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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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.

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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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Hillary Rodham Clinton was home in the White House on a half dozen days when her husband had sexual encounters there with intern Monica Lewinsky, according to Sen. Clinton’s schedule, released Wednesday among 11,000 pages of papers from her years as first lady.

The words of the schedules are dry, but they take on emotional weight when coupled with revelations about the sex scandal that eventually came to light. A year later, the first lady’s schedules show her pressing ahead with public events and showing her face as revelations about the scandal upended her life and threatened Bill Clinton’s presidency.

The papers also shed light on her struggle for health care reform early in the Clinton administration, her scaling back when that effort failed, her travels abroad and the legal woes that dogged the Clintons in the White House.

It’s unlikely she would be surprised at this late date to learn that the president was cheating on her while she was at home in the White House. But the release of the documents reminds voters anew about Bill Clinton’s affair and the impeachment proceedings that brought Washington to a halt for a year.

The private crisis came at the most public of times for the first lady.

She had speeches scheduled, at home and abroad. She appeared by President Clinton’s side at an education event where he angrily dismissed the reports of having sex with Lewinsky.

Her schedule has her choosing flowers for a black-tie dinner, congratulating "Guns Aren’t Cool" award winners and reading to kids in the week in January 1998 when allegations of the scandal begin coming out. She denounced a "vast right-wing conspiracy" in a TV interview.

Almost a year earlier, the schedules show, she was home on Feb. 28, 1997, the day when the Kenneth Starr report says Bill Clinton had a sexual encounter with Lewinsky in an Oval Office bathroom in the early evening, staining her blue dress.

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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!