The Hillary Paper Chase: 3,022,030 Documents To Go
During last week's Democratic presidential debate, Hillary Clinton faced tough questions about why so many of her papers at her husband's presidential library in Little Rock, Ark., are still secret—and her answers have only invited more questions. Clinton said during the debate that one chunk of records, from her days heading up her husband's health-care task force, had been released. "Now, all of the records, as far as I know, about what we did with health care, those are already available," she said. But National Archives documents obtained by NEWSWEEK and interviews with Archives officials indicate that the vast majority of the Clintons' health-care task-force records are still under lock and key in Little Rock—and might stay that way for some time.
In a letter last year responding to a Freedom of Information Act request by the conservative group Judicial Watch, Melissa Walker, supervisory archivist of the Clinton Presidential Library, wrote that archivists had identified 3,022,030 still-unreleased health-care documents, along with 2,884 e-mails and 1,021 photos covered by the group's request. Archives officials at the Clinton library have yet to process the Judicial Watch request or release the several million pages of task-force documents, including many key internal memos written by Mrs. Clinton and her advisers about how to restructure the health-care industry. This prompted the group to file a new lawsuit last week demanding their immediate disclosure. "This doesn't pass the giggle test," said Christopher Farrell, the group's research director, about Clinton's statement that "all" of her health-care records had been released.
The Clinton White House publicly released 13,400 pages of documents regarding Hillary's related health-care "working group" to resolve a 1994 lawsuit. And Clinton campaign spokes-man Jay Carson says that as many as half a million health-care papers have now been disclosed, but he acknowledges that many others have yet to be cleared. "There are undoubtedly other documents related to health care in the hundred million pages" of unreleased records at the library, Carson said, but he added that Clinton's hands were tied because understaffed Archives officials had to review each and every FOIA request—and handle all of them in order. "We don't control their process," he said. "We're not holding anything up."
At the debate, Mrs. Clinton rejected the idea that she could accelerate the process by encouraging her husband to lift restrictions he has placed on confidential communications with his wife on policy matters. "Well, that's not my decision to make," she said. In 1994, according to another National Archives document obtained by NEWSWEEK, President Clinton formally designated both his wife and his close adviser Bruce Lindsey as co-representatives for control of his papers in the event of his death or disability. Lindsey now reviews all White House papers at the library before they are cleared for release; Hillary, Carson says, "has never been involved in the clearing process. Bruce is the designee." But that has not stopped Clinton's principal rival, Sen. Barack Obama, from hitting the issue hard. In an interview with NEWSWEEK, he called Clinton's responses on the records issue "disingenuous." "She can release these papers," Obama said. "She can get them released soon." Carson shot back that Obama "has formally abandoned the politics of hope and is running a negative campaign."
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Michael Isikoff has been an award-winning investigative correspondent for Newsweek since 2004. He has written extensively on the U.S. government's war on terrorism, the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, presidential politics and other national issues. His book, "Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War," co-written with David Corn, was an instant New York Times best-seller when it was published in September, 2006. The book was hailed by the New York Times Book Review as "fascinating reading" and "the most comprehensive account of the White House's political machinations" in the run up to the war in Iraq. Since January 2009, Isikoff has been an MSNBC contributor, making regular appearances on the Rachel Maddow Show and Hardball w/ Chris Matthews.
Ever since the events of September 11, Isikoff has broken repeated stories about the U.S. government's war on terror and won numerous journalism awards. His blog "DeClassified: Investigative Reporting in Real Time," which appears regularly on Newsweek's Web site and is written with MarkHosenball, has become a must-read for senior U.S. intelligence officials. Isikoff and Hosenball won the 2005 award from the Society of Professional Journalists for best investigative reporting online.
Isikoff's June 2002 Newsweek cover story on U.S. intelligence failures that preceded the 9-11 terror attacks, along with a series of related articles, was honored with the Investigative Reporters and Editors top prize for investigative reporting in magazine journalism. He was honored, along with a team of Newsweek reporters, by the Society of Professional Journalists for coverage of the Abu Ghraib scandal. For that coverage, Isikoff obtained exclusive internal White House, Justice Department and State Department memos showing how decisions made at the highest levels of the Bush administration led to abuses in the interrogation of terror suspects. Isikoff was also part of a reporting team that earned Newsweek the National Magazine Award for General Excellence in 2002, the highest award in magazine journalism, for their coverage of the aftermath of the September 11 terror attacks.
Isikoff's exclusive reporting on the Monica Lewinsky scandal gained him national attention in 1998, including profiles in The New York Times and The Washington Post and a guest appearance on "Late Show with David Letterman." His coverage of the events that lead to President Bill Clinton's impeachment earned Newsweek the prestigious National Magazine Award in the Reporting category in 1999. Isikoff's reporting also won the National Headliner Award, the Edgar A. Poe Award presented by the White House Correspondents Association and the Gerald R. Ford Journalism Prize for Reporting on the Presidency. In 2001, Isikoff was named on a list of "most influential journalists" in the nation's capital by Washingtonian magazine.
Isikoff is the author of "Uncovering Clinton: A Reporter's Story," a book that chronicled his own reporting of the Lewinsky story and was hailed by a critic for The Washington Post-Los Angeles Times news service as "the absolutely essential narrative of the scandal with revelations that no one would have thought possible." The book, also a New York Times bestseller, was named Best Non-Fiction Book of 1999 by the Book of the Month Club.
Isikoff came to Newsweek from The Washington Post, where he had been a reporter since September 1981. There he covered the Justice Department and the Persian Gulf War, reported on international drug operations in Latin America and worked on the Post's financial news desk. Isikoff graduated from Washington University with a B.A. in 1974 and received a Masters in Journalism from Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism in 1976.
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