Hillary Clinton Fired From Watergate Investigation For ‘Lying, Unethical Behavior’

http://patdollard.com/2013/05/flashback-hillary-clinton-fired-from-watergate-investigation-for-lying-unethical-behavior-conspiracy-to-violate-the-constitution/

Hillary Clinton might have a pretty hefty scandal brewing. 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. "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." George Santayana It may help you to remember this bit of history regarding Hillary Rodham Clinton.... Watergate-era Judiciary chief of staff: Hillary Clinton fired for lies, unethical behavior January 23rd, 2013 http://www.eohistory.info/2013/hillaryHistory.htm By DAN CALABRESE - Bet you didn't know this.

I've decided to reprint a piece of work I did nearly five years ago, because it seems very relevant today given Hillary Clinton's performance in the Benghazi hearings. Back in 2008 when she was running for president, I interviewed two erstwhile staff members of the House Judiciary Committee who were involved with the Watergate investigation when Hillary was a low-level staffer there. I interviewed one Democrat staffer and one Republican staffer, and wrote two pieces based on what they told me about Hillary's conduct at the time.

I published these pieces back in 2008 for North Star Writers Group, the syndicate I ran at the time. This was the most widely read piece we ever had at NSWG, but because NSWG never gained the high-profile status of the major syndicates, this piece still didn't reach as many people as I thought it deserved to. Today, given the much broader reach of CainTV and yet another incidence of Hillary's arrogance in dealing with a congressional committee, I think it deserves another airing. For the purposes of simplicity, I've combined the two pieces into one very long one. If you're interested in understanding the true character of Hillary Clinton, it's worth your time to read it.

As Hillary Clinton came under increasing scrutiny for her story about facing sniper fire in Bosnia, one question that arose was whether she has engaged in a pattern of lying.

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.

“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.

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.

Zeifman says that if Hillary, Marshall, Nussbaum and Doar had succeeded, members of the House Judiciary Committee would have also been denied the right to cross-examine witnesses, and denied the opportunity to even participate in the drafting of articles of impeachment against Nixon.

Of course, Nixon’s resignation rendered the entire issue moot, ending Hillary’s career on the Judiciary Committee staff in a most undistinguished manner. Zeifman says he was urged by top committee members to keep a diary of everything that was happening. He did so, and still has the diary if anyone wants to check the veracity of his story. Certainly, he could not have known in 1974 that diary entries about a young lawyer named Hillary Rodham would be of interest to anyone 34 years later.

But they show that the pattern of lies, deceit, fabrications and unethical behavior was established long ago – long before the Bosnia lie, and indeed, even before cattle futures, Travelgate and Whitewater – for the woman who is still asking us to make her president of the United States.

Franklin Polk, who served at the time as chief Republican counsel on the committee, confirmed many of these details in two interviews he granted me this past Friday, although his analysis of events is not always identical to Zeifman’s. Polk specifically confirmed that Hillary wrote the memo in question, and confirmed that Hillary ignored the Douglas case. (He said he couldn’t confirm or dispel the part about Hillary taking the Douglas files.)

To Polk, Hillary’s memo was dishonest in the sense that she tried to pretend the Douglas precedent didn’t exist. But unlike Zeifman, Polk considered the memo dishonest in a way that was more stupid than sinister.

“Hillary should have mentioned that (the Douglas case), and then tried to argue whether that was a change of policy or not instead of just ignoring it and taking the precedent out of the opinion,” Polk said.

Polk recalled that the attempt to deny counsel to Nixon upset a great many members of the committee, including just about all the Republicans, but many Democrats as well.

“The argument sort of broke like a firestorm on the committee, and I remember Congressman Don Edwards was very upset,” Polk said. “He was the chairman of the subcommittee on constitutional rights. But in truth, the impeachment precedents are not clear. Let’s put it this way. In the old days, from the beginning of the country through the 1800s and early 1900s, there were precedents that the target or accused did not have the right to counsel.”

That’s why Polk believes Hillary’s approach in writing the memorandum was foolish. He says she could have argued that the Douglas case was an isolated example, and that other historical precedents could apply.

