Clinton presidential documents show White House amid setbacks, scandals
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Version 0 of 1. White House aides raised questions about how to structure and describe then-first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton’s role in the 1993 attempt to overhaul the health-care system, including whether she would be considered a government employee and whether the group’s work could be kept secret, documents released Friday show. The lawyerly exchanges among aides in the Clinton White House include suggested talking points to back up the administration’s position that Hillary Clinton could head up a task force on health-care reform without triggering a federal open-meetings requirement. Scores of documents about the failed health-care effort were among about 10,000 pages of documents released Friday by the Clinton Presidential Library — the last batch in a series released over the past eight months. The trove of unclassified memos, correspondence, phone logs and other papers initially withheld by Clinton charts his administration’s responses to a series of scandals and setbacks. There is a communications plan for answering questions about the Whitewater affair and the suicide of deputy White House counsel Vince Foster, and discussions about Monica Lewinsky, the Kenneth Starr report on her dalliance with Clinton, the White House travel office debacle and more. There is also a one-line handwritten note from “BC” to “HRC” asking how one internal strategy discussion turned out. On health care, which was the new president’s signature first-year effort, the documents show initial qualms within the administration about Hillary Clinton’s role and the plan to do much of the initial work in secret. A Feb. 3, 1993, legal memo to Hillary Clinton offers several possible ways to structure her participation and notes potential pitfalls. Calling her a consultant, for example, could be seen as a “gimmick.” On Feb. 17, 1993, a few weeks after Bill Clinton had announced that his wife would lead the work to draft a new federal health-care mandate, a senior lawyer at the agency then known as the General Accounting Office wrote to White House counsel Bernard W. Nussbaum. Noting that the White House position was that the presence of Hillary Clinton on the panel did not constitute “outside influence” under a 1972 public disclosure law, lawyer Henry R. Wray asked for “further elaboration of your analysis.” If the White House position that the task force would not be covered under the Federal Advisory Committee Act was based on a finding that its membership was made up of federal employees, “on what basis does the first lady qualify under this exemption?” Wray asked. “Are there other reasons why you believe the task force is not subject to FACA? What are the Supreme Court cases on which you are relying, and how do they apply to your analysis of the status of the task force?” The makeup and operations of the task force quickly became the subject of a federal lawsuit, which the White House ultimately won years later. An initial procedural ruling could have slowed the task force or impeded its work, however, leading to an internal debate about whether to appeal. Appealing might open the White House to questions about why spokespeople had initially said they were unconcerned or even pleased with the initial decision. Proposed talking points would have had the press secretary explain it this way: “As we told you last week, the president was pleased with the district court’s decision because the court held that everything that has happened to date is legal . . . however our lawyers at the Justice Department felt strongly that the court had made substantial errors,” that could negatively affect future cases. The health-care effort fell apart in 1994. It remains the largest federal policy initiative closely associated with Hillary Clinton, a potential 2016 Democratic candidate for president. She has since said that the proposed overhaul was too large and too complicated and that the Clinton administration made mistakes. |