Will Media Give Story About Hillary's Unethical Past the Legs It Deserves? (Hillary's Nixon Days)

I hope the media gives this the legs it deserves. It may be early in Hillary's career, but it gives a clear picture to the roots of her character and its quite disturbing stuff.

Jerry Zeifman, the man who served as chief counsel to the House Judiciary Committee during the Watergate hearings, comes out calling Hillary a career liar and says she wanted to deny Nixon the basic right to counsel!

As Hillary Clinton came under increasing scrutiny for her story about facing sniper fire in Bosnia, one question that arose was whether she has engaged in a pattern of lying.

The now-retired general counsel and chief of staff of the House Judiciary Committee, who supervised Hillary when she worked on the Watergate investigation, says Hillary’s history of lies and unethical behavior goes back farther – and goes much deeper – than anyone realizes.

Jerry Zeifman, a lifelong Democrat, supervised the work of 27-year-old Hillary Rodham on the committee. Hillary got a job working on the investigation at the behest of her former law professor, Burke Marshall, who was also Sen. Ted Kennedy’s chief counsel in the Chappaquiddick affair. When the investigation was over, Zeifman fired Hillary from the committee staff and refused to give her a letter of recommendation – one of only three people who earned that dubious distinction in Zeifman’s 17-year career.
Why?
“Because she was a liar,” Zeifman said in an interview last week. “She was an unethical, dishonest lawyer. She conspired to violate the Constitution, the rules of the House, the rules of the committee and the rules of confidentiality.”

After hiring Hillary, Doar assigned her to confer with me regarding rules of procedure for the impeachment inquiry. At my first meeting with her I told her that Judiciary Committee Chairman Peter Rodino, House Speaker Carl Albert, Majority Leader “Tip” O’Neill, Parliamentarian Lou Deschler and I had previously all agreed that we should rely only on the then existing House Rules, and not advocate any changes. I also quoted Tip O’Neill’s statement that: “To try to change the rules now would be politically divisive. It would be like trying to change the traditional rules of baseball before a World Series.”

Hillary assured me that she had not drafted, and would not advocate, any such rules changes. However, as documented in my personal diary, I soon learned that she had lied. She had already drafted changes, and continued to advocate them. In one written legal memorandum, she advocated denying President Nixon representation by counsel. In so doing she simply ignored the fact that in the committee’s then most recent prior impeachment proceeding, the committee had afforded the right to counsel to Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas.

I had also informed Hillary that the Douglas impeachment files were available for public inspection in the committee offices. She later removed the Douglas files without my permission and carried them to the offices of the impeachment inquiry staff — where they were no longer accessible to the public.

Hillary had also made other ethical flawed procedural recommendations, arguing that the Judiciary Committee should: not hold any hearings with – or take depositions of — any live witnesses; not conduct any original investigation of Watergate, bribery, tax evasion, or any other possible impeachable offense of President Nixon; and should rely solely on documentary evidence compiled by other committees and by the Justice Departments special Watergate prosecutor

The right to counsel is considered one of the inviolable tenets of our justice system. It doesn’t speak well of ambitious attorneys working on a highly-charged political investigation that she wanted to deny someone the right to an attorney. Small wonder Zeifman questioned her ethics. If all she did was to propose that as a tactic, that would not make it terribly concerning — but she did much more than just spitball ideas. When informed that public evidence showed a precedent for the right to counsel, she absconded with the files to eliminate the evidence. Does that remind anyone of later incidents in the Clinton narrative, such as the billing records for the Rose Law offices and the 900+ raw FBI files on political opponents of the Clintons

These are very serious charges to Clinton's character. Of course it isn't news that she is a liar, but the detailed ugly details of wanting to deny someone basic Constitutional rights for the sake of a political vendetta has the potential to do her in. If the media gives this the legs it deserves Hillary's political future could cease to exist. Hopefully they don't sweep this one under the rug.

