Subject: Correct The Record Saturday October 11, 2014 Roundup
From: Burns Strider <[email-masked]>
To: CTRFriendsFamily <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 11 Oct 2014 13:18:44 -0400
List-Id: <CTRFriendsFamily.americanbridge.org>

*​**Correct The Record Saturday October 11, 2014 Roundup:*

*Headlines:*

*Washington Post Opinion: Hillary Clinton’s increasing comfort with being a
female almost-candidate
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/ruth-marcus-this-time-hillary-clinton-is-letting-her-hair-down/2014/10/10/6226ce6c-509c-11e4-8c24-487e92bc997b_story.html>*

"Clinton, like her party, is prepared to put issues of gender equality
front and center; the preponderance of female voters and the Democrats’
edge with them make that focus a no-brainer for candidates of both genders.
'We talk about a glass ceiling,' Clinton said at a forum on women’s
economic security at the Center for American Progress last month. 'These
women don’t even have a secure floor under them.'"

*Politico: “Final document dump spills Clinton White House secrets”
<http://www.politico.com/story/2014/10/clinton-white-house-records-release-111777.html?hp=f3>*

“The records released over eight months did little to fulfill the fevered
imaginations of Clinton critics who pined for some revelation that would
torpedo Hillary Clinton’s chances to attempt a return to the White House
through a presidential campaign of her own.”

*Time: “Hillary Clinton’s Burden of History”
<http://time.com/3491599/hillary-clinton-library-documents-history/>*

“Clinton will benefit some, too. The documents are proof of her intimate
involvement in nearly every aspect of professional Washington for more than
two decades.”

*New York Times: “National Archives Releases More Clinton-Era Documents”
<http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/11/us/politics/national-archives-releases-more-clinton-era-documents.html?_r=0>*

“The National Archives released 10,000 more pages of previously undisclosed
documents from the Clinton White House on Friday...”

*Wall Street Journal: “Clinton Documents Show White House Scrambling to Do
Damage Control”
<http://online.wsj.com/articles/clinton-documents-show-white-house-scrambling-to-do-damage-control-1412982518>*

“New records released from former President Bill Clinton’s administration
depict a White House scrambling to defuse a series of scandals, with aides
preparing detailed strategies to protect Bill and Hillary Clinton in the
face of outside investigations that dogged them over two terms.”

*MSNBC: “11 things we learned from today’s massive Clinton document dump”
<http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/10-things-we-learned-todays-massive-clinton-document-dump>*

"Here are the eleven most interesting revelations from the document dump,
in no particular order:"

*Washington Post: “Clinton presidential documents show White House amid
setbacks, scandals”
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/clinton-presidential-documents-show-white-house-amid-scandals-setbacks/2014/10/10/6c9a872a-50ac-11e4-babe-e91da079cb8a_story.html>*

“White House aides raised questions about how to structure and describe
then-first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton’s role in the 1993 attempt to
overhaul the health-care system, including whether she would be considered
a government employee and whether the group’s work could be kept secret,
documents released Friday show.”

*Bloomberg: “How Bill Clinton’s White House Handled Political Threats”
<http://www.businessweek.com/news/2014-10-11/how-bill-clintons-white-house-handled-political-threats>*

“The Clinton White House operated with a siege mentality for eight years,
fashioning political strategies designed to preserve the first family and
neutralize enemies both real and perceived, according to presidential
documents released yesterday for the first time.”

*Bloomberg: “Clinton Advisers Urged White House to ‘Defend HRC’”
<http://www.businessweek.com/news/2014-10-10/clinton-advisers-urged-white-house-to-defend-hrc>*

“President Bill Clinton’s White House staff worked for years to keep
Hillary Clinton from becoming a ‘political liability’ during investigations
into the couple’s Arkansas land deal known as Whitewater.”

*Wall Street Journal blog: Washington Wire: “Clinton Docs: Health-Overhaul
Postmortem Identified ‘Disloyal’ Officials”
<http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2014/10/10/clinton-docs-health-overhaul-postmortem-identified-disloyal-officials/>*

“A White House memo suggests that when Hillary Clinton was first lady in
the early 1990s, she was unhappy about leaks that painted her husband’s
White House in an unflattering light and wanted to know who was behind the
disclosures.”

*The Hill opinion: A. B. Stoddard: “Clinton’s calculus”
<http://thehill.com/opinion/columnists/220410-ab-stoddard-clintons-calculus>*

“For such a calculating and calculated politician, the volatility of the
next three months will challenge Clinton’s best-laid plans.”

*Articles:*

*Washington Post Opinion: Hillary Clinton’s increasing comfort with being a
female almost-candidate
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/ruth-marcus-this-time-hillary-clinton-is-letting-her-hair-down/2014/10/10/6226ce6c-509c-11e4-8c24-487e92bc997b_story.html>*

By Ruth Marcus

October 10, 2014 7:19 p.m. EDT

The 2008 campaign was the first with a woman as a serious presidential
contender, so it was not surprising that gender was an uncomfortable,
tiptoe-y subject. The male candidates weren’t sure-footed in dealing with
it — recall Barack Obama’s “you’re likable enough, Hillary” and the debate
discussion about the color of her jacket.

Neither, actually, was Clinton herself. Her campaign was never certain how,
or even whether, to talk about gender. Often, it put the issue at arm’s
length. “I am very proud to be making history running as a woman for
president of the United States,” Clinton would say on the campaign trail,
“but I’m not running because I am a woman.”

Sometimes, under pressure, her campaign unnecessarily turned the gender
card face up, as when, after a bruising debate in November 2007, her allies
complained of six guys “piling on” the candidate— as if anyone ever thought
of Clinton as a defenseless victim.

If the pre-campaign season is any indication — and, yes, I do think we are
in pre-campaign season — this time could be interestingly different.

Clinton, like her party, is prepared to put issues of gender equality front
and center; the preponderance of female voters and the Democrats’ edge with
them make that focus a no-brainer for candidates of both genders. “We talk
about a glass ceiling,” Clinton said at a forum on women’s economic
security at the Center for American Progress last month. “These women don’t
even have a secure floor under them.”

More notable than the new focus on gender substance, though, may be
Clinton’s newfound comfort — or new degree of comfort — with being the
female almost-candidate.

Witness Clinton’s full-on embrace of grandma-hood, tweeting out pictures of
her new granddaughter despite the twin potential pitfalls of gender andage.
No one remarked on whether Mitt Romney’s passel of grandkids made him seem
old. (By the way, Clinton is seven months younger.) And no one questioned
whether being a grandpa would diminish his zeal for the presidency.

You might call it sexist — except that Clinton herself has raised that
possibility. “I know I have a decision to make,” she told People magazine
in June. “But part of what I’ve been thinking about, is everything I’m
interested in and everything I enjoy doing — and with the extra added joy
of ‘I’m about to become a grandmother,’ I want to live in the moment.”

Just last week, though, baby Charlotte made her first appearance — in name,
not in fact — on the campaign trail. Touting her “grandmother glow,”
Clinton, campaigning for Pennsylvania gubernatorial candidate Tom Wolf,
noted that “there’s a lot of Philadelphia and a lot of Pennsylvania in
Charlotte. . . . Her father’s already held her while watching the Eagles
play.”

And Charlotte is not just a cute prop — she serves a substantive point:
That “you should not have to be the grandchild of a president” — or perhaps
two presidents — “to get a good education, to get good health care. Let’s
make sure we give every child in Pennsylvania the same chance that I’m
determined to give my granddaughter.” Get ready to hear that line on the
presidential campaign trail.

At the same time, Clinton seems looser, almost playful about gender in
recent appearances. There she was at the Economic Club of Chicago earlier
in the week describing how she tried to turn down Obama when he asked her
to be secretary of state.

“In my discussions with him, after he offered me the job here in Chicago
and I said no, and I said no again, and I said no again, and finally I just
gave in,” Clinton said. “And as I said to somebody the other day, I told my
husband no and I wouldn’t get married, and no, and just gave in. So . . . I
have a history with charismatic, attractive men. They just wear me out.”

