(Exclusive to Accuracy in Media)

I have just seen Hillary Clinton
and her former Yale law professor both in tears at a campaign rally
here in my home state of Connecticut. Her tearful professor said how
proud he was that his former student was likely to become our next President. 
Hillary responded in tears.

My own reaction
was of regret that, when I terminated her employment on the Nixon impeachment
staff, I had not reported her unethical practices to the appropriate
bar associations.

Hillary
as I knew her in 1974

At the time
of Watergate I had overall supervisory authority over the House Judiciary
Committee’s Impeachment Inquiry staff that included Hillary Rodham-who
was later to become First Lady in the Clinton White House.  

During that
period I kept a private diary of the behind the scenes congressional
activities. My original tape recordings of the diary and other materials
related to the Nixon impeachment provided the basis for my prior book Without Honor and are now available for inspection in
the George Washington University
Library.

After President
Nixon’s resignation a young lawyer, who shared an office with Hillary,
confided in me that he was dismayed by her erroneous legal opinions
and efforts to deny Nixon representation by counsel-as well as an unwillingness to investigate
Nixon. In my diary of August 12, 1974 I noted the following:

John Labovitz apologized to me for the fact that months ago he and Hillary
had lied to me [to conceal rules changes and dilatory tactics.]
Labovitz said, “That came from Yale.” I said, “You mean Burke
Marshall [Senator Ted Kennedy's chief political strategist, with whom
Hillary regularly consulted in violation of House rules.] Labovitz said,
“Yes.” His apology was significant to me, not because it was a revelation
but because of his contrition.

At that time
Hillary Rodham was 27 years old. She had obtained a position on our
committee staff through the political patronage of her former Yale law
school professor Burke Marshall and Senator Ted Kennedy. Eventually,
because of a number of her unethical practices I decided that I could
not recommend her for any subsequent position of public or private trust.

Her patron,
Burke Marshal, had previously been Assistant Attorney General for Civil
Rights under Robert Kennedy. During the Kennedy administration Washington
insiders jokingly characterized him as the Chief
counsel to the Irish Mafia.
After becoming a Yale professor he also became Senator Ted Kennedy’s
lawyer at the time of Chappaquidick-as well as Kennedy’s chief political
strategist. As a result, some of his colleagues often described him
as the Attorney General
in waiting of the Camelot government in exile.
   
In addition
to getting Hillary a job on the Nixon impeachment inquiry staff, Kennedy
and Marshall had also persuaded Rodino to  place two other close
friends of Marshall in top positions on our staff. One was John Doar;
who had been Marshall’s deputy in the Justice Department-whom
Rodino appointed to head the impeachment inquiry staff. The other was
Bernard Nussbaum, who had served as Assistant U.S. Attorney in New York-who
was placed in charge of conducting the actual investigation of Nixon’s
malfeasance.           

Marshall, Doar,
Nussbaum, and Rodham had two hidden objectives regarding the conduct
of the impeachment proceedings. First, in order to enhance the prospect
of Senator Kennedy or another liberal Democrat being elected president
in 1976 they hoped to keep Nixon in office “twisting in the wind”
for as long as possible. This would prevent then-Vice President Jerry
Ford from becoming President and restoring moral authority to the Republican
Party.  

As was later
quoted in the biography of Tip
O’Neill (by John
Farrell), a liberal Democrat would have become a “shoe in for the
presidency in 1976″ if Nixon had been kept in office until the end
of his term. However, both Tip O’Neill and I-as well as most Democrats-regarded
it to be in the national interest to replace Nixon with Ford as soon
as possible. As a result, as described by O’Neill, we coordinated
our efforts to “keep Rodino’s feet to the fire.” 

A second objective
of the strategy of delay was to avoid a Senate  impeachment trial,
in which as a defense Nixon might assert that  Kennedy had authorized
far worse abuses of power than Nixon’s effort to “cover up” the
Watergate burglary (which Nixon had not authorized or known about in
advance). In short, the crimes of Kennedy included the use of the Mafia
to attempt to assassinate Castro, as well as the successful assassinations
of Diem in Vietnam and Lumumba in the Congo.  

