pictures of Clinton arriving at the main air base in Tuzla (see attached video) don’t show anyone ducking or covering.

Read more at Newsbusters with photos!

Hmm I wonder if the morning of the Waco Branch Davidian Fire will be accounted for? Many people have concluded that Hillary might have been the one to force the confrontation - and Reno took the wrap.

The National Archives announced on Tuesday that 11,046 pages of Senator Hillary Rodham’s White House schedules will be released on Wednesday.

The records were the subject of a legal fight between Judicial Watch, a conservative watchdog group, and the National Archives, which has been slow to comply with a request to release the records, arguing that the vetting process takes time.

Mrs. Clinton’s schedules have attracted close attention throughout the campaign, partly because Mrs. Clinton has frequently held up her eight years as first lady as evidence of her experience.

Judicial Watch announced on March 4 that the National Archives promised to release at least 10,000 pages of the records by March 20.

The Archives said in a statement on Tuesday that the schedules are from the staff files of Patti Solis Doyle, Mrs. Clinton’s former campaign manager who was her chief scheduler in the White House.

“Arranged chronologically, these records document in detail the activities of the First Lady, including meetings, trips, speaking engagements and social activities for the eight years of the Clinton Administration,” the statement said.

Of the more than 11,000 pages to be released, 4,746 pages have redactions, mostly relating to “the privacy interests of third parties,” including Social Security numbers, telephone numbers and home addresses, the Archives said.

Source: Times

Democrats have to be asking themselves how they got to this point. Hopes of a quick and definitive primary have disappeared and they find themselves embroiled in a bitter stalemate punctuated with accusations of racism and sexism while the GOP nominee uses the time to raise money and mend fences.

The irony of course is that Hillary Clinton has gone from being the inevitable and early nominee to waging a desperate battle until the convention; from planning an above the fray campaign with feints to the center to throwing everything she can think of at her opponent no matter the ideological coherence or potential damage to the party.

And with the awkward question of what to do with the delegates from Michigan and Florida still left unresolved, Democrats have to be wondering how far and how ugly this can go.

A few things are clear: Hillary won’t give up as long as there is a slim chance for victory and she will use all available weapons. If there is a remotely plausible scenario where she wins, she will hang on. If a tactic has a chance of giving her an advantage, no matter how temporary, she will use it.

What sometimes gets lost in the mythology and nostalgia surrounding the Clintons, particularly among hardcore Democrats, is that their primary mode of politics is to attack in order to survive.

Read on for more on this pattern and its implications.

The pattern plays itself out with regularity: they overreach politically or refuse to come clean about ethical lapses; their response is to attack the press and their critics; and the goal quickly switches from accomplishment to survival.

The problem is that they have pulled this off so often that they believe they are invincible; that they really are martyrs to a vast conspiracy. Hillary in particular has never been known to reflect on her actions and there inevitable repercussions. Her first response is always: attack!

What did Hillary do when confronted with questions about land deals and investments in Arkansas? She stonewalled, lied, and attacked the press and her critics all the while pretending that she was completely innocent.

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