Pretty edgy, with its coy, no-sometimes-means-yes connotations. Except that
everybody understands that Clinton knows her mind; this girl is swept off
her feet only when she’s so inclined. No one hearing it would think, “Gee,
if she can’t say no to Barack Obama, how will she stand up to Vladimir
Putin?” Clinton knows: Whatever criticisms she might encounter, not being
tough enough won’t be among them.

We saw some glimmerings of this Clinton in 2008, but her comfort level with
gender, her willingness to engage in a bit of post-feminist
flirtatiousness, seems greater now. The 2016 campaign could be the one that
lets Hillary enjoy being a girl.

*Politico: “Final document dump spills Clinton White House secrets”
<http://www.politico.com/story/2014/10/clinton-white-house-records-release-111777.html?hp=f3>*

By Josh Gerstein

October 10, 2014, 1:04 p.m. EDT

It was the document dump to end all document dumps.

Tens of thousands of pages of previously-secret files detailing the inner
workings of the President Bill Clinton’s White House as it struggled with
then-first lady Hillary Clinton’s high-profile failure on health care
reform, as aides sought to manage a slew of actual or perceived scandals,
and as the White House staff reeled from disclosure of the Monica Lewinsky
affair.

However, the records released over eight months did little to fulfill the
fevered imaginations of Clinton critics who pined for some revelation that
would torpedo Hillary Clinton’s chances to attempt a return to the White
House through a presidential campaign of her own.

The papers show a White House unabashed in its desires to manipulate the
media through selective leaks and carefully-chosen interviews. But they’re
also a reminder that many of the techniques the Clinton team innovated are
now commonplace in the political arena.

The set of files posted Friday spilled secrets on the creation of the
“don’t ask, don’t tell policy,” heated controversies involving Whitewater
and the White House Travel Office, and how White House aides encouraged the
president to use a State of the Union address to defend his wife against
Republican criticism.

Among the most notable disclosures Friday:

Gays in the military

A fly-on-the-wall view of an early meeting Bill Clinton held with the joint
chiefs of staff over his pledge to reverse the ban on gays in the military.
The closed-door session, held just five days after Clinton took office,
featured a spirited back-and-forth about the policy.

Joint Chiefs Chairman Colin Powell and Vice President Al Gore faced off
over whether the issue of gay rights was parallel to that of African
Americans, the detailed notes show.

Powell declared that the comparison with blacks was “off-base” because race
is a “benign” characteristic and “sexuality is” different.

Gore responded that he saw “some parallels” between discrimination against
gays and African Americans and that a gay person kicked out of the military
just for being gay “is discriminated against in a way similar to black[s,]”
the notes show.

Marine Corps Commandant Carl Mundy, who died earlier this year, equated
announcing “I’m gay” with declaring “I’m KKK, Nazi, rapist,” the notes
indicate.

Clinton suggested he was open to kicking some gays out of the military,
even if they were identified through their advocacy. “People I would like
to keep [in the military] wouldn’t show up at a Queer Nation parade,” the
president said.

It’s unclear who took the 34-pages of richly-detailed notes, but National
Archives notations indicated they came from the files of National Security
Council staffer Richard Beardsworth.

Whitewater independent counsel

Notes detail opposition by both Bill and Hillary Clinton to the naming of
an independent counsel to investigate their Whitewater investment.

One in a series of files pertaining to Whitewater contains a series of
handwritten notes that appear to be minutes or a meeting or a survey of
opinion. One entry, that appears to say “Mack” next to it, as in Chief of
Staff Mack McLarty, reads, “Let’s get off whether we’ll have spcl pros or
counsel, HRC + BC don’t want it.”

Militia group regulations

In the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing, the Clinton administration
considered the possibility of aggressive new regulation of domestic militia
groups, including publishing membership lists of such organization,
requiring them to register with the federal government or to get permission
before offering “paramilitary” training.

Some of the ideas were championed by Clinton adviser Dick Morris, who was
known for advancing policy proposals that resonated well in polls.

“The public overwhelmingly supports a significant expansion in the FBI’s
ability to investigate militia groups. If you and the Justice Department
believe such an expansion would be in the public interest, I would
recommend that we go ahead with it with a high profile announcement,”
Morris wrote in an Oct. 6, 1995, memo to Chief of Staff Leon Panetta, as
well as Deputy Chiefs of Staff Erskine Bowles and Harold Ickes.

The proposals seem to have produced widespread alarm in the administration,
among Justice Department officials, White House lawyers and even other
political advisers. Some worried that even reducing the proposals to
writing could provoke a backlash from conservatives already wary of the
federal government following high-profile showdowns at Ruby Ridge, Idaho
and Waco, Texas.

“The Justice Department has stopped working on the terrorism question. They
say this is because [White House Counsel Ab Mikva] instructed them that
this is not information that should be on paper,” wrote Clinton White House
aide Jennifer O’Connor. She’s now back at the White House, working in
President Barack Obama’s counsel’s office after serving as a
crisis-response lawyer handling problems at the Internal Revenue Service
and with the roll-out of Obamacare.

O’Connor wrote that Mikva concluded “politically, the ideas we talked about
are really bad ideas.”

“All of the lawyers analyzing these proposals (in this office and at DOJ)
strongly believe it is a serious mistake—as a policy but especially as a
political matter to impose militia controls of the type now being
discussed, even if they would be constitutional,” Mikva and others wrote,
warning that measures already announced had prompted “an unprecedented
alliance” between the American Civil Liberties Union and the National Rifle
Association.

“We worry that further proposals of the type being discussed could be
depicted in very menacing terms to average citizens and could tip the
political balance against the President,” Mikva added.

Behind closed doors

The records also offer colorful, behind-the-scenes glimpses of Bill
Clinton’s candor with aides. One document shows a side of Clinton rarely
seen in public as he spoke frankly about what could and could not be in his
1999 State of the Union speech.

“We can’t go around and bash the s*** out of all these people using child
labor to produce all these cheap manufacturing projects and say, but we
can’t sign this convention because we want to keep the Mexican children
working on our farms,” he said during a discussion of child labor.

His remarks, peppered with profanity, sounded notes of humor and
impatience, and underscored his desire to make the speech accessible.

“If I were listening to this pension thing, I wouldn’t know what in the
living hell we were talking about,” Clinton said.

He also said one draft of the speech spent too much time on Saddam Hussein.

“It looks like we are obsessed with Saddam Hussein,” he said. “I mean, it
looks like, Jesus, he’s the only guy we ever think about. There’s a whole
world out there.”

An affair to remember

One former Clinton aide, speechwriter Lowell Weiss, sent a colleague a
magazine article he wrote summing up the love-hate relationship many White
House staffers have with their jobs.

“It has been said, accurately I think, that working in the White House is
like dating the hottest woman (or man) you’ve ever seen,” Weiss observed.
“You know the relationship can’t last. You know it’s not healthy for you.
But man, it’s hard to give up.”

Previously secret documents

The legal authority relied on to withhold the Clinton Library records made
public on Friday and earlier this year expired in January 2013, 12 years
after Clinton left office. However, none of the records were released until
February of this year, after POLITICO reported that the long-secret files
were in limbo.

The records releases have been closely watched by political operatives and
journalists alike since the files could shed light on Hillary Clinton’s
White House activities and fuel questions she faces about aspects of her
record as she prepares for a possible bid for the presidency.

Three days after POLITICO inquired with President Barack Obama’s White
House in February about why none of the so-called previously withheld
records had been released, White House lawyer David Sandler emailed the
Archives, approving the release of thousands of pages of documents, records
obtained under the Freedom of Information Act show.

The very next day, Clinton representative Bruce Lindsey signed off on
disclosing the same batch of records — a trove so large that it has taken
the library months to organize and post online.

Either Obama or Clinton could have moved to prevent disclosure of some of
the records. Despite the lengthy review process, neither did, according to
an Archives spokeswoman.

However, the release Friday of the final set of previously restricted
records does not mean all the Clinton-era White House records are now
available for public view. Far from it.

Tens of millions of pages and millions of emails have yet to be processed
by archivists. In addition, some of the records that have been processed
remain off-limits to the public on national security or privacy grounds. It
also appears that some legal advice given to the Clintons has been deemed
to be personal records, not covered by the Presidential Records Act.
Records related solely to political matters have also been put off-limits
under the same rationale.

