Hillary's Secrecy and The Latest Fusillade from the Obama Campaign

Obama campaign manager David Plouffe has emailed a letter to supporters going after Hillary Clinton for refusing to open the records of her days as First Lady. I don't have a link, but it reads in part:

This week's debate has received a lot of attention, but at least one major issue remains unresolved.

When asked several direct questions about the release of official records from her time in the White House, Senator Clinton gave a vague and dismissive answer.

These documents, according to Newsweek, include Senator Clinton's "appointment calendar as First Lady, her notes at strategy meetings, what advice she gave her husband and his advisers, what policy memos she wrote, even some key papers from her health-care task force."

It's time to turn the page on this kind of secrecy and restore trust in our government.

If Senator Clinton is going to run on her record, the American people deserve to see it.

Earlier, Factcheck.org looked at Clinton's assertion that this decision is, essentially, out of her hands, and found it to be "doubly misleading." But then again, there's my colleague Joe's argument:

She has every right to keep her private White House correspondence with Bill private, and should have said so. Or perhaps, "I'll lay out all my private correspondence if the rest of you will lay out yours. Fair's fair."

Joe makes a pretty good case here; if she doesn't want to release the documents, perhaps she should just say so. The more legalistic reasoning she offers is reminiscent of the argument that went on in the White House in November, 1993, culminating in her decision not to release the Whitewater documents in response to a query from the Washington Post. If you read what Clinton wrote in her memoir (page 200-201 of my hardcover edition), you get a sense of how she thinks about these things:

David Kendall, Bernie Nussbaum and Bruce Lindsey, all lawyers, argued that releasing documents to the press was a "slippery slope." Since the record was still partial and might never be complete, we didn't know the answers to lots of questions about McDougal and his business dealings. The press would not be satisfied, always thinking we were holding something back when we didn't have anything left to tell them. As a lawyer, I tended to agree with this view. Bill didn't pay much attention to the issue, since he knew he hadn't done anything as Governor to favor McDougal, and besides, we had lost money. Consumed with the demands of the Presidency, he told me to decide with David how to handle our response.

She told Kendall to voluntarily provide the documents to government investigators and cooperate with a grand jury investigation.:

I did not believe--wrongly, it turned out--that the media would continue to blast us because we hadn't turned over the same documents to them, so long as we had provided them to the Department of Justice.

That expecatation about the media's response may not have been her only--or her most damaging--miscalculation. I was covering the White House in the later years of the Clinton term. Many officials there would argue privately that had she turned over the documents to public scrutiny, there may never have been a call for an Independent Counsel; in other words, there would have been no Ken Starr, and ultimately, no impeachment. Is this alternate history correct? There's really no way of knowing. But these are exactly the kinds of decisions that can come back and haunt a politician in ways she cannot anticipate.

UPDATE: From our friends over at The Page comes this memo from Clinton lawyer Bruce Lindsey laying out their position on the records, and correcting what they insist are misimpressions about them. Also, great video of Clinton's husband defending her on the issue, in his classic finger-pointing style.