ABC Digs Deep

“Hillary Was in White House on ‘Stained Blue Dress’ Day

Schedules Reviewed by ABC Show Hillary May Have Been in the White House When the Fateful Act Was Committed”

Team Coverage!

The Hilary Clinton papers are loosed upon an expectant world, and Brian Ross and the ABC Investigative Team have done democracy’s work, cross checking the First Lady’s schedules with the Ken Starr oral sex tick-tock ,with explosive results.

Jeepers, Peeper

Meanwhile, a desperate plea for the silent legions of citizen journalists to paw through the papers for the august New York Times [“Like many others, we are poring over the pages today to see what’s in there. We invite you to take a look, too, and let us know what you find”].

The Times did come up with some of what we don’t learn from the document dump:

“The documents offer no support for her claims, made during the presidential campaign, that she helped to negotiate the Irish peace accords or facilitated the flow of refugees in the Balkans. Neither is there evidence in them to back up her claim that she helped pass the Family and Medical Leave Act, the first legislation Mr. Clinton signed as president. The legislation, sponsored by Senator Christopher J. Dodd, Democrat of Connecticut, sailed through Congress and landed on Mr. Clinton’s desk 10 days after he was inaugurated. Indeed, on the day Mr. Clinton signed the bill into law, Feb. 5, 1993, there is no indication on that day’s calendar that she attended…The documents offer no insight into her role in appointments to key administration posts or in courting donors for her or her husband’s political campaigns…And they do not add to an understanding of how she coped with revelations in 1998 of her husband’s sexual betrayal with a young White House worker, or provide a paper trail of the discussions that led to her declaring her candidacy for the Senate in 1999.”

The Dallas Morning News‘ answer: Go Local!

“Cutting to the chase, the quest for interesting, Texas-related nuggets would be incredibly tedious and time-consuming. So, maybe there are some readers with a lot of patience for squinting who would care to take a peak and share their findings.”

Make of It What You Will!

The long awaited, eagerly anticipated, epic event of our time has arrived.

Some of the endlessly gassed about Hillary Clinton papers will be unveiled at last before the eyes of an eager and expectant world, yielding up such secrets as they contain.

I have no idea whats there, and neither do most of us, but i predict two lines of easy blather:

– angry huffing that this is not enough [I’m looking at you, Judicial Watch]

– content free “analysis” seizing upon the odd fact to demonstrate ready-made theories [see above]

One Man, Our Vote

Greg Grandlin offers a roundup of one interested party’s role in the last twelve presidential elections, and perhaps on his last one.

“Fidel Castro, the First Superdelegate” clocks el Lider Maximo’s walk-ons and cameos over five decades.

Vote Early & Vote Often

BFF!

In the tradition of his predecessors, George W. Bush has proudly affirmed he’ll take overseas money for his Presidential Library, and makes no promises he’ll disclose any of it. Bush spoke to a news conference last week.

Q Any restrictions on who can give? Will you take foreign money for this?

THE PRESIDENT: Yes, I’ll probably take some foreign money, but don’t know yet, Ken. We just haven’t — we just announced the deal and I, frankly, have been focused elsewhere, like on gasoline prices and, you know, my trip to Africa, and haven’t seen the fundraising strategy yet. So the answer to your question, really, I can’t answer your question well.

Q Where does the people’s right to know this fit into all that?

THE PRESIDENT: We’re weighing, taking a look, taking consideration, giving it a serious consideration. Nice try, though.

Party Time Out

The Republican National Committee has long joined in the fun beating up the Clintons over access to Clinton Administration papers. But you don’t need to hide what you don’t have, and they’re doing their part to bury Bush Administration emails generated by White House staff.

A subset of the wider lost email issue, some 80 White House staff used RNC email accounts for both political and government business. The RNC did nothing to preserve the government records, purging files after 30 days.

And now they say they won’t bother to find the lost records.

“The process of recovering missing e-mails from RNC servers and \ilhite House
back-up tapes has not begun. Beginning in April 2007, the Archives urged the White
House to start recovering missing White House e-mails stored on back-up tapes
maintained by the Republican National Committee (RNC) and the White House. In his
May 1, 2007,letter, the Archivist advised Mr. Fielding that such ‘oa ‘restoration’ project
can easily take more than one year to complete.” Despite repeated requests from the
Archives, these efforts have not yet begun. Moreover, the RNC has informed the
Committee that it has no intention of trying to restore missing White House e-mails.”