*Time: “Hillary Clinton’s Burden of History”
<http://time.com/3491599/hillary-clinton-library-documents-history/>*

By Zeke J. Miller

October 10, 2014

[Subtitle:] Everything old is new again for the Clintons, as documents
reveal White House secrets.

Buried in the 10,000 pages of documents released by the Clinton
Presidential Library Friday is one bearing the customized stamp “Document
Produced To Independent Counsel.”

Created to help track the untold number of documents produced for
independent counsel Ken Starr’s investigations of the Clintons, the stamp
is a totem of the problem that has dogged Hillary Clinton since she ran for
the U.S. Senate in 2000: her history.

The Library made the documents available Friday, completing the release of
30,000 pages of previously restricted White House records on everything
from the failed HillaryCare push to the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Those
controversies generated internal debates and gotcha-moments now bearing out
14 years after the former First Lady and her husband vacated the White
House, complicating her bid to be a repeat occupant.

Deliberations over Supreme Court appointments, controversial pardons, and
meetings with foreign leaders are bared for the world to see. Even personal
feuds, like that between the former president and former Arkansas Gov. Mike
Huckabee, are on display in the margins of official documents and notes to
staff. To read the document trove is to reenter a White House at the center
of political and personal maelstroms.

The stamped memo captures the mid-1990s Clinton White House at a peak of
high drama. Written by Deputy White House Counsel Bruce Lindsay to prepare
President Bill Clinton for an interview on the Whitewater scandals, it
strikes a familiar chord for those who view the former president as
deceptive and those who view him as unfairly besieged by enemies. “NOTE: Of
course, it is strongly recommended that you not answer specific factual
questions about Whitewater, using the appointment of a special counsel as a
legitimate way to deflect questions.”

Other documents reveal Hillary Clinton’s distaste for the press, her
staff’s attempts to crack down on internal leaks, and the influence of
donors in the White House. Ultimately, the documents, with an audience of
Washington politicos, appear neither good nor bad for Clinton as she moves
towards a run for the White House in 2016. Many simply reveal another
perspective of issues well-covered twenty years ago. As much as anything
else does, they simply define who she is and where she’s come from, even as
she contemplates a new chapter in her life.

Conventional wisdom holds that longtime Senators with equally long voting
records have a harder time running for the White House than governors do, a
problem that Clinton has on steroids. Unending media interest in her and
her husband, a sped-up news cycle, and the country’s increasingly short
attention span have made even old news of interest as Clinton looks to
2016. Republicans will try to use these documents to revive the “Clinton
Fatigue” that plagued the couple’s last years in office and cast a tall
shadow over her failed 2008 presidential bid.

But Clinton will benefit some, too. The documents are proof of her intimate
involvement in nearly every aspect of professional Washington for more than
two decades. They show the Clintons and their aides tangling with
complicated policy challenges, and reveal them slowly developing skills to
manage the national media amid scandal.

Ultimately, the greatest challenge Clinton faces in the documents may not
be answering for past political maneuvers or the snide remarks of aides,
but finding a way to simply leave the past behind.

*New York Times: “National Archives Releases More Clinton-Era Documents”
<http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/11/us/politics/national-archives-releases-more-clinton-era-documents.html?_r=0>*

By The New York Times

October 10, 2014

The National Archives released 10,000 more pages of previously undisclosed
documents from the Clinton White House on Friday, with topics including
Hillary Rodham Clinton’s ill-fated attempt as first lady to overhaul the
health care system.

Previous disclosures often shed new light on elements of the Clinton
presidency, including the administration’s scrambles after the Republicans
won control of the House in 1994 and after the Monica Lewinsky scandal
began to envelop the White House in 1998.

The latest disclosures are posted on the website of the William J. Clinton
Library.

A First Lady Plots Her Own Political Path

In the fall of 1999, Mrs. Clinton’s staff faced a unique challenge:
Figuring out how a sitting first lady could explore a run for the United
States Senate. Should Mrs. Clinton’s exploratory campaign committee or
taxpayers pay for her trips to New York? What if she meets with United
Nations officials and attends a fund-raiser?

The conclusion: The government would pay travel costs of Secret Service
agents, the White House photographer, doctors and personal aides when Mrs.
Clinton traveled to New York; the campaign would pay for travel of any
aides related to her run for Senate.

The math over how to split these costs was broken down in excruciating
detail in these memos. A trip to Binghamton, N.Y., and New York City
included “43 percent official; 22 percent exploratory committee; 36 percent
political,” read one memo from the first lady’s office.

The memos highlight the untraditional tenure of Mrs. Clinton, whose
political ambition and policy involvement often overshadowed the
traditional role of a first lady.

Continue reading the main story

Clinton Documents

Mrs. Clinton’s role in overseeing the secretive Health Care Task Force
prompted a lawsuit over whether the first lady was a private citizen or a
public official. (A United States Court of Appeals declared the first lady
to be a government official exempt from some disclosure requirements.)

The attempt at a health care overhaul represented a trial by fire for Mrs.
Clinton, who was accused of overseeing a secretive and dysfunctional task
force led by an aide, Ira Magaziner.

In a memo dated April 1995, Mr. Magaziner explains in detail his efforts to
persuade the news media to report more positively on the failed task force,
including a list of names of Clinton aides whom he believed to be sources
on articles critical of the president and first lady’s efforts at a health
care overhaul.

“I seethe inside when I think of how disloyal some administration officials
have been to you and the president and how hurtful they have been to me in
their private discussions with the press,” Mr. Magaziner wrote to Mrs.
Clinton.

— Amy Chozick

After a Suicide, a Cryptic Note From the President

One of the most intriguing documents released on Friday is an otherwise
blank sheet of paper with a cryptic note in President Clinton’s familiar
left-hand scrawl.

The paper is dated June 14, 1994. “H.R.C.,” it says, using the initials for
Hillary Rodham Clinton. “What did we ever decide to do on this?” And then
it is signed, “B.C.”

Whatever “this” was is not mentioned. The paper was in a file marked “Vince
Foster,” referring to the longtime friend of Mrs. Clinton who came from
Arkansas to serve as White House deputy counsel but then committed suicide.
The day before the date marked on the document, both Mr. and Mrs. Clinton
were interviewed by Robert Fiske, the independent counsel then looking into
Mr. Foster’s death.

— Peter Baker

Managing a Sex Scandal

On March 26, 1996, a young White House aide sent an email message up the
chain of command. “This is an official request to hang the picture of
President Clinton signing the telecomm bill in our office,” the aide wrote.
It was signed, “Thank you. Monica Lewinsky.”

A month later, the young Ms. Lewinsky would be banished from the White
House, dispatched to the nether regions of the administration by
presidential advisers trying to protect the president. “Our direction is to
make sure she has a job in an agency,” Patsy Thomasson, the deputy White
House personnel director, wrote in a message. “We are working toward that
end.”

The ultimately tragicomic White House tenure of Ms. Lewinsky echoes through
some of the documents released on Friday. In hundreds of pages related to
the scandal that would, to her everlasting chagrin, forever bear her name,
Ms. Lewinsky is largely an off-screen character discussed endlessly by all
the other players, with her own voice coming through in just that single
banal, one-sentence request.

Also missing from the file are the voices of two other protagonists, Mr.
and Mrs. Clinton. But the papers pull back the curtain a bit on the
frenzied efforts by the people around them to deal with the burgeoning
political furor touched off by the president’s sexual liaison with Ms.
Lewinsky that would lead to his impeachment by the House and acquittal by
the Senate.

According to the papers, Mr. Clinton received a letter from Keith
Olbermann, who had left sportscasting to become a political broadcaster,
apologizing for “whatever part I may have played in perpetuating this
ceaseless coverage” and promising to leave the news business and head “back
to my previous career in sports as quickly as possible.”

A note drafted for Mr. Clinton to send in reply had the president saying,
“I’m grateful you got in touch with me, and I send you my very best wishes.”

White House aides debated whether to forgive others they deemed complicit
in fanning the flames. Mickey Ibarra, a White House aide, wrote about
speaking with Gov. Parris Glendening of Maryland after he criticized Mr.
Clinton. “I delivered our message (it does not help any of us to pile on),”
Mr. Ibarra wrote.