But Zeifman says the memo and removal of the Douglas files was only part the effort by Hillary, Doar, Nussbaum and Marshall to pursue their own agenda during the investigation.

After my first column, some readers wrote in claiming Zeifman was motivated by jealousy because he was not appointed as the chief counsel in the investigation, with that title going to Doar instead.

Zeifman’s account is that he supported the appointment of Doar because he, Zeifman, a) did not want the public notoriety that would come with such a high-profile role; and b) didn’t have much prosecutorial experience. When he started to have a problem with Doar and his allies was when Zeifman and others, including House Majority Leader Tip O’Neill and Democratic committee member Jack Brooks of Texas, began to perceive Doar’s group as acting outside the directives and knowledge of the committee and its chairman, Peter Rodino.

(O’Neill died in 1994. Brooks is still living and I tried unsuccessfully to reach him. I’d still like to.)

This culminated in a project to research past presidential abuses of power, which committee members felt was crucial in aiding the decisions they would make in deciding how to handle Nixon’s alleged offenses.

According to Zeifman and other documents, Doar directed Hillary to work with a group of Yale law professors on this project. But the report they generated was never given to the committee. Zeifman believes the reason was that the report was little more than a whitewash of the Kennedy years – a part of the Burke Marshall-led agenda of avoiding revelations during the Watergate investigation that would have embarrassed the Kennedys.

The fact that the report was kept under wraps upset Republican committee member Charles Wiggins of California, who wrote a memo to his colleagues on the committee that read in part:

Within the past few days, some disturbing information has come to my attention. It is requested that the facts concerning the matter be investigated and a report be made to the full committee as it concerns us all.

Early last spring when it became obvious that the committee was considering presidential "abuse of power" as a possible ground of impeachment, I raised the question before the full committee that research should be undertaken so as to furnish a standard against which to test the alleged abusive conduct of Richard Nixon.

As I recall, several other members joined with me in this request. I recall as well repeating this request from time to time during the course of our investigation. The staff, as I recall, was noncommittal, but it is certain that no such staff study was made available to the members at any time for their use.

Wiggins believed the report was purposely hidden from committee members. Chairman Rodino denied this, and said the reason Hillary’s report was not given to committee members was that it contained no value. It’s worth noting, of course, that the staff member who made this judgment was John Doar.

Hillary Rodham of the impeachment inquiry staff coordinated the work. . . . After the staff received the report it was reviewed by Ms. Rodham, briefly by Mr. Labovitz and Mr. Sack, and by Doar. The staff did not think the manuscript was useful in its present form. . . .

In your letter you suggest that members of the staff may have intentionally suppressed the report during the course of its investigation. That was not the case.

As a matter of fact, Mr. Doar was more concerned that any highlight of the project might prejudice the case against President Nixon. The fact is that the staff did not think the material was usable by the committee in its existing form and had not had time to modify it so it would have practical utility for the members of the committee. I was informed and agreed with the judgment.

Mr. Labovitz, by the way, was John Labovitz, another member of the Democratic staff. I spoke with Labovitz this past Friday as well, and he is no fan of Jerry Zeifman.

“If it’s according to Zeifman, it’s inaccurate from my perspective,” Labovitz said. He bases that statement on a recollection that Zeifman did not actually work on the impeachment inquiry staff, although that is contradicted not only by Zeifman but Polk as well.

Labovitz said he has no knowledge of Hillary having taken any files, and defended her no-right-to-counsel memo on the grounds that, if she was assigned to write a memo arguing a point of view, she was merely following orders.

But as both Zeifman and Polk point out, that doesn’t mean ignoring background of which you are aware, or worse, as Zeifman alleges, confiscating documents that disprove your argument.

All told, Polk recalls the actions of Hillary, Doar and Nussbaum as more amateurish than anything else.

“Of course the Republicans went nuts,” Polk said. “But so did some of the Democrats – some of the most liberal Democrats. It was more like these guys – Doar and company – were trying to manage the members of Congress, and it was like, ‘Who’s in charge here?’ If you want to convict a president, you want to give him all the rights possible. If you’re going to give him a trial, for him to say, ‘My rights were denied,’ – it was a stupid effort by people who were just politically tone deaf. So this was a big deal to people in the proceedings on the committee, no question about it. And Jerry Zeifman went nuts, and rightfully so. But my reaction wasn’t so much that it was underhanded as it was just stupid.”

