Hillary Clinton: Habitual Liar

[Guest]

By DAN CALABRESE - Bet you didn't know this.

I've decided to reprint a piece of work I did nearly five years ago, because it seems very relevant today given Hillary Clinton's performance in the Benghazi hearings. Back in 2008 when she was running for president, I interviewed two erstwhile staff members of the House Judiciary Committee who were involved with the Watergate investigation when Hillary was a low-level staffer there. I interviewed one Democrat staffer and one Republican staffer, and wrote two pieces based on what they told me about Hillary's conduct at the time.

I published these pieces back in 2008 for North Star Writers Group, the syndicate I ran at the time. This was the most widely read piece we ever had at NSWG, but because NSWG never gained the high-profile status of the major syndicates, this piece still didn't reach as many people as I thought it deserved to. Today, given the much broader reach of CainTV and yet another incidence of Hillary's arrogance in dealing with a congressional committee, I think it deserves another airing. For the purposes of simplicity, I've combined the two pieces into one very long one. If you're interested in understanding the true character of Hillary Clinton, it's worth your time to read it.

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.”

How could a 27-year-old House staff member do all that? She couldn’t do it by herself, but Zeifman said she was one of several individuals – including Marshall, special counsel John Doar and senior associate special counsel (and future Clinton White House Counsel) Bernard Nussbaum – who engaged in a seemingly implausible scheme to deny Richard Nixon the right to counsel during the investigatio

Why would they want to do that? Because, according to Zeifman, they feared putting Watergate break-in mastermind E. Howard Hunt on the stand to be cross-examined by counsel to the president. Hunt, Zeifman said, had the goods on nefarious activities in the Kennedy Administration that would have made Watergate look like a day at the beach – including Kennedy’s purported complicity in the attempted assassination of Fidel Castro.

The actions of Hillary and her cohorts went directly against the judgment of top Democrats, up to and including then-House Majority Leader Tip O’Neill, that Nixon clearly had the right to counsel. Zeifman says that Hillary, along with Marshall, Nussbaum and Doar, was determined to gain enough votes on the Judiciary Committee to change House rules and deny counsel to Nixon. And in order to pull this off, Zeifman says Hillary wrote a fraudulent legal brief, and confiscated public documents to hide her deception.

The brief involved precedent for representation by counsel during an impeachment proceeding. When Hillary endeavored to write a legal brief arguing there is no right to representation by counsel during an impeachment proceeding, Zeifman says, he told Hillary about the case of Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, who faced an impeachment attempt in 1970.

“As soon as the impeachment resolutions were introduced by (then-House Minority Leader Gerald) Ford, and they were referred to the House Judiciary Committee, the first thing Douglas did was hire himself a lawyer,” Zeifman said.

The Judiciary Committee allowed Douglas to keep counsel, thus establishing the precedent. Zeifman says he told Hillary that all the documents establishing this fact were in the Judiciary Committee’s public files. So what did Hillary do?

“Hillary then removed all the Douglas files to the offices where she was located, which at that time was secured and inaccessible to the public,” Zeifman said. Hillary then proceeded to write a legal brief arguing there was no precedent for the right to representation by counsel during an impeachment proceeding – as if the Douglas case had never occurred.

The brief was so fraudulent and ridiculous, Zeifman believes Hillary would have been disbarred if she had submitted it to a judge.

Zeifman says that if Hillary, Marshall, Nussbaum and Doar had succeeded, members of the House Judiciary Committee would have also been denied the right to cross-examine witnesses, and denied the opportunity to even participate in the drafting of articles of impeachment against Nixon.

Of course, Nixon’s resignation rendered the entire issue moot, ending Hillary’s career on the Judiciary Committee staff in a most undistinguished manner. Zeifman says he was urged by top committee members to keep a diary of everything that was happening. He did so, and still has the diary if anyone wants to check the veracity of his story. Certainly, he could not have known in 1974 that diary entries about a young lawyer named Hillary Rodham would be of interest to anyone 34 years later.

But they show that the pattern of lies, deceit, fabrications and unethical behavior was established long ago – long before the Bosnia lie, and indeed, even before cattle futures, Travelgate and Whitewater – for the woman who is still asking us to make her president of the United States.

Franklin Polk, who served at the time as chief Republican counsel on the committee, confirmed many of these details in two interviews he granted me this past Friday, although his analysis of events is not always identical to Zeifman’s. Polk specifically confirmed that Hillary wrote the memo in question, and confirmed that Hillary ignored the Douglas case. (He said he couldn’t confirm or dispel the part about Hillary taking the Douglas files.)

To Polk, Hillary’s memo was dishonest in the sense that she tried to pretend the Douglas precedent didn’t exist. But unlike Zeifman, Polk considered the memo dishonest in a way that was more stupid than sinister.