When the radio host Tom Joyner made comments on his show that irritated
Clinton aides, one sent a message saying they should remember that the next
time he asked for an interview. Another countered that Mr. Joyner was
mostly on the president’s side and besides they would need him in the
future. “Politics baby!!!!!” the aide wrote.

Sidney Blumenthal, a White House adviser close to Mrs. Clinton, wrote a
series of messages aimed at undercutting key players in the episode. He
referred to “the plotters” who were promoting the scandal and called the
journalist Michael Isikoff, then of Newsweek, a “coconspirator.”

He suggested that Linda Tripp, who taped Ms. Lewinsky talking about her
relationship with the president and then turned over the recordings to the
independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr, may have falsified talking points she
said Ms. Lewinsky had given her. If so, Mr. Blumenthal wrote, “Tripp would
be a liar, a worthless witness and open to prosecution herself for lying to
F.B.I. investigators.”

As for Lucianne Goldberg, the literary agent who helped Ms. Tripp bring the
original accusations to Mr. Isikoff at Newsweek, Mr. Blumenthal sent a
message to the reporter David Corn questioning her integrity. In the
message, Mr. Blumenthal wrote that Ms. Goldberg had been sued by the author
Kitty Kelley “for stealing a lot of money from her” and suggested Mr. Corn
call Ms. Kelley. “Do you want Kitty’s phone number?” he asked. “I think
she’d talk on background.”

Also evident in the files is a certain resignation by Clinton aides
mystified by the whole episode. Paul Begala, the longtime Clinton
strategist, wrote to a White House aide in 1999 looking for help in coming
up with lines for an event to be presided over by the NBC journalist Tim
Russert. Mr. Begala wanted to be prepared for what he presumed would be the
line of questioning.

“Russert asked me 13 times in one interview what the president’s
relationship with Monica Lewinsky was,” Mr. Begala wrote, trying out a
line. “Hell, I don’t even know what his relationship with Al Gore is.”

— Peter Baker

Damage Control Over Whitewater Deal

More than 1,000 pages of the documents released on Friday concern the
Whitewater investigation in the mid-1990s of an Arkansas real estate deal
involving the first couple. Among the legal opinions, talking points and
chronologies in the documents are many memos focused on how to portray the
Clintons in the most favorable light.

• An unsigned memo for the president from March 1994, titled “Key Points on
Whitewater for Press Conference,” said, “You and Hillary have done nothing
wrong. This whole affair involves an unsuccessful investment in a minor
real estate deal nearly 16 years ago. Defend H.R.C. Stress her ethics and
accomplishments as a lawyer and in doing public service work. A person
whose life and career have exemplified highest ethical standards and
integrity.

• In another memo written that same month, a political adviser, Paul
Begala, urged the Clintons to do a joint interview on primetime television.
“They must be relaxed, open and forthcoming. Any sense of bitterness, anger
or righteous indignation will not work,” he wrote. “A word about
interaction: Mandy observes that in many joint interviews, the president
defers to the first lady. This may or may not be real, and it might be as
simple as Southern manners, but it’s important that the president take the
lead on this issue.”

• A January 1995 memo suggests that a “Whitewater Team” be formed, the
purpose of which would be to “develop and implement a coherent offensive
and defensive White House strategy for responding to inquiries directed at
the character of the president or Mrs. Clinton.” The proposed team was to
include more than a dozen people, including lawyers, press assistants and a
researcher. “The team’s central focus will be issues that involve direct
challenges to the character of the president or Mrs. Clinton,” the memo
said.

— Kitty Bennett

Last-Minute Pleas for Clemency

In his final days in office, President Bill Clinton and his staff were
being lobbied by a host of friends arguing for pardons or other executive
clemency, including one of his former lawyers, a former president and a
future adviser to the current president.

But none of the documents released on Friday warned him of the firestorm
that would erupt with his last-minute acts of clemency.

The most controversial of the pardons eventually issued went to the
financier Marc Rich, and the documents include a letter from Dec. 19, 2000,
about Mr. Rich that was sent to a Clinton aide, Bruce Lindsey, by a former
White House counsel, Jack Quinn. In the letter, Mr. Quinn cited a
conversation with Mr. Lindsey while in Belfast about the pardon request for
Mr. Rich, his client.

“You expressed a concern that they are fugitives; and I told you they are
not,” Mr. Quinn wrote, referring to Mr. Rich and Pincus Green, his partner.
Mr. Quinn went on to explain that Mr. Rich and Mr. Green were living in
Switzerland when they were indicted in 1983. So rather than fleeing the
indictments they simply “chose not to return to the U.S. for a trial.”

“Their failure to return to New York was not a crime, and no one has ever
accused them of a crime for failing to come to the U.S. for a trial,” Mr.
Quinn wrote.

The letter came just a few days after Mr. Quinn sent a handwritten note to
Mr. Lindsey. “I am told that Barak also raised the Marc Rich matter with
the president, as has at least one other person who was told that you and I
should discuss it,” Mr. Quinn wrote in that note, referring to Ehud Barak,
then the Israeli prime minister.

In another plea, former President Jimmy Carter and his wife, Rosalynn,
weighed in on behalf of two inmates on death row, Juan Raul Garza and David
Paul Hammer, arguing that Mr. Clinton should spare them because of problems
with the application of capital punishment in America.

“Renewing federal executions under these circumstances would undermine your
lifelong commitment to equal justice at home,” they wrote.

And Harold Hongju Koh, then the assistant secretary of state for democracy,
human rights and labor who would go on to become President Obama’s top
State Department legal adviser for a time, also wrote the White House about
Mr. Garza, who was then scheduled to be the first federal inmate executed
in nearly 40 years.

Mr. Koh advocated a moratorium on federal executions because of evidence of
racial disparity in the justice system. “One of President Clinton’s
greatest legacies will be his commitment to racial justice and equality,”
Mr. Koh wrote. A moratorium “would reaffirm that legacy.”

In the end, Mr. Clinton pardoned Mr. Rich and Mr. Green. He postponed Mr.
Garza’s execution, but the convict was put to death in June 2001 after
President George W. Bush refused to grant clemency.

Mr. Hammer’s execution was postponed and his death sentence was later
overturned by a judge because the prosecution had withheld statements that
might have helped him. He was resentenced to life in prison, a sentence
reaffirmed this summer.

— Peter Baker

Was Bill Clinton a Trekkie?

The revelation of presidential affair with a young aide would be a public
relations nightmare for any White House, but some aides kept a sense of
humor about it in their correspondence.

Mr. Clinton was preparing for a news conference in 1999 a week before an
interview Ms. Lewinsky gave to Barbara Walters was set to air. Anticipating
that reporters would ask the president whether he planned to watch the
interview, James Kennedy, a White House spokesman, passed along a suggested
response to his colleague, Amy Weiss.

Mr. Kennedy wrote that Mr. Clinton should say, “I have already expressed my
regret for what she and others have had to go through because of things I
have said and done. I wish her well in whatever she does.”

But that was not Mr. Kennedy’s original idea. He first thought about
letting Mr. Clinton say bluntly that he would not be watching television
that day. Frustrated that a lawyer struck that line from the proposed
response, Mr. Kennedy suggested that Joe Lockhart, the White House press
secretary, offer an intergalactic response.

“Perhaps Joe, if asked, can say he usually watches ‘Star Trek: Voyager’ at
that hour,” Mr. Kennedy wrote. Here’s the interview Mr. Clinton might have
missed while he was possibly watching the prequel to the original “Star
Trek” series:

— Alan Rappeport

Hollywood Strikes Back

Mr. Clinton found some of his strongest financial support among Hollywood
moguls who were not too happy when the White House introduced a Summit on
Violence in the Media in the wake of the 1999 high school shooting in
Columbine, Colo. In one memo, a senior adviser, Minyon Moore, writes that
Andy Spahn, an adviser to several megadonors in the entertainment industry,
had expressed concern about the summit meeting.

