Dan Calabrese has a blockbuster column on Hillary Clinton’s unethical behavior while serving on the legal staff of the House Judiciary Committee during the Watergate hearings. (Via Hot Air.) There’s a lot of material here, but here’s the juiciest thread:
Jerry Zeifman, a lifelong Democrat, supervised the work of 27-year-old Hillary Rodham on the committee. . . 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. . .
She was one of several individuals – including [Burke] 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 investigation.
The actions of Hillary and her cohorts went directly against the judgment of top Democrats . . . 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. . .
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.
(Emphasis mine.) The credibility of Zeifman’s charges are bolstered (if Clinton’s subsequent behavior weren’t enough) by his contemporaneous notes of the affair:
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.
This revelation won’t change the coveted Internet Scofflaw endorsement. Here at Internet Scofflaw we aren’t under any illusions regarding Hillary Clinton’s character, but we still see her as the lesser of two evils.
Internet Scofflaw 