After hiring
Hillary, Doar assigned her to confer with me regarding rules of procedure
for the impeachment inquiry. At my first meeting with her I told her
that Judiciary Committee Chairman Peter Rodino, House Speaker Carl Albert,
Majority Leader Tip O’Neill, Parliamentarian Lou Deschler and I had
previously all agreed that we should rely only on the then existing
House Rules, and not advocate any changes. I also quoted Tip
O’Neill’s statement that: “To try to change the rules now would
be politically divisive. It would be like trying to change the traditional
rules of baseball before a World Series.” 

Hillary assured
me that she had not drafted, and would not advocate, any such rules
changes. However, as documented in my personal diary, I soon learned
that she had lied. She had already drafted changes, and continued to
advocate  them. In one written legal memorandum, she advocated
denying President Nixon representation by counsel. In so doing she simply
ignored the fact that in the committee’s then-most-recent prior impeachment
proceeding, the committee had afforded the right to counsel to Supreme
Court Justice William O. Douglas.        

I had also
informed Hillary that the Douglas impeachment files were available for
public inspection in the committee offices. She later removed the Douglas
files without my permission and carried them to the offices of the impeachment
inquiry staff-where they were no longer accessible
to the public.  

Hillary had
also made other ethically flawed procedural recommendations, arguing
that the Judiciary Committee should:  not hold any hearings with-or
take depositions of-any live witnesses; not conduct any
original investigation of Watergate, bribery, tax evasion, or any other
possible impeachable offense of President Nixon; and should rely solely
on documentary evidence compiled by other committees and by the Justice
Department’s special Watergate prosecutor.  

Only a few
far-left Democrats supported Hillary’s recommendations. A majority
of the committee agreed to allow President Nixon to be represented by
counsel and to hold hearings with live witnesses. Hillary then advocated
that the official rules of the House be amended to deny members of the
committee the right to question witnesses. This recommendation was voted
down by the full House. The committee also rejected her proposal that
we leave the drafting of the articles of impeachment to her and her
fellow impeachment-inquiry staffers. 

It was not
until two months after Nixon’s resignation that I first learned of
still another questionable role of Hillary. On Sept. 26, 1974, Rep.
Charles Wiggins, a Republican member of the committee, wrote to ask
Chairman Rodino to look into “a troubling set of events.” That spring,
Wiggins and other committee members had asked “that research should
be undertaken so as to furnish a standard against which to test the
alleged abusive conduct of Richard Nixon.” And, while “no such staff
study was made available to the members at any time for their use,”
Wiggins had just learned that such a study had been conducted-at
committee expense-by a team of professors who completed
and filed their reports with the impeachment-inquiry staff well in advance
of our public hearings.                                                                                    

The report
was kept secret from members of Congress. But after the impeachment-inquiry
staff was disbanded, it was published commercially and sold in book
stores. Wiggins wrote: “I am especially troubled by the possibility
that information deemed essential by some of the members in their discharge
of their responsibilities may have been intentionally suppressed by
the staff during the course our investigation.” He was also concerned
that staff members may have unlawfully received royalties from the book’s
publisher.                                                                      

On Oct. 3,
Rodino wrote back: “Hillary Rodham of the impeachment-inquiry staff
coordinated the work. The staff did not think the manuscript was useful
in its present form.” No effort was ever made to ascertain whether
or not Hillary or any other person on the committee staff received royalties. 

Two
decades later Bill Clinton became President. As was later to be 
described in the Wall Street Journal by Henry Ruth-the lead Watergate courtroom prosecutor-”The
Clintons corrupted the soul of the Democratic Party.” 

Share This

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

About the author

8 Comments for Hillary’s Crocodile Tears in Connecticut