After prodding and a lawsuit filed under the Freedom of Information Act, the National Archives today released Hillary Clinton’s schedules from her years as first lady, years she likes to tack on to her CV as “experience” as she applies for the top job on Pennsylvania Avenue.
And while the 11,000 pages now seeing the light of day spell out details about when she had a soft drink (Pakistan, 1995) and what she read aloud to grade schoolers in Waco, TX in 2000 (Where the Wild Things Are), the schedule is sanitized when convenient.
There are blanks, whited-out boxes, where embarrassing information might lurk, bringing to mind that handy 18-1/2 minute gap in Nixon’s Watergate tapes.
An examination by Walter Isikoff and Mark Hosenball for Newsweek Online finds redactions for March 9, 1995, when Johnny Chung had his photo taken with the then-first lady. Chung is the notorious fund raiser who later admitted a fair portion of his illegal campaign cash came from a Chinese spy military intelligence operative. Right after the picture-taking, Ikikoff and Hosenball note:
Chung hand-delivered his $50,000 to Maggie Williams, who was the First Lady’s chief of staff at the time and now manages her presidential campaign.
Clinton’s schedule for January 26, 1996 says “NO public schedule.” In fact, the missing appearance was very public and covered by a throng of media, at least her entrance and exit. That was the day she testified, under subpoena, before a federal grand jury in Washington investigating Whitewater. Testified for four hours, which takes up a good chunk of anybody’s daily schedule.
For such a large information dump, Isikoff and Hosenball — and probably some unsung researchers — have done a fine job of quickly isolating some of these gaps that are worthy of Rose Mary Woods’ admiration.
But not ours.
The full article is here.








4 comments
March 20, 2008 at 9:35 pm
Obama’s passport file breached, 2 at State Dept fired « Barry!
[...] 20, 2008 in Barack Obama, Democrats, News Tags: politics On the heels of my comparison to Watergate yesterday comes another one, more [...]
March 21, 2008 at 5:13 pm
Hillary’s quest, Hillary’s records | From Scratch
[...] The records have been available several hours now and they are very heavily redacted. See The Modern 18 1/2 Minute Gap at my other [...]
March 22, 2008 at 11:57 am
Will Rhodes
She digs deeper holes for herself than even the media can do.
She opens her mouth – then see what she said about it a while back – a perfect example is the Florida and Michigan Primaries – she said they didn’t matter when she believed she would be walking into the Democrat nomination. Now that she isn’t…
March 22, 2008 at 4:24 pm
ellaella
How I wish you lived in the US and could vote here.