Bill says back off
The fine details escape me and most Americans, but Bill Clinton does have a point when he denounces press and rival campaign accusations that he and the Mrs. are withholding papers.
As he says, and is true, he has released more and faster than his predecessors . And the mechanics of this are convoluted even if all parties pulled as one.
For example, Judicial Watch has gotten endless press over it’s requests for Clinton papers and dark mutterings that the Clinton fix is in. Turns out the Associated Press discovered that the Archives hasn’t even processed Judicial Watch’s request yet. Clinton’s minions have yet to touch it.
The fine details of Clinton’s Archives letter matter, and I doubt he wants to help his enemies, but on the broader front he is correct and his critics ignore the history of the law and past Presidential Libraries.
Say he let it rip as the Washington Post recently proposed, releasing everything without review. And in this mythical world President Bush quickly signed off on everything, and the National Archives had staff to shovel it all through. Let’s write the headlines:
“Let’s Do Lani Guinier’s Taxes!”
“Publicly Close, Clinton wrote Infrequently to Mother”
“They Believed In Bill, Now Failed Clinton Nominees Privacy Exposed”
It’s an issue, and a headache for Candidate Clinton, but the pretense that there is a snappy solution to this is getting tiresome.
I
Howdy!
The Washington Post “Fact Checker” weighs in on the Clinton’s papers, and comes up with a simple pointless solution that will never see the light of day.
She says she’s for disclosure, he blamed the Bush White House, the Archives says President Clinton’s representatives have a blanket list of topics they don’t want out till they see the papers first. A Bush Executive Order gave this power to ex president’s and their children after them just as Reagan era papers were about to surface. 
With the sitting president getting yet another whack at preventing disclosure afterwards.
The Post says Clinton should let it all hang out:
‘There is, however, nothing in Executive Order 13233 that obliges a former president, or his representative, to go through the records one by one. If former President Clinton is so opposed to the Bush administration order, he could simply instruct Lindsey to approve the documents wholesale.”
Brilliant. Perhaps the Clinton’s have wandered into a trap Bush devised, perhaps their intentions are impure. But as is often said in political money arguments, why should they unilaterally disarm? We’ve decades to go before we’ll see the Reagan and Bush 1 documents in full.
Absent a real law not twisted into it’s reverse by crackpot Executive Orders our knowledge of past administrations will be based more on contemporary leaks and fatuous memoirs.
Every jot and tickle of drama surrounding access to Hillary Clinton’s papers gets extensive play in right wing blogs, generally along the lines of “I wonder what she’s hiding” or “Hmmm.”
We can now watch with interest the reaction to the Chicago Tribune’s blow by blow of the ever changing status of Rudy Giuliani’s papers.
After his failed attempt to extend his term in mayor’s office by three months, Rudy’s thoughts apparently turned to History.
As his mayoralty entered it’s final days, the Giuliani appointed Records Department Commissioner signed an agreement transferring his administration’s papers to the Rudolph Giuliani Center for Urban Affairs. The Commissioner says he agreed to give away the papers because the municipal archives’ staff had been halved under Giuliaini:
“We went from 92 people in ’93 to 44 in 2001…That’s the largest percentage drop of any city department. The archives were overstressed.”
The agreement gave Giuliani veto over releasing papers: “”whenever Rudolph W. Giuliani has a personal interest or right in a document separate and apart from the interests and rights of the city, his approval shall be required before any such document may be released or disclosed by the center to the public.”
Protests , lawsuits, and City Council legislation turned this back, with Rudy eventually dropping the language and returning the papers. Or so he says.
The city’s records chief says he thinks he got them all, but “I couldn’t testify in court that every paper came back.” And New York historian Michael Wallace told the Tribune “There should always be an asterisk next to any citation of the Giuliani papers, saying … ‘The chain of public custody of these documents was broken…He had to be sued repeatedly to get him to disclose even the most inoffensive material …Somebody with that kind of track record, you don’t want to turn over to him the task of archiving his papers.”
At the time the agreement was signed the Rudy center was but a gleam in the incorporating attorney’s eyes. Even today it’s only existence is as files at Rudy’s corporate offices.
DeFrank Talk
Reaction to Tom DeFrank’s Gerald Ford tell-all “Write It When I’m Gone” shows an interesting split.
When Ford reinforces conventional wisdom it’s shouted from the rafters:
Rudy: strong. Bill: can’t keep it in his pants.Hillary: pushy dame.
But when Ford speaks ill of the dead turned plaster saint, not so much:
“A superficial, disengaged, intellectually-lazy showman who didn’t do his homework and clung to a naive, unrealistic, and essentially dangerous worldview. Foreign leaders have said they were appalled by Reagan’s lack of knowledge of the issues.”
How can they miss him when he won’t go away?
McClatchy Newspapers’ William Douglas reports on the Bush countdown clock industry, all manner of paraphernalia celebrating the eventual passage of time and power. No actual stats to stack up to the Hillary Hatin’ merchandise, but the Bush clocks are “hot.”
