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January 04, 2008
What Hillary never mentions (and others fail to ask....)
Ann Althouse brings up an important question about Hillary Clinton which so far hasn't received any attention at all in the campaign -- much less the attention it deserves: ...she never mentions her work on the Nixon impeachment inquiry these days either. I wonder why.As a Watergate buff, I don't wonder why at all. (I'm also thinking there might be a sarcastic element in Ann Althouse's wonderment, but I don't want to make unwarranted assumptions which aren't all that relevant anyway, as this is an important issue.) In 1974, Democrat Jerry Zeifman was chief counsel to the House Judiciary Committee during the impeachment proceedings against Richard Nixon, and he recalled (in 1999) that Hillary Rodham had been charged with establishing legal procedures. The procedures she urged the committee to adopt, though, were so ethically flawed that the members refused to adopt most of them: Hillary's main duty on our staff has been described by as "establishing the legal procedures to be followed in the course of the inquiry and impeachment." A number of the procedures she recommended were ethically flawed. And I also concluded that she had violated House and committee rules by disclosing confidential information to unauthorized persons.Huh? I thought only Bush and Cheney denied people the right to counsel. Of course, it didn't work. The evil Nixon was afforded the same right to counsel as had William O. Douglas during his impeachment. Except that according to Zeifman, Hillary tried to prevent the public from seeing the Douglas impeachment files: I also informed Hillary that the Douglas impeachment files were available for public inspection in our offices. I later learned that the Douglas files were then removed from our general files without my permission, transferred to the offices of the impeachment inquiry staff, and were no longer accessible to the public.Sounds like the young Hillary was already trying to bite off more than she could chew. In her defense, though, she seems to have been doing the dirty work for others: The recommendations advocated by Hillary were apparently initiated or approved by Yale Law School professor Burke Marshall - in violation of committee and House rules on confidentiality. They were also advocated by her immediate supervisors, Special Counsel John Doar and Senior Associate Special Counsel Bernard Nussbaum, both of whom had worked under Marshall in the Kennedy Justice Department.That's only part of it. There's a more detailed account here, and at at Jerry Zeifman's web site. It';s worth noting that Zeifman's allegations were substantially confirmed by former Congressman Wiggins. Zeifman also alleges Hillary's role in suppressing a report on the long history of tolerated presidential misconduct: In the end, several members of the committee "revolted" at being kept in the dark, and the staff was ordered to turn over all materials to the committee and to Zeifman, who was the chief counsel, and ultimately Hillary's boss. "When that time came ... Hillary suppressed the report on the long history of tolerated presidential misconduct and did not tell me, did not tell anybody. It is a felony to suppress information from a congressional committee by a nonstaff member; there are no cases that I know of where a staff suppressed information," Zeifman says. Certainly not such vital material.That's fascinating in itself, for Hillary certainly seems to have known and worked with the late Arkansan C. Vann Woodward; the latter's Yale papers even list a Box 47, file 555 which pertains to Hillary Rodham, in 1974. (Hmmm... maybe I shouldn't have mentioned this. Wouldn't want Sandy Berger to go rooting through file 555, now would we?) Might Hillary have made money selling the report she suppressed? Wiggins, never having seen the material before and aware of what that meant, wrote to committee chairman Peter Rodino -- who did not deny that the study was done. "No investigation was ever conducted; no one has determined whether Hillary illegally profited," Zeifman says, recalling that, obstruction of justice or not, there was by then no interest in reopening any can of worms related to Watergate.God forbid that anyone would reopen any can of worms related to Watergate. Sigh. (And I do mean a long sigh....) Anyway, in answer to Ann Althouse, I think it's completely understandable why Hillary never mentions her work on the Nixon impeachment inquiry. I also think it's quite understandable why she's never asked. (Not that anyone's allowed to ask her about anything these days anyway, but with Hillary, there are a lot of questions that would never be asked even if they could be asked.) UPDATE: I should have credited Glenn Reynolds for the Althouse link! (I was so distracted by Watergate nostalgia that I forgot all about the law professor angle, which was the whole point of the Althouse post, and Glenn's link to it.) posted by Eric on 01.04.08 at 05:19 PM |
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Wow. This is huge. Why can't the pinko media see how important this is? If just a fraction of the liberals knew about Hillary's UNBELIEVABLE role in the Watergate proceedings, she'd have to move to Mexico.