Polk recalls Zeifman sharing with him at the time that he believed Hillary’s primary role was to report back to Burke Marshall any time the investigation was taking a turn that was not to the liking of the Kennedys.

“Jerry used to give the chapter and verse as to how Hillary was the mole into the committee works as to how things were going,” Polk said. “And she’d be feeding information back to Burke Marshall, who, at least according to Jerry, was talking to the Kennedys. And when something was off track in the view of the Kennedys, Burke Marshall would call John Doar or something, and there would be a reconsideration of what they were talking about. Jerry used to tell me that this was Hillary’s primary function.”

Zeifman says he had another staff member get him Hillary’s phone records, which showed that she was calling Burke Marshall at least once a day, and often several times a day.

A final note about all this: I wrote my first column on this subject because, in the aftermath of Hillary being caught in her Bosnia fib, I came in contact with Jerry Zeifman and found his story compelling. Zeifman has been trying to tell his story for many years, and the mainstream media have ignored him. I thought it deserved an airing as a demonstration of how early in her career Hillary began engaging in self-serving, disingenuous conduct.

Disingenuously arguing a position? Vanishing documents? Selling out members of her own party to advance a personal agenda? Classic Hillary. Neither my first column on the subject nor this one were designed to show that Hillary is dishonest. I don’t really think that’s in dispute. Rather, they were designed to show that she has been this way for a very long time – a fact worth considering for anyone contemplating voting for her for president of the United States.

“She would go around saying, ‘I’m dating a person who will some day be president,’” Polk said. “It was like a Babe Ruth call. And because of that comment she made, I watched Bill Clinton’s political efforts as governor of Arkansas, and I never counted him out because she had made that forecast.”

Bill knew what he wanted a long time ago. Clearly, so did Hillary, and her tactics for trying to achieve it were established even in those early days.

Jerry Zeifman — February 5, 2008 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.

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.

Published in 1996 - Still available from Amazon.com 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.”

I think its a Clinton Family Heirloom....

ARKANSAS ALZHEIMER’S

Number of times that Clinton figures who testified in court or before Congress said that they didn’t remember, didn’t know, or something similar.

Bill Kennedy 116
Harold Ickes 148
Ricki Seidman 160
Bruce Lindsey 161
Bill Burton 191
Mark Gearan 221
Mack McLarty 233
Neil Egglseston 250
Hillary Clinton 250
John Podesta 264
Jennifer O’Connor 343
Dwight Holton 348
Patsy Thomasson 420
Jeff Eller 697

FROM THE WASHINGTON TIMES: In the portions of President Clinton’s Jan. 17 deposition that have been made public in the Paula Jones case, his memory failed him 267 times. This is a list of his answers and how many times he gave each one.

I don’t remember - 71
I don’t know - 62
I’m not sure - 17
I have no idea - 10
I don’t believe so - 9
I don’t recall - 8
I don’t think so - 8
I don’t have any specific recollection - 6
I have no recollection - 4
Not to my knowledge - 4
I just don’t remember - 4
I don’t believe - 4
I have no specific recollection - 3
I might have - 3
I don’t have any recollection of that - 2 I don’t have a specific memory - 2
I don’t have any memory of that - 2
I just can’t say - 2
I have no direct knowledge of that - 2
I don’t have any idea - 2
Not that I recall - 2
I don’t believe I did - 2
I can’t remember - 2
I can’t say - 2
I do not remember doing so - 2
Not that I remember - 2
I’m not aware - 1
I honestly don’t know - 1
I don’t believe that I did - 1
I’m fairly sure - 1
I have no other recollection - 1
I’m not positive - 1
I certainly don’t think so - 1
I don’t really remember - 1
I would have no way of remembering that - 1
That’s what I believe happened - 1
To my knowledge, no - 1
To the best of my knowledge - 1
To the best of my memory - 1
I honestly don’t recall - 1
I honestly don’t remember - 1
That’s all I know - 1
I don’t have an independent recollection of that - 1
I don’t actually have an independent memory of that - 1
As far as I know - 1
I don’t believe I ever did that - 1
That’s all I know about that - 1
I’m just not sure - 1
Nothing that I remember - 1
I simply don’t know - 1
I would have no idea - 1
I don’t know anything about that - 1
I don’t have any direct knowledge of that - 1
I just don’t know - 1
I really don’t know - 1
I can’t deny that, I just — I have no memory of that at all - 1

http://prorev.com/legacy.htm

#29 in the continuing series.