“He indicated that if this was another attempt by the White House and
Congress to attack the entertainment industry and not to talk specifically
about guns, that this would greatly affect” a fund-raiser scheduled with
Mr. Clinton in Los Angeles, Ms. Moore wrote.

In another memo, a White House aide informs Mr. Clinton’s office that David
Geffen, the producer and prominent Democratic donor, wanted his foundation
mentioned at the summit meeting. “Andy Spahn from his office will try to
roll us on this,” the aide wrote. “How do you want me to handle their
pressure?”

— Amy Chozick

*Wall Street Journal: “Clinton Documents Show White House Scrambling to Do
Damage Control”
<http://online.wsj.com/articles/clinton-documents-show-white-house-scrambling-to-do-damage-control-1412982518>*

By Peter Nicholas and Colleen McCain Nelson

October 10, 2014, 7:08 p.m. EDT

[Subtitle:] Whitewater, Lewinsky Affair, Vince Foster Suicide Among
Scandals Detailed in Newly Released Pages

New records released from former President Bill Clinton’s administration
depict a White House scrambling to defuse a series of scandals, with aides
preparing detailed strategies to protect Bill and Hillary Clinton in the
face of outside investigations that dogged them over two terms.

The nearly 10,000 pages of material made public Friday by the William J.
Clinton Presidential Library show White House advisers who were sometimes
as suspicious of each other as of the prosecutors examining the first
family’s financial dealing and use of power in the 1990s.

Files made public covered some of the lowest points of the Clinton
presidency: the Monica Lewinsky sex scandal, the death of former White
House Deputy Counsel Vince Foster, and the series of Arkansas and White
House dealings known collectively as Whitewater.

In a five-page memo written in 1995, then-White House adviser Ira Magaziner
tells Hillary Clinton of how “disloyal” administration officials had “hurt”
her and her husband.

“You asked who in the administration was responsible for the harmful
accounts" that had appeared in books about the White House, Mr. Magaziner
wrote, suggesting who might have might have been behind the leaks.

“I seethe inside when I think of how disloyal some administration officials
have been to you and the president,” he added.

The documents are part of a cache of 30,000 pages of material that had been
previously withheld under laws exempting certain presidential records from
disclosure. Those exemptions have expired and the library has been putting
out the material on a rolling basis since February. With the release
Friday, the library said it has made public all the material that had been
previously held back.

Many of the records lay out intricate plans to guard the Clintons ’ public
image as outside investigations ramped up.

In June 1994, White House aide David Dreyer laid out a draft communications
plan for responding to Whitewater allegations. Congressional hearings on
Whitewater were set to begin, and Mr. Dreyer wrote, “This is going to be a
bad story. The hearings are a forum for our opponents.”

In a lengthy memo, he laid out an all-hands-on-deck approach to controlling
the story line, suggesting that members of Congress should be recruited to
give brief speeches saying nothing happened.

Mr. Dreyer wrote that Republicans “will stop at nothing, including torment
the family of Vince Foster to advance their narrow political interests, to
stop progress on health care or to hurt the president and Mrs. Clinton.”

The following month, Mr. Dreyer wrote another memo outlining the White
House’s strategy for dealing with congressional hearings into Whitewater.

Among the plans: The Democratic National Committee created a video of
Republican speeches during the hearings on the Iran-Contra scandal that
occurred on GOP President Ronald Reagan ’s watch—to “show members what it
means to be on message in support of the administration.”

Also that year, Clinton adviser Paul Begala wrote a memo to Lisa Caputo,
the first lady’s press secretary, outlining a strategy for Bill and Hillary
Clinton to do a joint television interview.

“In this situation, the Clintons’ attitude is their message,” he wrote in
the memo, dated March 1994.

“They must be relaxed, open and forthcoming. Any sense of bitterness,
anger, or righteous indignation will not work.”

One word of caution he offered, referencing campaign adviser Mandy Grunwald
: “Mandy observes that in many joint interviews, the president defers to
the first lady. This may or may not be real, and it might be as simple as
Southern manners, but it’s important that the president take the lead on
this issue.”

The trove of documents includes 229 pages related to the Lewinsky scandal—a
PG-rated collection of emails and talking points that show a White House
scrambling to protect Bill Clinton.

As details of the president’s relationship with Ms. Lewinsky emerge and as
the threat of impeachment looms, the White House correspondence often
focuses on coordinated talking points emphasizing that “a private mistake
does not amount to an impeachable action.” Several emails from White House
aides discuss whether someone in the West Wing was the source of stories
calling Ms. Lewinsky “a stalker.”

The documents also include the White House’s response to an email from
journalist Keith Olbermann, who wrote to apologize for “whatever part I may
have played in perpetuating this ceaseless coverage" of the Lewinsky story.

“I’ll be heading back to my previous career in sports as quickly as
possible,” Mr. Olbermann wrote.

*MSNBC: “11 things we learned from today’s massive Clinton document dump”
<http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/10-things-we-learned-todays-massive-clinton-document-dump>*

By Alex Seitz-Wald and Aliyah Frumin

October 10, 2014, 7:37 p.m. EDT

The Clinton presidential library on Friday released almost 10,000 pages of
never-before-seen documents that shed new light on the inner workings of
the Clinton White House, from the salacious (Monica Lewinsky) to the
political (Mike Huckabee hates Bill Clinton) to the comical (a future
Supreme Court justice’s profane apology to her boss).

Here are the eleven most interesting revelations from the document dump, in
no particular order:

Before she was a Supreme Court justice, Elena Kagan “really f—ked up:”
While working as a lawyer in the Clinton White House in 1996, Kagan
apologized to him for not keeping him informed about a television segment
on the Paula Jones lawsuit. “I realize now that I may·have really f–ked up
in not mentioning to you,” Kagan wrote to then-White House Counsel Jack
Quinn. “God, do I feel like an idiot.” Fortunately, her career seems to
have survived.

Mike Huckabee “hates” Bill Clinton: After the Columbine school shooting,
Bill Clinton’s successor as governor of Arkansas, Mike Huckabee, urged the
president to issue a national proclamation to promote “positive television
programing.” Clinton aide appended a handwritten note to the Republican’s
letter urging a “quick/warm response,” because Huckabee “hates BC [Bill
Clinton]” and “is planning a Senate race against [Sen. Blanche] Lincoln.”

Pressure from Hollywood: As the White House was preparing an event that
would highlight the problem with violence in the media for young people, a
key Democratic money man warned of a backlash in Hollywood. Andy Spahn, an
advisor to some of Hollywood’s biggest political donors, warned White House
political aide Minyon Moore that the “attack [on] the entertainment
industry … would greatly effect the [fundraising] event that this community
will be hosting with the POTUS on May 15th in LA,” as Moore summarized it
to Gore advisor Bruce Reed. “I would appreciate being kept up to date on
these activities to I avoid a backlash.”

Tensions with Jimmy Carter: After Clinton launched missile strikes against
a factory in Sudan thought to be used by al-Qaida in retaliation for the
U.S. Embassies bombing, his Democratic predecessor called for an
investigation into whether the factory actually had been producing chemical
weapons. “Oh yeah, Carter’s on the case,” a national security aide
commented sarcastically. ”Carter is not persuadable. His comments are over
the top, no?”

An apology on Monica Lewinsky: In 1998, then-MSNBC host Keith Olbermann
wrote to Clinton apologizing for “whatever part I may have played in
perpetuating this ceaseless coverage” of the Lewinsky affair story. In a
reply, Clinton thanked Olbermann for his “kind message,” adding “I’m
grateful you got in touch with me, and I send you my very best wishes.”
Another document shows Lewinsky performing normal White House intern
duties, requesting that a portrait of Clinton be hung.

Internal concern over Marc Rich pardon: Clinton’s eleventh hour pardon of
billionaire would leave a black mark on his legacy, something longtime
Clinton aide Bruce Lindsey foresaw before the pardon, the new documents
show. Lindsey was alarmed that Rich and his wife were fugitives, but White
House counsel Jack Quinn dismissed the concern. “They (understandably in my
mind) chose not to return to the U.S. for a trial in light of all that had
happened to them; particularly the enormous and overwhelming adverse and
prejudicial publicity generated, I am sure, by the U.S. Attorney [Rudy]
Guiliani.” He also criticizes Giuliani for refusing to hear “highly
respected independent legal scholars” on the matter.