“Hillary should have mentioned that (the Douglas case), and then tried to argue whether that was a change of policy or not instead of just ignoring it and taking the precedent out of the opinion,” Polk said.

Polk recalled that the attempt to deny counsel to Nixon upset a great many members of the committee, including just about all the Republicans, but many Democrats as well.

“The argument sort of broke like a firestorm on the committee, and I remember Congressman Don Edwards was very upset,” Polk said. “He was the chairman of the subcommittee on constitutional rights. But in truth, the impeachment precedents are not clear. Let’s put it this way. In the old days, from the beginning of the country through the 1800s and early 1900s, there were precedents that the target or accused did not have the right to counsel.”

That’s why Polk believes Hillary’s approach in writing the memorandum was foolish. He says she could have argued that the Douglas case was an isolated example, and that other historical precedents could apply.

But Zeifman says the memo and removal of the Douglas files was only part the effort by Hillary, Doar, Nussbaum and Marshall to pursue their own agenda during the investigation.

After my first column, some readers wrote in claiming Zeifman was motivated by jealousy because he was not appointed as the chief counsel in the investigation, with that title going to Doar instead.

Zeifman’s account is that he supported the appointment of Doar because he, Zeifman, a) did not want the public notoriety that would come with such a high-profile role; and didn’t have much prosecutorial experience. When he started to have a problem with Doar and his allies was when Zeifman and others, including House Majority Leader Tip O’Neill and Democratic committee member Jack Brooks of Texas, began to perceive Doar’s group as acting outside the directives and knowledge of the committee and its chairman, Peter Rodino.

(O’Neill died in 1994. Brooks is still living and I tried unsuccessfully to reach him. I’d still like to.)

This culminated in a project to research past presidential abuses of power, which committee members felt was crucial in aiding the decisions they would make in deciding how to handle Nixon’s alleged offenses.

According to Zeifman and other documents, Doar directed Hillary to work with a group of Yale law professors on this project. But the report they generated was never given to the committee. Zeifman believes the reason was that the report was little more than a whitewash of the Kennedy years – a part of the Burke Marshall-led agenda of avoiding revelations during the Watergate investigation that would have embarrassed the Kennedys.

The fact that the report was kept under wraps upset Republican committee member Charles Wiggins of California, who wrote a memo to his colleagues on the committee that read in part:

Within the past few days, some disturbing information has come to my attention. It is requested that the facts concerning the matter be investigated and a report be made to the full committee as it concerns us all.

Early last spring when it became obvious that the committee was considering presidential "abuse of power" as a possible ground of impeachment, I raised the question before the full committee that research should be undertaken so as to furnish a standard against which to test the alleged abusive conduct of Richard Nixon.

As I recall, several other members joined with me in this request. I recall as well repeating this request from time to time during the course of our investigation. The staff, as I recall, was noncommittal, but it is certain that no such staff study was made available to the members at any time for their use.

Wiggins believed the report was purposely hidden from committee members. Chairman Rodino denied this, and said the reason Hillary’s report was not given to committee members was that it contained no value. It’s worth noting, of course, that the staff member who made this judgment was John Doar.

In a four-page reply to Wiggins, Rodino wrote in part:

Hillary Rodham of the impeachment inquiry staff coordinated the work. . . . After the staff received the report it was reviewed by Ms. Rodham, briefly by Mr. Labovitz and Mr. Sack, and by Doar. The staff did not think the manuscript was useful in its present form. . . .

In your letter you suggest that members of the staff may have intentionally suppressed the report during the course of its investigation. That was not the case.

As a matter of fact, Mr. Doar was more concerned that any highlight of the project might prejudice the case against President Nixon. The fact is that the staff did not think the material was usable by the committee in its existing form and had not had time to modify it so it would have practical utility for the members of the committee. I was informed and agreed with the judgment.

Mr. Labovitz, by the way, was John Labovitz, another member of the Democratic staff. I spoke with Labovitz this past Friday as well, and he is no fan of Jerry Zeifman.

“If it’s according to Zeifman, it’s inaccurate from my perspective,” Labovitz said. He bases that statement on a recollection that Zeifman did not actually work on the impeachment inquiry staff, although that is contradicted not only by Zeifman but Polk as well.

Labovitz said he has no knowledge of Hillary having taken any files, and defended her no-right-to-counsel memo on the grounds that, if she was assigned to write a memo arguing a point of view, she was merely following orders.

But as both Zeifman and Polk point out, that doesn’t mean ignoring background of which you are aware, or worse, as Zeifman alleges, confiscating documents that disprove your argument.

All told, Polk recalls the actions of Hillary, Doar and Nussbaum as more amateurish than anything else.

