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

During Hillary’s Clinton’s New York race for the Senate in 2000, a man in an Uncle Sam suit calling himself ”Tax Man” followed Republican candidate Rick Lazio around, demanding to know why Lazio was so slow in making his income tax returns public.

”The people of New York have a right to know what he’s hiding,” said Howard Wolfson, then a top Clinton aide who often trailed behind ”Tax Man” feeding reporters campaign spin. “Rick Lazio’s 15 minutes are up — he should stop making excuses and come clean with New Yorkers.”

Eight years later, Clinton and her presidential campaign aren’t making her income tax returns public. She’s promised to release her income tax information on or around April 15.

Wolfson, now the Clinton campaign’s communications director, won’t say why Clinton wouldn’t release her tax information earlier. Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., her rival for the Democratic presidential nomination, released his 2006 tax returns last April.

The junior senator from New York isn’t the only presidential candidate who hasn’t made tax records public. Arizona Sen. John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee, hasn’t either. His campaign says that he’ll make his records public in the next month or so.

McCain has never made his tax returns public, but Clinton has. In 1994, under political pressure over the Whitewater land deal controversy, the Clintons made public all their tax returns since 1977. The couple also disclosed their tax returns during Bill Clinton’s eight years in the White House, but not since.

The delays by Clinton and McCain perplex some government watchdog groups, which note that past presidential candidates had no trouble producing their tax returns in a timely fashion. Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry, the 2004 Democratic presidential nominee, released his tax information in December 2003, for example.

”This is a part of the public record that voters have come to expect. Concern grows when anything is withheld,” said Sheila Krumholz of the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonprofit organization that examines money and politics. “If it means waiting until April 15, we wait until April 15. We just don’t know why.”

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Is it possible to win the Democratic nomination in such a way as to make winning not worth it?

The Barack Obama campaign thinks so. It thinks Hillary Clinton’s campaign is willing to take any road to the White House, including the low road.

“They would do anything to win, and that means anything,” David Axelrod, Obama’s chief strategist, told me Monday. “There is a frenetic energy around them to commandeer this election in any way they can.”

Axelrod went on: “She is the ultimate Washington inside player. She is always asking, ‘How do we wire the vote? How do we wire the system to get the results we want?’”

From his point of view, the Clinton campaign keeps trying to change the rules.

“When they started off, it was all about delegates,” Axelrod said. “Now that we have more delegates, it’s all about the popular vote. And if that does not work out, they will probably challenge us to a game of cribbage to choose the nominee.”

Another Obama senior aide told me he believed Clinton was willing to “destroy the party” just as long as she ends up with the nomination.

I asked Clinton Communications Director Howard Wolfson for a response.

“I think these apocalyptic quotes are unhelpful,” Wolfson said. “I don’t envision that either side would destroy the party. There is a democratic process here to play out. This process is not over. There are still 10 [contests] left to vote. What is the fear here? Let’s let democracy run its course.”

From the perspective of the Clinton campaign, it has little choice but to go all-out. As a top Clinton aide admitted to me: “Under our projections, if you sat both the Michigan and Florida delegations as they now exist and based on our projections for the remaining contests, Sen. Clinton would still trail narrowly on pledged delegates going into the convention.”

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