MRS. CLINTON ‘S ETHICAL FLAWS
Sarasota Herald-Tribune (FL) - November 23, 1996
Author: CAL THOMAS / Watergate revisited

Whitewater independent counsel Kenneth Starr has mostly kept quiet in recent months, neither seeking indictments against higher-ups in the Clinton administration before the election nor responding to attempts to assassinate his character by functionaries in the White House and the Clintons’ former business partners in the jailhouse.

Now, Starr is beginning to fire back. In a speech to the Economic Club of Detroit earlier this month, Starr spoke of the importance of civic virtue. Citing James Madison, Starr said civic virtue meant to the Founders ``that individuals, as they pursued their self-interested goals, would feel a commitment to justice, to civility and, above all, to truthfulness. Without these traits, the individual cannot be a true citizen. And without virtuous citizens, the framers believed, self-government will ultimately self-destruct.’’

Starr succinctly and accurately summarized what the misdeeds collectively known as Whitewater are about. Not only do they concern events in Little Rock when Bill Clinton was governor, said Starr: ``It is also about questions - and I stress that they are only questions, which we are very far along in examining - about the integrity of the official processes of government in Washington. It is about whether participants in Washington later deceived federal investigators trying to reconstruct those processes of government.’’ That is not third-rate stuff.

Clinton defenders, including the president himself, have tried to undermine Starr’s credibility and integrity. He has been called a partisan who is out to get Clinton . Starr last week compared himself to Watergate prosecutor Archibald Cox, a Democrat, who was fired by Richard Nixon.

The Clinton people bristle when Whitewater is compared to Watergate, but JerryZeifman , former chief counsel to the House Judiciary Committee, thinks the linkage is apt. In his new book, Without Honor: The Impeachment of President Nixon and the Crimes of Camelot, Zeifman offers fascinating insights into two people who were principals in the impeachment efforts against Nixon, who are also key players in events under investigation by Starr’s office.

Two names surface again and again in Zeifman ‘s book. They are Bernard Nussbaum, former White House counsel who was one of 40 attorneys hired by then House Judiciary Committee Chairman Peter Rodino, and a 26-year-old Yale Law School graduate named Hillary Rodham, also on the committee staff.

Zeifman writes, ``I came to regard Doar (John Doar was a special counsel to the House Judiciary Committee), Nussbaum and Rodham as somewhat less than honorable lawyers, unworthy of either public or private trust.

``Week after week,’’ writes Zeifman , ``flawed legal opinions and dubious procedural rules were being churned out by Nussbaum and Rodham. . . . Each of them fostered delay. They had to be shot down one by one by a coalition of Republicans and Democrats led by Tip O’Neill and Minority Leader John Rhodes. . . . ‘’

Zeifman then writes about a legal position that could come back to haunt the Clintons: ``. . . perhaps (the) most invidious rule, which was also espoused by Rodino, was the surprising notion that the president was not entitled to representation by counsel in the committee’s impeachment proceedings. The staff lawyer who produced the flawed legal research that Rodino, Doar and Nussbaum relied on most to advocate that rule was Rodham.’’

Zeifman writes that the public was being misled ``with the aid of flawed memoranda written by Rodham and endorsed by Doar. . . . ‘’

Another young lawyer associated with Zeifman was John Labovitz. Zeifman writes that Labovitz ``came to my office and apologized for having participated to some extent to conceal from me the work that was being done. Some months ago he and Hillary lied intentionally to me and told me that there were no drafts of proposed rules of procedure for the impeachment inquiry.’’

Repeatedly, Zeifman refers to the ``ethical shortcomings’’ and ``erroneous legal opinions’’ of Nussbaum and Rodham. Those looking for an explanation as to how subpoenaed, but ``missing,’’ documents materialized in the private living quarters of the Clinton White House may get a clue from Zeifman : ``It was not until months after my conference with Rodham that I learned that the supply of traditional rules that had been reserved for future use had been unaccountably removed from the committee’s storeroom.’’

Starr need not worry about attacks on his integrity. But Zeifman has compiled a formidable dossier on the ethical flaws and questionable character in several people now at the center of Starr’s investigation. When the indictments roll in, the Clintons will be on very shaky ethical ground.

LOS ANGELES TIMES SYNDICATE

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.