“Of course the Republicans went nuts,” Polk said. “But so did some of the Democrats – some of the most liberal Democrats. It was more like these guys – Doar and company – were trying to manage the members of Congress, and it was like, ‘Who’s in charge here?’ If you want to convict a president, you want to give him all the rights possible. If you’re going to give him a trial, for him to say, ‘My rights were denied,’ – it was a stupid effort by people who were just politically tone deaf. So this was a big deal to people in the proceedings on the committee, no question about it. And Jerry Zeifman went nuts, and rightfully so. But my reaction wasn’t so much that it was underhanded as it was just stupid.”

Polk recalls Zeifman sharing with him at the time that he believed Hillary’s primary role was to report back to Burke Marshall any time the investigation was taking a turn that was not to the liking of the Kennedys.

“Jerry used to give the chapter and verse as to how Hillary was the mole into the committee works as to how things were going,” Polk said. “And she’d be feeding information back to Burke Marshall, who, at least according to Jerry, was talking to the Kennedys. And when something was off track in the view of the Kennedys, Burke Marshall would call John Doar or something, and there would be a reconsideration of what they were talking about. Jerry used to tell me that this was Hillary’s primary function.”

Zeifman says he had another staff member get him Hillary’s phone records, which showed that she was calling Burke Marshall at least once a day, and often several times a day.

A final note about all this: I wrote my first column on this subject because, in the aftermath of Hillary being caught in her Bosnia fib, I came in contact with Jerry Zeifman and found his story compelling. Zeifman has been trying to tell his story for many years, and the mainstream media have ignored him. I thought it deserved an airing as a demonstration of how early in her career Hillary began engaging in self-serving, disingenuous conduct.

Disingenuously arguing a position? Vanishing documents? Selling out members of her own party to advance a personal agenda? Classic Hillary. Neither my first column on the subject nor this one were designed to show that Hillary is dishonest. I don’t really think that’s in dispute. Rather, they were designed to show that she has been this way for a very long time – a fact worth considering for anyone contemplating voting for her for president of the United States.

By the way, there’s something else that started a long time ago.

“She would go around saying, ‘I’m dating a person who will some day be president,’” Polk said. “It was like a Babe Ruth call. And because of that comment she made, I watched Bill Clinton’s political efforts as governor of Arkansas, and I never counted him out because she had made that forecast.”

Bill knew what he wanted a long time ago. Clearly, so did Hillary, and her tactics for trying to achieve it were established even in those early days.

Vote wisely.

[bonnie]

RICHARD

thank you for posting this article----it was very interesting

and very informative

I guess some people can say any thing and think they

can get away with it

dgrimm60

She can.Liberals get giddy over the thought of her running for president in 2016

[Ted Oplinger]

Well, the ability to lie and deceive are but resume enhancements for a Democrat. For a Republican, though, they are career-enders when the media gets wind.

[Guest]

Yep.

[joeb]

Hilary's response to Rand's questioning that nothing mattered but that idea that a Bengazi-like situation would never happen again was, to me, a response that said truth didn't matter to her in the least.

[Guest]

That's exactly what she said...I couldn't believe it. The arrogance.

[bonnie]

Hillary's First Big Lie

By Jack Cashill

The congressional hearings on Benghazi last week led me to question just when it was that public integrity ceased to matter. After some research, I came to an unexpectedly specific answer -- January 26, 1992, the day America first met Hillary Clinton.

Earlier that month, Arkansas state employee Gennifer Flowers confessed to a tabloid that she and Bill Clinton had engaged in a 12-year affair. In a desperate attempt to save Bill's candidacy for president, the Clintons agreed to be interviewed by Steve Kroft on CBS's 60 Minutes.

Upon watching this interview, I was struck by how forcefully Kroft stuck it to the Clintons. I had all but forgotten that in days gone by news people expected the truth from public officials, even Democratic front-runners for the presidency. Starting with this interview, the Clintons would dramatically lower that expectation.

When Kroft asked Bill if he had an affair with Flowers, he answered, "That allegation is false." Hillary, her hands lovingly intertwined with Bill's, nodded in affirmation. Of course, they were both lying, Bill with much greater skill. Democratic Senator Bob Kerrey would later immortalize Bill as "an unusually good liar."

At this point in the interview, Hillary tried to explain how these allegations emerged. "When this woman [Flowers] first got caught up in these charges," she said, "I felt as I've felt about all of these women: that they had just been minding their own business and they got hit by a meteor, and it was no fault of their own."

It was Hillary's next thought that caused me to hit the pause button and replay the video. "We reached out to them," said Hillary. "I met with two of them to reassure them they were friends of ours." This was the only sentence for which I marked the time -- roughly 3:28 in the video clip -- and wrote down the quote verbatim.

Something provocative, perhaps historic, had caught my attention. No, it was not the use of "friends of ours," mob shorthand for "made guys." Rather, it was that on no other occasion had Hillary admitted an active role in silencing Bill's women. She continued, "I felt terrible about what was happening to them."