It was an amazing rise to power. A real slug of a human being, a former bar bouncer and dirty trickster named D. Craig Livingstone, made it to the head of White House Security. His appointment was so typical of how unimportant security was to the Clinton White House, both at the White House and in national security.

Livingstone resigned in a scandal known as Filegate. He admitted to illegally reading raw FBI files of Republicans — a federal crime. People were starting to ask questions about who was responsible for hiring Craig Livingstone. The name Hillary Clinton was mentioned, however, the First Evil Lady of course denied any involvement. She wouldn’t do anything wrong, would she? In an attempt to distance herself from Livingstone, an FBI agent and fine American would have to be smeared. When the Clintons face turmoil, they lie and they smear. Their expertise at such an operation has become legendary.

From Carl Limbacher at NewsMax comes the following in Sept. 1999:

Dennis Sculimbrene, at one time the most senior FBI agent assigned to the White House, has filed suit against the Justice Department, the FBI and the White House for a combined total of more than $10 million. You may have thought such a lawsuit, brought by the public interest law firm Judicial Watch and filed in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia on July 26, should have received major press attention. The story, in fact, was ignored.

In some ways this former FBI agent’s story is typical of so many Clinton era whistleblowers who found themselves hung out to dry by the very people and organizations that purport to serve the interests of justice, including the press.

Despite the media black out, Sculimbrene’s suit has some startling and important revelations.

Sculimbrene is the one witness whose testimony is backed by unimpeachable documentary evidence, which irrefutably links First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton to the hiring of Filegate’s central character, D. Craig Livingstone, once head of White House Security. Her Livingstone connection ties Mrs. Clinton to one of the worst abuses of presidential power in the history of the republic.

In FBI parlance the key evidence is called an “insert”; a short memo thought to be of no consequence when Sculimbrene wrote it in March 1993 as part of his background investigation into Mr. Livingstone, then a new White House hire. At the time, Agent Sculimbrene was so highly trusted that he was the only member of the FBI’s White House detail with a special SCI security clearance (Secret Compartmentalized Information), which allowed him access to highly classified material.

The highly trusted agent wrote the following, which became part of the then-obscure Livingstone’s own FBI background file:

“BERNARD NUSSBAUM, Counsel to the President, advised that he had known the appointee for the period of time that he has been employed in the new administration. He had come highly recommended to him by HILLARY CLINTON, who has known his mother for a longer period of time....”

Just how problematic was this now six-year old document detailing the Hillary/Livingstone connection - written at a time when not a single soul had reason to fabricate such a link?

A quick review of the joint White House/FBI campaign to harass, abuse and discredit Sculimbrene sheds a good deal of light on that question.

Before Filegate there was Travelgate, the scandal under examination by the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee in 1996 when it emerged that the White House Counsel’s Office had illegally requisitioned Travel Office Chief Billy Dale’s FBI file. Within days, Dale’s single, purloined file had metastasized into hundreds and D. Craig Livingstone, the keeper of the confidential dossiers, became a household name overnight.

Sculimbrene knew something was amiss a full two months before the Dale and his co-workers were tossed out the door in the Travelgate purge. Top Clinton aides had already begun questioning the FBI agent about the backgrounds and political views of the Travel Office Staff. The agent told his superior that it looked to him like the Clinton administration wanted an excuse to fire Dale and the others.

When the Travel Office axe finally fell in May 1993, Sculimbrene witnessed Clinton aides rifling Dale’s office, which was left completely unsecured despite the fact that the White House had announced an FBI investigation was underway.

Sculimbrene notified his bosses about what he’d seen. One of his superiors was actually supervising the criminal investigation, which would eventually result in Dale’s indictment. But, despite Sculimbrene’s crucial account of White House Travel Office evidence tampering, he would not be interviewed on the subject for another two years.

