Clinton's First Lady Schedules Released
Journalists, bloggers and political activists were poring through more than 11,000 pages of former first lady Hillary Clinton's schedules on Wednesday, looking for clues that may reveal her role in the White House during her husband's administration.
FOXNews.com
Wednesday, March 19, 2008
Journalists, bloggers and political activists were poring through more than 11,000 pages of former first lady Hillary Clinton's schedules on Wednesday, looking for clues that may reveal her role in the White House during her husband's administration.
Released by the National Archives, the records detail meetings, ceremonies, speaking engagements and travel. They are expected to offer some insight into whether the Democratic presidential candidate can accurately claim executive experience from her eight years as first lady.
"The schedules do help illustrate Hillary Clinton's extensive and exhaustive work as a public servant and her role as an influential advocate at home and around the world on behalf of our country. As such, they are a valuable addition to the substantive and vast public record already made available by President Clinton," reads a statement issued by Clinton's 2008 presidential campaign after the document drop.
A cursory perusal of the records, released on CDs and posted on the William J. Clinton Presidential Library Web site, found that in the early days of the Clinton administration, then-first lady Hillary Clinton held several meetings on health care with Cabinet secretaries and staff.
Click here to view the schedules on the Clinton Library Web site
In July of that same year, Clinton was traveling when her Arkansas law partner and friend, Vince Foster, was found dead in the early morning hours at Fort Marcy Park in Northern Virginia with a bullet through his mouth. The death of Foster, a deputy White House counsel, was later ruled a suicide. On that day, Clinton was in Los Angeles for a live TV show, then a 15-minute radio show interview, the schedules show.
It is unclear when Clinton learned about Foster's death. In Gail Sheehy's book, "Hillary's Choice," the author notes "That same day, phone records show a flurry of calls between Hillary in Little Rock, Susan Thomases in New York and Maggie Williams in Washington."
(Williams was a senior aide to Clinton at the time and is currently her campaign manager. Thomases was a close friend and New York attorney who had previously worked with Clinton at the Children's Defense Fund.)
On another significant day in the Clinton White House -- Jan. 4, 1996 -- the first lady held private meetings in the White House residence with Williams and the her chief of staff, Patti Solis Doyle.
Jan. 4, 1996, is the day Carolyn Huber, the Clintons' director of personal correspondence, discovered billing records in the "book room" on the third floor of the White House residence that had been subpoenaed by Kenneth Starr more than two years earlier. Access to this room, according to The Washington Post, "is generally limited to the first family."
The 116-page document, which Huber testified before the Senate Whitewater Committee had been located on a table in the middle of the room, consisted of Hillary Clinton's bills for her legal work for the Madison Guaranty Savings and Loan, a key account of Clinton's while she was a partner of the Rose Law Firm in Arkansas.
A review of the period in January 1998 surrounding the disclosure of the Monica Lewinsky affair reflects no disruption in Clinton's schedule. It appears from these scheduling documents that she carried on her usual regimen of awards ceremonies and other activities.
The chronological schedules were kept by Doyle, the former chief of staff who was responsible for tracking all of Clinton's contacts and activities throughout the White House years. Doyle served as Clinton's campaign manager over the past year, but was replaced by Williams after Clinton's Feb. 5 Super Tuesday primary stalemate with Barack Obama.
Judicial Watch, the legal watchdog group that sued to see the schedules, is hoping the information will reveal some of Clinton's early contacts as head of the National Task Force on Health Care Reform, a Cabinet-level group appointed by Bill Clinton days after his 1993 inauguration. The watchdog group has sued to have telephone logs and meeting notes released.
Of the 2,888 days that Clinton was in the White House, archivists say they can not find 27 days of schedules. Of the 11,046 pages available, 4,746 have been blacked out, primarily to protect privacy details of guests, including Social Security numbers, telephone numbers and home addresses, the National Archives said.
FOX News' James Rosen and Trish Turner contributed to this report.
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