Although I’ve thus far preferred her to Barack Obama, Hillary’s Clinton’s bald-faced lie about facing sniper fire in Bosnia was very early the last straw for me. Now Ed Morrissey writes about an even more disturbing episode at the beginning of her career. If true, this Watergate-era scandal should put an end to Hillary’s political career.
Dan Calabrese’s new column on Hillary Clinton’s past may bring the curtain down on her political future. Calabrese interviewed Jerry Zeifman, the man who served as chief counsel to the House Judiciary Committee during the Watergate hearings, has tried to tell the story of his former staffer’s behavior during those proceedings for years. Zeifman claims he fired Hillary for unethical behavior and that she conspired to deny Richard Nixon counsel during the hearings
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.”
Writing about Hillary’s faux tears before the New Hampshire primary, Zeifman also said:
My own reaction was of regret that, when I terminated her employment on the Nixon
impeachment staff, I had not reported her unethical practices to the appropriate bar
associations.
Wow. Damning words, if I’ve ever heard them.
I can’t say as I’ve ever heard of Jerry Zeifman, which makes me wonder exactly how hard he tried to tell his story during the 30+ years that have passed since the alleged incident occurred. Surely Rush Limbaugh, et al, would have picked at this story like buzzards swarming over still-twitching road kill during the last few torturous years of the first Clinton presidency.
Here’s a lengthy but interesting excerpt from Zeifman’s February article for Accuracy in Media:
Only a few far-left Democrats supported Hillary’s recommendations. A majority of the committee agreed to allow President Nixon to be represented by counsel and to hold hearings with live witnesses. Hillary then advocated that the official rules of the House be amended to deny members of the committee the right to question witnesses. This recommendation was voted down by the full House. The committee also rejected her proposal that we leave the drafting of the articles of impeachment to her and her fellow impeachment-inquiry staffers.
It was not until two months after Nixon’s resignation that I first learned of still another questionable role of Hillary. On Sept. 26, 1974, Rep. Charles Wiggins, a Republican member of the committee, wrote to ask Chairman Rodino to look into "a troubling set of events." That spring, Wiggins and other committee members had asked "that research should be undertaken so as to furnish a standard against which to test the alleged abusive conduct of Richard Nixon." And, while "no such staff study was made available to the members at any time for their use," Wiggins had just learned that such a study had been conducted-at committee expense-by a team of professors who completed and filed their reports with the impeachment-inquiry staff well in advance of our public hearings.
The report was kept secret from members of Congress. But after the impeachment-inquiry staff was disbanded, it was published commercially and sold in book stores. Wiggins wrote: "I am especially troubled by the possibility that information deemed essential by some of the members in their discharge of their responsibilities may have been intentionally suppressed by the staff during the course our investigation." He was also concerned that staff members may have unlawfully received royalties from the book’s publisher.
I still believe that Hillary Clinton would be a better president than Barack Obama if not for the baggage of her marriage to Bill Clinton and her own questionable past. However, both of these are huge negatives that have become increasingly hard to overlook, even in a person who is merely a fallback candidate for the presidency.
It’s ironic that Hillary’s bid for the White House would be tripped up because of her lies and manipulations during an election in which all she had to do in order to waltz triumphantly back into the Oval Office was to step up to the microphone and play it straight with the American people. But the Clintons outsmarted themselves by playing politics, triangulating public opinion, and constantly re-inventing Hillary, seemingly after every new poll. That mistake has probably cost Hillary the dream of her lifetime, the further irony of which is that she doesn’t seem to have deserved it anyway.