“A terrific backlash:” A coming back Top Health and Human Services official
Peter Edelman, who would later resign in protest from the administration,
expressed concern over the confirmation process for Lani Guinier, Clinton’s
nominee for assistant attorney general for the Civil Rights Division.
Clinton eventually – and controversially – pulled the nomination following
negative press from the right attacking Guinier’s views on voting and
democracy. “I am hearing that there will be terrific backlash in the black
community if Lani’s nomination is pulled now … She has to have the chance
to make her case,” Edelman warned the White House’s top lawyer on June 2,
1993.

“Riding a roller coaster in a hurricane:” As Hillary Clinton’s health care
reform task force was getting under way, its leader Ira Magaziner warned
the Clintons it would not be easy. “The health care effort is going to be
like riding a roller coaster in a hurricane,” he wrote in a memo to the
first couple. “If we are well organized, persistent and ‘fight like hell’
every day for the next nine months, we will succeed.”

A health care autopsy: The effort failed and Magaziner conducted an autopsy
of sort in 1995, while providing extensive help to journalist  David Broder
on a book about the process. “I see the inside when I think of how disloyal
some administration officials have been to you,” he wrote to Hillary
Clinton, “and how hurtful they have been to me in their private discussions
with the press.” In addition to disloyal officials and the press, Magaziner
also said the delayed process was “fatal.” He added that the delay was not
the task force’s fault, but the result of external events.

Keeping the committee secret: The documents show the great lengths the
administration went to keep the members of the health care task force and
its proceedings secret. Top officials in various parts of the government
strategized from the outset how to keep records private, and individual
Freedom of Information Act Requests were elevated for discussion about
senior White House lawyers. The administration was eventually sued to make
the documents public, but a court sided with the White house.

Two president-elects at once? In 2000, weeks after Election Day, with no
clear winner, the White House asked the Department of Justice if it could
start helping both Al Gore and George W. Bush in their transition efforts.
Nope, the department ruled, “since there cannot be more than one
‘President-elect’ and one ‘’Vice-President-elect’ under the Act.”

*Washington Post: “Clinton presidential documents show White House amid
setbacks, scandals”
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/clinton-presidential-documents-show-white-house-amid-scandals-setbacks/2014/10/10/6c9a872a-50ac-11e4-babe-e91da079cb8a_story.html>*

By Anne Gearan

October 10, 2014, 11:57 p.m. EDT

White House aides raised questions about how to structure and describe
then-first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton’s role in the 1993 attempt to
overhaul the health-care system, including whether she would be considered
a government employee and whether the group’s work could be kept secret,
documents released Friday show.

The lawyerly exchanges among aides in the Clinton White House include
suggested talking points to back up the administration’s position that
Hillary Clinton could head up a task force on health-care reform without
triggering a federal open-meetings requirement.

Scores of documents about the failed health-care effort were among about
10,000 pages of documents released Friday by the Clinton Presidential
Library — the last batch in a series released over the past eight months.
The trove of unclassified memos, correspondence, phone logs and other
papers initially withheld by Clinton charts his administration’s responses
to a series of scandals and setbacks.

There is a communications plan for answering questions about the Whitewater
affair and the suicide of deputy White House counsel Vince Foster, and
discussions about Monica Lewinsky, the Kenneth Starr report on her
dalliance with Clinton, the White House travel office debacle and more.

There is also a one-line handwritten note from “BC” to “HRC” asking how one
internal strategy discussion turned out.

On health care, which was the new president’s signature first-year effort,
the documents show initial qualms within the administration about Hillary
Clinton’s role and the plan to do much of the initial work in secret.

A Feb. 3, 1993, legal memo to Hillary Clinton offers several possible ways
to structure her participation and notes potential pitfalls. Calling her a
consultant, for example, could be seen as a “gimmick.”

On Feb. 17, 1993, a few weeks after Bill Clinton had announced that his
wife would lead the work to draft a new federal health-care mandate, a
senior lawyer at the agency then known as the General Accounting Office
wrote to White House counsel Bernard W. Nussbaum.

Noting that the White House position was that the presence of Hillary
Clinton on the panel did not constitute “outside influence” under a 1972
public disclosure law, lawyer Henry R. Wray asked for “further elaboration
of your analysis.”

If the White House position that the task force would not be covered under
the Federal Advisory Committee Act was based on a finding that its
membership was made up of federal employees, “on what basis does the first
lady qualify under this exemption?” Wray asked. “Are there other reasons
why you believe the task force is not subject to FACA? What are the Supreme
Court cases on which you are relying, and how do they apply to your
analysis of the status of the task force?”

The makeup and operations of the task force quickly became the subject of a
federal lawsuit, which the White House ultimately won years later. An
initial procedural ruling could have slowed the task force or impeded its
work, however, leading to an internal debate about whether to appeal.

Appealing might open the White House to questions about why spokespeople
had initially said they were unconcerned or even pleased with the initial
decision.

Proposed talking points would have had the press secretary explain it this
way:

“As we told you last week, the president was pleased with the district
court’s decision because the court held that everything that has happened
to date is legal . . . however our lawyers at the Justice Department felt
strongly that the court had made substantial errors,” that could negatively
affect future cases.

The health-care effort fell apart in 1994. It remains the largest federal
policy initiative closely associated with Hillary Clinton, a potential 2016
Democratic candidate for president.

She has since said that the proposed overhaul was too large and too
complicated and that the Clinton administration made mistakes.

*Bloomberg: “How Bill Clinton’s White House Handled Political Threats”
<http://www.businessweek.com/news/2014-10-11/how-bill-clintons-white-house-handled-political-threats>*

By Jonathan Allen, Angela Greiling Keane and Toluse Olorunnipa

October 11, 2014

The Clinton White House operated with a siege mentality for eight years,
fashioning political strategies designed to preserve the first family and
neutralize enemies both real and perceived, according to presidential
documents released yesterday for the first time.

Those files shed new light on the approach President Bill Clinton, First
lady Hillary Clinton and their aides took to dealing with political
threats, including never-give-an-inch aggressiveness, detailed preparation
and efforts to get favorable stories in the media.

Clinton White House aides kept track of administration officials who spoke
ill of Hillary Clinton’s health-care push. The communications team asked
“Sophie’s Choice” author William Styron to write an op-ed noting the 1994
anniversary of deputy White House counsel Vince Foster’s suicide to
discredit a congressional investigation into an Arkansas land deal known as
Whitewater.

“The one-year anniversary of Vince Foster’s suicide on July 20th in
conjunction with the beginning of congressional Whitewater hearings
presents an appropriate opportunity to rebut conspiracy theories over his
suicide, and to directly address the political motivations of those who
continue to exploit the issue,” White House officials David Dreyer and
Julia Moffett wrote in a June 1994 memo.

Clinton Culture

It all added up to a fight club culture that permeated the White House and
remains a part of the ethos of two-headed Clinton political operation,
which would be put to work should Hillary Clinton run for president in 2016.

The documents were published online yesterday by the William J. Clinton
Library in Little Rock, Arkansas, as part of a regular release of documents
from his presidency.

Two of President Barack Obama’s top legal picks -- Supreme Court Justice
Elena Kagan and White House Counsel W. Neil Eggleston -- appear throughout
the documents due to their work as Clinton associate counsels, and both
were involved in seeking to limit congressional access to White House
information.

A particular focus of White House aides was protecting Hillary Clinton
during the Whitewater investigations.

After Bill Clinton became president in 1993, the couple endured scrutiny
over a 1978 Arkansas real-estate deal they had taken part in. While several
Clinton associates were convicted of fraud in the failed venture, the
Clintons were eventually cleared of wrongdoing.

‘Defend HRC’

The investigations included inquiries into Hillary Clinton’s legal work for
a savings and loan that failed.

For a March 24, 1994, presidential news conference, the second bullet point
on a draft of talking points reads: “Defend HRC,” using the acronym for
Hillary Rodham Clinton.

“Stress her ethics and accomplishments as a lawyer and in doing
public-service work,” it reads. “No distance between you and HRC regarding
Whitewater.”

