http://www.northstarwriters.com/dc163.htm
As Hillary Clinton came under increasing scrutiny for her story about
facing
sniper fire in
Bosnia, one question that arose was whether she has engaged in a pattern
of
lying.
The now-retired general counsel and chief of staff of the House Judiciary
Committee, who
supervised Hillary when she worked on the Watergate investigation, says
Hillary’s history of lies
and unethical behavior goes back farther – and goes much deeper – than
anyone realizes.
Jerry Zeifman, a lifelong Democrat, supervised the work of 27-year-old
Hillary Rodham on the
committee. Hillary got a job working on the investigation at the behest of
her former law
professor, Burke Marshall, who was also Sen. Ted Kennedy’s chief counsel
in
the Chappaquiddick
affair. 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.
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.”
How could a 27-year-old House staff member do all that? She couldn’t do it
by herself, but
Zeifman said she was one of several individuals – including 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.
Why would they want to do that? Because, according to Zeifman, they feared
putting Watergate
break-in mastermind E. Howard Hunt on the stand to be cross-examined by
counsel to the president.
Hunt, Zeifman said, had the goods on nefarious activities in the Kennedy
Administration that
would have made Watergate look like a day at the beach – including
Kennedy’s
pur****ted complicity
in the attempted assassination of Fidel Castro.
The actions of Hillary and her cohorts went directly against the judgment
of
top Democrats, up to
and including then-House Majority Leader Tip O’Neill, 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 do***ents 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.
“As soon as the impeachment resolutions were introduced by (then-House
Minority Leader Gerald)
Ford, and they were referred to the House Judiciary Committee, the first
thing Douglas did was
hire himself a lawyer,” Zeifman said.
The Judiciary Committee allowed Douglas to keep counsel, thus establi****ng
the precedent. Zeifman
says he told Hillary that all the do***ents establi****ng 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.
Zeifman says that if Hillary, Marshall, Nussbaum and Doar had succeeded,
members of the House
Judiciary Committee would have also been denied the right to cross-examine
witnesses, and denied
the op****tunity to even participate in the drafting of articles of
impeachment against Nixon.
Of course, Nixon’s resignation rendered the entire issue moot, ending
Hillary’s career on the
Judiciary Committee staff in a most undistinguished manner. 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 – long before the Bosnia lie, and indeed, even before
cattle futures,
Travelgate and Whitewater – for the woman who is still asking us to make
her
president of the
United States.
|
