The Clintons’ Records
So it turns out that — in the middle of a desperate primary battle — the Clintons are withholding from the public documents from the William Jefferson Clinton presidential library. This was denied back in December, when our roving national correspondent, Josh Gerstein, reported that about 2,600 pages of documents were being withheld at Mr. Clinton’s direction, despite assurances from the former president’s office that he “has not blocked the release of a single document from his library.” That story was met by derision from the Clinton camp, which claimed that the article contained unspecified errors and misstated how the process of releasing presidential records worked.
The essential accuracy of Mr. Gerstein’s dispatch was borne out over the weekend when USA Today reported that the National Archives was withholding all or some of pages of pardon-related records the newspaper requested under the Freedom of Information. USA Today said about 300 of those pages consisted of internal White House documents. The paper did not indicate what portion of the documents were withheld for national security or privacy reasons, which Mr. Clinton has no role in assessing, and what portion were withheld as confidential advice, a designation which Mr. Clinton can waive or assert at will.
The news in the USA Today report is that the pardon-related records were made available to Mr. Clinton’s representative, Bruce Lindsey, and that he declined to review them, according to the library’s deputy director, Emily Robison. The Clinton camp has maintained that a letter Mr. Clinton wrote to the archives in 2002 would not cause automatic withholding of documents, but rather the referral of those documents to Mr. Lindsey. So it’s another debate on what the meaning of “is” is.
Complicating the issue further are statements from the National Archives on Friday that it may have interpreted Mr. Clinton’s 2002 letter and an earlier version in 1994 too conservatively.[…]
Read it all. The Billaries are evil, at the very least.