As Bill and Hillary Clinton prepared to do a joint television interview in
March of 1994, a memo from Democratic strategist Paul Begala urged the
president to “take the lead.”

“In many joint interviews, the president defers to the first lady,” the
memo reads. “This may or may not be real, and it might be as simple as
Southern manners, but it’s important that the president take the lead on
this issue.”

Other points in the Begala memo relate to defending the first lady from the
public perception that she had become a “political liability” and wielded
too much power in the White House.

Op-Ed Response

“Every first lady has had her share of controversy,” the memo reads. It
goes on to cite high approval ratings for her in polls.

In January 1996, at least six White House aides -- including Bill Clinton’s
campaign strategist Dick Morris -- helped Hillary Clinton craft an op-ed
column giving her side of the story, according to the documents.

In the piece, which ran in newspapers including the Spokesman-Review in
Spokane, Washington, Clinton defended herself against what she called
“outrageous accusations.”

“Close to $30 million in taxpayer money has been spent investigating
Whitewater,” she wrote. “But none of these exhaustive inquiries has turned
up evidence that we did anything illegal, unethical or wrong.”

The current-day Obama picks -- Kagan and Eggleston -- were among Clinton
aides who sought to limit how many documents were released to congressional
and Government Accountability Office investigators probing Whitewater and
the 1993 firings of seven employees in the White House travel office.

“The committee’s attempt to push its investigation to invade the
relationship between the president and his private counsel, however, goes
too far,” Kagan wrote Dec. 13, 1995 about the special Senate committee
investigating Whitewater. “We cannot responsibly accede to this flagrant
abuse of Congress’s investigative powers.”

Lawmaker’s Pursuit

William Clinger, Jr., a Pennsylvania Republican who served two terms in
Congress, pursued the Clinton White House as chairman of the House
Government Reform and Oversight Committee with his investigation of the
travel office firings and subsequent response.

White House staff wrote memos detailing efforts to keep documents relating
to the travel office and Whitewater investigations confidential and out of
the hands of U.S. lawmakers and the GAO.

Losing Control

“We need to treat all of these investigations with the utmost seriousness,”
Eggleston wrote in a June 7, 1994, memo to Lloyd Cutler, working as a
special counsel to Clinton. “We will lose all control,” he wrote, if the
GAO “is permitted to wander the halls and conduct interviews and review
documents at its whim.”

Kagan in May 1996 apologized in a memo to Jack Quinn, then White House
counsel, for not informing him of a conversation about an appearance on the
“Crossfire” political TV show, using an expletive to express how much she
thought she’d erred.

“God, do I feel like an idiot,” Kagan concluded in the explanation to Quinn
about an appearance scheduled for “Ab” on the show. Abner Mikva was White
House counsel before Quinn. The show was about a lawsuit filed by Paula
Jones, a former Arkansas state employee, against Bill Clinton for sexual
harassment, alleging it occurred when he was governor of the state.

Kagan spent time defending Clinton in the Jones case, which settled before
going to trial. Kagan worked on it with lawyers from Skadden, Arps, Slate,
Meagher & Flom. The team was afraid the Supreme Court would agree to hear
the case, which it never did.

While most of her work related to Clinton damage control, Kagan in 1996 had
to help smooth the fallout when an Olympic kayaker was arrested while
paddling on the flooded Potomac River. Kagan refrained from offering a
recommendation on that issue, ending her e-mail with, “What next?”

*Bloomberg: “Clinton Advisers Urged White House to ‘Defend HRC’”
<http://www.businessweek.com/news/2014-10-10/clinton-advisers-urged-white-house-to-defend-hrc>*

By Toluse Olorunnipa

October 10, 2014

President Bill Clinton’s White House staff worked for years to keep Hillary
Clinton from becoming a “political liability” during investigations into
the couple’s Arkansas land deal known as Whitewater.

After Bill Clinton became president in 1993, the couple endured scrutiny
over a 1978 Arkansas real estate deal they had taken part in. While several
Clinton associates were convicted of fraud in the failed venture, the
Clintons were eventually cleared of wrongdoing.

The investigations included inquiries into Hillary Clinton’s legal work for
a savings and loan that failed.

For a March 24, 1994, press conference president Bill Clinton was giving,
the second bullet point on a draft of talking points reads: “Defend HRC,”
using the acronym for Hillary Rodham Clinton. The memo was among the papers
published online today by the William J. Clinton Library in Little Rock,
Arkansas, as part of a regular release of documents from his presidency.

“Stress her ethics and accomplishments as a lawyer and in doing public
service work,” it reads. “No distance between you and HRC regarding
Whitewater.”

As Bill and Hillary Clinton prepared to do a joint television interview in
March of 1994, a memo from Democratic strategist Paul Begala urged the
president to “take the lead.”

“In many joint interviews, the president defers to the First Lady,” the
memo reads. “This may or may not be real, and it might be as simple as
Southern manners, but it’s important that the President take the lead on
this issue.”

Career Controversy

Other points in the Begala memo relate to defending the first lady from the
public perception that she had become a “political liability” and wielded
too much power in the White House.

“Every First Lady has had her share of controversy,” the memo reads. It
goes on to cite poll numbers that showed high approval ratings for the
first lady.

“Hillary is the first First Lady to come to the job from a distinguished
career of her own, independent of her husband’s,” Begala wrote. “Like many
two-career couples, the Clintons have had to find their own way in
uncharted waters, juggling career and family.”

In an undated document laying out questions President Clinton might receive
about his wife at a news conference, he was told to tell reporters who
asked when Hillary learned about a criminal referral on Whitewater to say
it was “in the newspapers.” The memo recommends running that answer by
lawyers before using it.

Strategic Deflect

Bill Clinton’s prepared answer, if questioned about whether he and Hillary
Clinton talked about their work when he was Arkansas governor and she
worked at Rose Law Firm, redirected the conversation to the issue of
working women.

“Working mothers should be able to have successful careers,” Bill Clinton
was told to say. “We should not be making rules that limit the career of
one spouse because of the career of the other.”

In January 1996, at least six White House aides -- including Bill Clinton’s
campaign strategist Dick Morris -- helped Hillary Clinton craft an op-ed
column giving her side of the story, according to the documents.

In the piece, which ran in newspapers such as the Spokesman-Review in
Spokane, Washington, Clinton defended herself against from what she called
“outrageous accusations.”

“Close to $30 million in taxpayer money has been spent investigating
Whitewater,” she wrote. “But none of these exhaustive inquiries has turned
up evidence that we did anything illegal, unethical or wrong.”

*Wall Street Journal blog: Washington Wire: “Clinton Docs: Health-Overhaul
Postmortem Identified ‘Disloyal’ Officials”
<http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2014/10/10/clinton-docs-health-overhaul-postmortem-identified-disloyal-officials/>*

By Peter Nicholas

October 10, 2014, 3:28 p.m. EDT

A White House memo suggests that when Hillary Clinton was first lady in the
early 1990s, she was unhappy about leaks that painted her husband’s White
House in an unflattering light and wanted to know who was behind the
disclosures.

Ira Magaziner, then a senior adviser who helped lead Mrs. Clinton’s effort
to overhaul the health-care system, sent a private memo to her in 1995 that
served as a postmortem on the project’s collapse.

In the memo, Mr. Magaziner discussed his frustrations with White House
colleagues who had been talking to the press and passing information he
believed to be damaging.

He told her he wouldn’t retaliate in his own discussions with journalists,
in part because he worried that could backfire in the 1996 reelection
campaign.

He mentioned that he had been meeting with authors of a book chronicling
the health-care fight, “The System” by David Broder and Haynes Johnson.

“Although I see the inside when I think of how disloyal some administration
officials have been to you and the president and how hurtful they have been
to me in their private discussions with the press, I decided to stick to
the principle of not being critical of other administration officials and I
withheld materials that would cast our colleagues in a bad light,” Mr.
Magaziner wrote. “Although it is tempting, I just don’t feel it’s right to
do and it could sew discord in 1996 when the book appears, which would not
be helpful to the campaign.”

