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On Thursday Sen. Clinton's office attacked Brill, with spokesman Phillipe Reines telling Fox News Channel's Bill O'Reilly, "Brill's accusations are completely false and an obvious last ditch effort to jump-start anemic book sales."

It would seem to me that Brill has every right to forget his "pledge" when it comes down to hillary calling him a liar.

Is this a written contract that Brill signed with Hitlery??? How is he bound by a "confidentiality agreement?"

If it's just a "he says-she says" argument, shoot...let 'er rip Brill and let it all hang out, 'cause that b*tch ain't ever gonna release you from any "confidentiality agreement"...certainly from anything that would implicate her heinous.

"It's hard to understand why Mr. Brill would choose to exploit such a horrible tragedy in this manner," Reines added.

Just change the name from "Mr. Brill" to "senator Clinton" (lower case "s" is deliberate) and you have the real story.

If Clinton believes that Brill is wrong, then she should publicly release him from the agreement. Otherwise, it has the "appearance" of impropriety.

Hillary is a media grubbing whore, but then, I tend to sugarcoat things.......

Agreed.

There has to be some mutuality in a confidentiality agreement. Certainly one of the implied terms must be that the beneficiary of the agreement will not lie about the matters being kept confidential for purposes of defaming the journalist who made the confidentiality pledge.

"If Hillary Clinton will simply release me from my pledge to keep those conversations off-the-record, I will be delighted to tell everybody in chapter and verse exactly what she said to me," the journalist and one-time Clinton defender said.

It's called spittin into the wind

If Hillary tells Brill one thing off-record, then publicly accuses him of lying--how is he obligated morally to keep that exchange off-record? Hillary violates it herself by accusing Brill.

Brill would be justified in going on-record.

While the story does have a ring of truth, the fact that this comes from NewsMax leads me to believe that the facts are mostly different from what's written here.

For example, who gave all of the gory details about the Hillary, Schumer, Bush meeting? It'd have to be Schumer, whose antipathy toward Hillary is common knowledge -- or one of his lackeys. Would Chuckie shade the truth when it comes to a pissing contest with Hillary? You bet he would.

"Off-the-record" statements and confidentiality agreements are important to journalistic ethics. It's a method for journalists to get background information that might otherwise remain hidden, so that story has the context with which to be clear in what it is documenting. There are several good reasons for these practices, as well as the potential for abuse.

In general, a journalist who publicly divulges what was said off-the-record or in confidentiality violates the trust the source placed in them. Journalists have been known to go to jail and be held in contempt of court rather than reveal information gathered this way.

Brill will be choking himself off to a lot of important sources if he just brazenly reveals information he gathered in this method. It's not legally binding (reporters play this game with conservatives all the time - blurting out what was said to them off-the-record) but it could place one in disrepute among their peers and dry up a lot of other sources one might need for future projects if word gets out.

Generally, it's not an unpardonable sin in the eyes of the media if they break their word with conservatives. For most of them, ideology seems to trump ethics. But to pull this stunt on a liberal like Hillary Clinton is tantamount to a Hollywood actor speaking at a pro-Bush rally. Brill may "never work in this town again".