Hillary had reason to feel terrible. Among the people the Clintons reached out to that year -- in this case, through a proxy -- was Sally Perdue, a former Miss Arkansas and Clinton paramour. "[The proxy] said that there were people in high places who were anxious about me and they wanted me to know that keeping my mouth shut would be worthwhile," Perdue would later relate. "Worthwhile" meant a GS-11 or higher job with the federal government. If she turned down the offer and talked to the media, "He couldn't guarantee what would happen to my pretty little legs."

Perdue was the least of the Clintons' problems in 1992. More potentially troublesome were the women that Clinton had criminally assaulted or humiliated -- Juanita Broaddrick, Elizabeth Ward Gracen, and Paula Jones among others. Jones, though not raped like Broaddrick or attacked like Gracen, would prove Bill Clinton's undoing.

Later in the 60 Minutes interview, Bill swore, "I have absolutely leveled with the American people." Of course, he did no such thing, and Kroft knew it. Skeptically, Kroft asked Bill if he thought the interview would help quiet the furor. Clinton answered, "That's up to the American people and to some extent up to the press. This will test the character of the press. It is not only my character that has been tested."

By Clinton standards, the media would pass the test, ace it even, and at their prompting, so would the public. Clinton had given the media just enough cover to "move on." This was their turning point. After twelve years of Reagan and Bush, they embraced their inner liberal and abandoned their role as watchdogs. America has always had scoundrels, but never before had the media collectively championed them.

For the next six years, and more recklessly still after the disastrous 1994 mid-terms, Hillary lied as necessary to protect the Clinton brand. At every turn, her co-dependents in the major media enabled her. Appalled by her performance, William Safire famously designated Hillary "a congenital liar" in a 1996 New York Times op-ed, but Hillary was just learning the art of the lie.

In 1998, she had plenty of opportunity to hone her craft. That year the story of Bill's sordid sexual history broke into public view despite the major media's best efforts to conceal it. The intrepid reporting of the American Spectator and the emergence of the Internet, the Drudge Report in particular, made containment impossible.

Unwilling to abandon the Clintons, the major media savaged the truth tellers -- the whistleblowers, the prosecutors, the "bimbos" that erupted -- and shifted their protective embrace to Hillary as the future progressive torchbearer. Almost to a person, in ways big and small, they helped her survive this ordeal.

Six years and a day after she lied on 60 Minutes to protect Bill's candidacy, Hillary lied on the Today Show to protect his presidency. "There isn't any fire," she told Matt Lauer about the "smoke" surrounding her husband, and unlike Steve Kroft in 1992, Lauer allowed her to lie.

He shifted his inquiry from whether Bill had a sexual liaison with Monica Lewinsky to whether independent counsel Ken Starr's "thirty million dollar" investigation had unfairly targeted the president. This set-up allowed Hillary to establish the media narrative going forward. ''The great story here," she said for the ages, "is this vast right-wing conspiracy that been conspiring against my husband since the day he announced for president."

The media helped in less obvious ways as well. In 1998, the Washington Post ran an historical series on Bill's sexual misadventures. One day the Post included a transcript of the 1992 60 Minutes interview. What follows is an excerpt from that transcript.

[These women] had just been minding their own business and they got hit by a meteor . . . . I felt terrible about what was happening to them.

The ellipsis conceals from the reader the most significant quote in the interview: "We reached out to them. I met with two of them to reassure them they were friends of ours." This was the only passage of any substance edited out of the transcript. In 1998, there was no YouTube. Readers relied on transcripts. By this time, much of the public was aware that the outreach to "these women" had not been at all friendly. A Post editor had chosen to scrub Hillary's sordid role in that outreach from the record.

Hillary would later claim to have learned about Bill's affair with Monica just before his August 1998 grand jury testimony. In fact, however, it was Hillary, working through her acolytes, who had Monica booted from the White House before the story went public and branded as a stalker after it did. The media chose not to know. They allowed the smartest woman in the world to play innocent victim, and this improbable role immunized her from scandal and burnished her political star.

By 2012, the major media had become so comfortable with Clinton lies that not a single one among them pointed out the grotesque irony of having an unrepentant sexual predator keynote a Democratic Convention whose theme was the "Republican war on women."

So accustomed had Hillary grown to having her lies glossed over that she grew increasingly indignant even at the timid questions Congress threw her way at last week's Benghazi hearing. When asked by Senator Ron Johnson about her version of events, Hillary exploded in an outburst destined to be at least as famous as her "vast right wing conspiracy" jeremiad.

Said Hillary, summing up the state of public integrity in 2013, "What difference at this point does it make?" Say what you will, but today, that is a legitimate question.

[joeb]

That's exactly what she said...I couldn't believe it. The arrogance.

I could believe it. It just confirmed to me what I already knew about her and Bill. Same song, second verse same as the first, with those two.