The memo was part of a batch of about 10,000 pages of material released
Friday by the Clinton Presidential Library. Since February, the library has
been releasing archival records that were previously withheld under various
exemptions to public records law. Those exemptions have expired, prompting
the library to put forward the records on a rolling basis. (See more
coverage here.)

Mr. Magaziner’s memo goes on to discuss two other books that had come out
in 1994: Bob Woodward’s “The Agenda” and Elizabeth Drew’s “On the Edge.”

“You asked who in the administration was responsible for the harmful
accounts in their books,”  Mr. Magaziner wrote. “The Drew book has been
especially harmful.”

He went on to list various senior Clinton administration officials he said
were responsible for unflattering information in the books.

He mentioned Donna Shalala, the former Clinton Health and Human Services
secretary and now president of the University of Miami.

Ms. Drew’s accounts “are mainly derived from extensive discussions she had
with Donna Shalala, which were very damaging to you, me and the president,”
Mr. Magaziner wrote.

He advised there was not much they could do in response.

“Unless we are prepared to show Woodward or Drew documents and respond in
kind to other administration officials who trashed us, there is little we
can do to make their accounts more accurate,” he wrote.

There doesn’t seem to be any lingering ill will. In February, Mrs. Clinton,
a potential presidential candidate in 2016, gave a paid speech at the
University of Miami. Ms. Shalala later said she negotiated a discount in
which Mrs. Clinton lowered her standard price.

One who provided information for the Woodward book was Gene Sperling, Mr.
Magaziner wrote.

Mr. Sperling served as an economic adviser in both the Clinton and Obama
White Houses.

But he, too, appears to be on good terms with the Clintons, taking part in
various panel discussions hosted by the family’s charitable foundation.

Mr. Magaziner told Mrs. Clinton that he wanted to ensure the Broder-Johnson
book – which would be published two years later — wouldn’t be overly
influenced by the Woodward and Drew books.

“I have shared my responses to Woodward and Drew with Broder and Johnson so
they will not accept as uncontested the gossip, false descriptions and
false accusations in those books,” he wrote.

*The Hill opinion: A. B. Stoddard: “Clinton’s calculus”
<http://thehill.com/opinion/columnists/220410-ab-stoddard-clintons-calculus>*

By A. B. Stoddard

October 10, 2014, 5:30 p.m. EDT

It must be hectic at Clinton Inc. these days, what with the excitement of a
newborn granddaughter, a busy speaking schedule, that yoga she’s doing and
now the need to game out multiple scenarios for a coming political storm.

Sure, there is a national election in a few weeks, but commenting on the
results will be the easy part for Hillary Clinton. It is what will happen
after the election, and all the unknowns, that will confound a candidate so
fond of painstaking planning.

Republicans, eyeing a Senate majority, are already making plans of their
own for the weeks between the election and the new Congress being sworn in
on Jan. 3, 2015. During the lame-duck session, some GOP senators are
already vowing a showdown over ObamaCare in the vote to pass additional
operating funds for the government.

The “risk-corridor” provision in the Affordable Care Act, which would
compensate losses by insurance companies from inadequate enrollment, must
be added to the new spending bill for 2015. Dubbed the “taxpayer-funded
bailout,” critics are vowing to block it, which could lead to another
government shutdown. Clinton will find it hard to dodge legislative battles
the way she waited nearly three weeks this summer to comment on the chaos
in Ferguson, Mo., following the shooting death of unarmed teenager by a
policeman.

And should President Obama announce executive action on immigration — which
Republicans will characterize as an unconstitutional amnesty — Clinton must
prepare to weigh in on what promises to be an explosive political fight.

As it stands, either party could control the upper chamber in the 114th
Congress, as there are likely to be runoff elections in both Louisiana and
Georgia — and Clinton could be pressed to help save the Democratic Senate
majority. The national parties have already reserved resources for what
promise to be intense battles should the races continue past election
night. Yet it’s not clear that sticking her neck out to save Sen. Mary
Landrieu and/or Michelle Nunn will help Clinton much. Should Democrats hold
on to a one- or two-seat majority, the former secretary of State would have
to spend the next two years defending Obama and Senate Majority Leader
Harry Reid. It would be far better for her campaign to run against a crazy,
obstructionist, overreaching GOP Congress.

And should she win the White House in 2016, she is likely to have a
Democratic Senate anyway. Even if the GOP retakes the Senate this year,
there’s a great chance it could flip back to Democratic control in two
years, when only 10 Democrats are running but 24 Republicans are up for
reelection, several in blue states Obama won in 2008 and 2012.

In addition to domestic policy debates, the war against the Islamic State
in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) will continue throughout 2015 and likely Clinton’s
entire campaign. Soon Obama is expected to shake up his national security
team, according to David Ignatius of The Washington Post. After the
makeover, when new personnel are grappling with the ISIS threat and the
nuclear ambitions of Iran, how supportive must Hillary Clinton be,
particularly if conditions in the Middle East continue to deteriorate? As a
presidential candidate she will likely have to contrast what is being done
with what must be done better.

Finally, all of these developments will also impact her big debut. Of
utmost concern will be the timing of the announcement of her now-old 2016
presidential campaign — just what dramatic lame-duck development could end
up stepping on her newsless declaration?

For such a calculating and calculated politician, the volatility of the
next three months will challenge Clinton’s best-laid plans. Of course it’s
exactly what she will need to expect, should she ever become president. The
unexpected gives you the presidency you get, and never the one you want.
Just ask Obama.

*Calendar:*

*Sec. Clinton's upcoming appearances as reported online. Not an official
schedule.*

·  October 12 – San Diego, CA: Sec. Clinton keynotes the American Academy
of Pediatrics annual conference (Twitter
<https://twitter.com/danmericaCNN/status/520267871654805508>)

·  October 13 – Las Vegas, NV: Sec. Clinton and Sen. Reid fundraise for the
Reid Nevada Fund (Ralston Reports
<http://www.ralstonreports.com/blog/hillary-raise-money-state-democrats-reid-next-month>
)

·  October 13 – Las Vegas, NV: Sec. Clinton keynotes the UNLV Foundation
Annual Dinner (UNLV
<http://www.unlv.edu/event/unlv-foundation-annual-dinner?delta=0>)

·  October 14 – San Francisco, CA: Sec. Clinton keynotes
salesforce.com Dreamforce
conference (salesforce.com
<http://www.salesforce.com/dreamforce/DF14/highlights.jsp#tuesday>)

·  October 15 – Louisville, KY: Sec. Clinton campaigns for Alison Lundergan
Grimes (Politico
<http://www.politico.com/story/2014/10/alison-lundergan-grimes-hillary-clinton-111779.html>
)

·  October 16 – MI: Sec. Clinton campaigns for Rep. Gary Peters and Mark
Schauer in Michigan (AP
<https://twitter.com/KThomasDC/status/520243743170236416>)

·  October 20 – San Francisco, CA: Sec. Clinton fundraises for House
Democratic women candidates with Nancy Pelosi (Politico
<http://www.politico.com/story/2014/08/hillary-clinton-nancy-pelosi-110387.html?hp=r7>
)

·  October 20 – San Francisco, CA: Sec. Clinton fundraises for Senate
Democrats (AP
<http://bigstory.ap.org/article/03fe478acd0344bab983323d3fb353e2/clinton-planning-lengthy-campaign-push-month>
)

·  October 24 – RI: Sec. Clinton campaigns for Rhode Island gubernatorial
nominee Gina Raimondo (Politico
<http://www.politico.com/story/2014/10/hillary-clinton-gina-raimondo-rhode-island-elections-111750.html>
)

·  November 2  – NH: Sec. Clinton appears at a GOTV rally for Gov. Hassan
and Sen. Shaheen (AP
<http://bigstory.ap.org/article/03fe478acd0344bab983323d3fb353e2/clinton-planning-lengthy-campaign-push-month>
)

·  December 1 – New York, NY: Sec. Clinton keynotes a League of
Conservation Voters dinner (Politico
<http://www.politico.com/story/2014/09/hillary-clinton-green-groups-las-vegas-111430.html?hp=l11>
)

·  December 4 – Boston, MA: Sec. Clinton speaks at the Massachusetts
Conference for Women (MCFW <http://www.maconferenceforwomen.org/speakers/>)