Hillary Clinton’s desire to keep documents that could incriminate her out of the public eye is nothing new and she explained why she never even writes anything down to PBS “News Hour” host Jim Lehrer in a 1996 interview.
Clinton is currently under scrutiny for using a private e-mail address for government business from a personal server during her time as secretary of state in the Obama administration.
Lehrer asked her, “Are you keeping a diary, you keep good notes of what’s happening?”
Clinton responded, “Heavens no! It could get subpoenaed! I don’t write anything down.”
Clinton and her husband’s lack of keeping documentation goes back to the scandals involving the Clinton White House’s mishandling of FBI files of GOP members of Congress. Clinton never divulged who hired Craig Livingstone, the man who mysteriously ended up collecting all the files.
Copies of legal billing documents from Clinton’s law office related to the infamous Whitewater land deal turned up two years after federal investigators issued subpoenas for them. The originals went missing immediately before her husband took office at the White House.
As a Yale Law School graduate in 1974, Clinton was a staffer on the committee that investigated whether there was enough evidence to impeach President Richard Nixon. Her boss was Jerry Zeifman, general counsel and chief of staff to the Watergate Committee. Zeifman says his young staffer tried to devise a way to deny Nixon legal counsel. Additionally, he said she hid public documents to obscure her behavior.
Zeifer later claimed he regretted that he had not reported the “unethical practices” of Clinton’s “to the appropriate bar associations. Nixon clearly had right to counsel, but Hillary… wrote a fraudulent legal brief and confiscated public documents to hide her deception.”