A scuttling?

This column by Dan Calabrese on the conduct of Hillary Rodham Clinton (then Hillary Rodham) as a staff member of the House Judiciary Committee during the Watergate hearings is now making the rounds in the blogosphere:

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 purported complicity in the attempted assassination of Fidel Castro.

Why would the complicity of US president in an attempted assassination of Fidel Castro be a bad thing? Heck, anyone who tried that would be more likely to get my vote. Come to think of it, we should probably be trying to assassinate Fidel Castro today. Sure, he might already be dead, but if he is just dig him up and shoot him. It's just the principle of the thing. But I digress ...

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 documents 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 establishing the precedent. Zeifman says he told Hillary that all the documents establishing 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.

Hiding files of public interest in areas inaccessible to the public and then denying their existence? Why does that ring a bell with me ...?

Anyway, I can't say I'm quite clear as to why this story is appearing now. The allegations were apparently originally published in 1999. I did not see that article until researching this piece, but I did see a post in Classical Values that ran this past January. It did not get a fraction of the attention Calabrese's column is now, even though it is the same story. I found the Classical Values post so explosive that I forwarded it to my political friends, though I never blogged on it myself (as you might recall, I had more pressing matters to attend to). I thought it likely someone would pick up on the Classical Values piece. Zeifman himself penned a column on the matter for Townhall on February 5, 2008. I can't say I know why no one did or why Calabrese's column is generating the waves that Classical Values and Townhall did not, but I have always shared Ann Althouse's curiosity as to why Hillary never talked about her experience in the Watergate investigation.

Leaving that aside for now, the reaction?

Captain Ed:

If all she did was to propose that as a tactic, that would not make it terribly concerning — but she did much more than just spitball ideas. When informed that public evidence showed a precedent for the right to counsel, she absconded with the files to eliminate the evidence. Does that remind anyone of later incidents in the Clinton narrative, such as the billing records for the Rose Law offices and the 900+ raw FBI files on political opponents of the Clintons?

Hillary’s advocates could accuse Zeifman of conjuring up these stories in order to draw attention to himself in the middle of a presidential campaign. However, Calabrese reports that Zeifman kept diaries during this period, urged on by friends mindful of the historical nature of the Watergate investigation. No one would have known at the time that this 27-year-old barracuda would have any sort of national significance — which makes Zeifman’s testimony all the more compelling.

I thought that rang a bell.

Wizbang:

Is there anyone who is surprised by this?

Anyone at all?

No?

Me either.

Michelle Malkin:

As if…

…you needed…

…any more evidence…

Power Line:

The allegations are explosive, and they come from the one person in the best position to know that they are true, Hillary's then-boss.

The longer the Democratic primary process goes on, the harder it is to decide which Democratic candidate would be the bigger catastrophe as President.

Remember that Power Line called Barack Obama "uniquely unfit to be President, or, for that matter, to serve in the Senate" as a result of Obama's apparent extreme racism. Hillary's recent spate of misstatements, centered on her allegedly being under sniper fire in Tuzla, has made her a national joke. A political contact of mine said this particular incident destroyed his generally view of Hillary because, though all politicians lie, this was a particularly stupid lie that was easily debunked. Conservatives will point out, however, that they have been warning the world of this part of Hillary's character for years, with all the effect of Cassandra warning Agamemnon. Come to think of it, with all the results as well.

As such, the Democrat primary seems to be devolving into "Hillary the Liar versus Obama the Racist."

But the timing of the story does bother me. Like I said earlier, why is this making waves now, when this story was revealed in 1999 and even earlier this year? Ace wonders as well:

Interesting that this Democrat lawyer sat on this until Hillary threatened to sink a more liberal presidential candidate. Correction: Alex informs me he didn't sit on this; he told David Brock about it for his book on Hillary, way back when Brock was a "conservative." (An Andrew Sullivan conservative.) So a long time ago, in other words.

The correction aside, the theory is valid. Why is this coming out now? Are we being played?

Is someone trying to scuttle a badly-damaged Hillary campaign, Hiryu-style, to free Obama of the continuing damage caused by Hillary?