In January 1994 Sculimbrene suffered a nearly fatal plane accident, which the Clinton administration would later use against him in a number of ways, according to his lawsuit. The accident left him with a severe head wound which forced him to take an extended leave of absence from his White House work.

When Sculimbrene returned to work eight months later, doctors recommended that his schedule be modified to accommodate his new physical limitations, which meant that he would return to his old White House position but work only during daytime hours and not be assigned any outside field work. Both the administration and the FBI welcomed Sculimbrene back under the new terms.

The arrangement worked well for nearly a year - until Sculimbrene mentioned to the FBI agent then building a case against Dale that he thought the upcoming Travelgate trial would become “a political football.”

Inexplicably, the senior agent warned Sculimbrene that he was considering filing a complaint against him with the FBI’s Office of Professional Responsibility based on the innocuous remark.

After Sculimbrene was subpoenaed to testify at Dale’s trial, the heat was gradually turned up. Suddenly, for the first time in his 22-year career, the FBI agent was ordered to take a random drug test. The White House Personnel Office invited him to apply for another job at the Department of Veterans Affairs, and then abruptly withdrew the offer after he refused to testify against Dale. And now he was being given work assignments that directly violated the previously agreed to workplace accommodations his doctors had requested.

Some of the harassment seemed ridiculous, such as the investigation launched by Sculimbrene’s FBI bosses into whether he had misused his parking pass. But by April 1996 the once highly trusted agent who consistently received “exceptional” performance evaluations was told that his detail to the White House had been terminated. Two months later Filegate exploded.

In the weeks that followed agent Sculimbrene would testify to House and Senate committees about Mrs. Clinton’s relationship to D. Craig Livingstone, noting that others in the White House Counsel’s office told him they were “stuck” with the former bar bouncer because of his Hillary connection.

Within days of his testimony, Sculimbrene’s permanent White House pass was lifted. He says his supervisor explained that his presence “made the First Family uncomfortable.”

In July 1996 FBI General Counsel Howard Shapiro made the bombshell discovery placing Mrs. Clinton at Filegate ground zero. Combing through Livingstone’s own FBI file, Shapiro located Sculimbrene’s smoking gun contemporaneous memo.

There it was in black and white, written years before anybody had heard of Filegate: Nussbaum’s account to the FBI agent of how Hillary had “highly recommended” the former bar bouncer for a top White House slot. Back then, few doubted Livingstone was acting on orders from some higher-up when he accumulated nearly one thousand government dossiers on potential Clinton enemies.

The next morning Shapiro dispatched two FBI agents to Sculimbrene’s home where the agent was grilled like a common criminal. In documents filed with the court, Sculimbrene complains that his interrogators asked him more than thirty times whether he kept other notes on what Nussbaum might have told him about Mrs. Clinton and Livingstone. Plainly the FBI was as concerned as the White House about other evidence emerging linking the First Lady to Filegate.

Shapiro’s agents repeatedly warned Sculimbrene that his three-year-old notation was contradicted not only by Nussbaum, but also by the First Lady and the President as well. Just in case he missed the point, Sculimbrene’s supervisor called during the grilling to advise him about an upcoming psychiatric examination that would determine the agent’s future fitness to serve the FBI.

If that weren’t enough, then-White House Counsel Jack Quinn personally wrote to FBI Director Louis Freeh, attempting to link Sculimbrene to another agent who’d been convicted of falsifying background investigations. Lanny Davis, not yet officially on the White House payroll, popped up on CNN’s “Crossfire” and CNBC’s “Rivera Live” insisting Sculimbrene’s claim that Nussbaum had told him anything linking Livingstone to Mrs. Clinton was “an absolute fabrication.”

“I am accusing Sculimbrene of having a political bias and that report is filled with lies,” said the future White House damage controller on national television. Ironically, the same kind of hysterical denials greeted the publication of 1996’s political book of the year, “Unlimited Access”, written by Sculimbrene’s White House partner, former FBI agent Gary Aldrich.

On August 2, 1996, Dennis Sculimbrene resigned from the FBI.

The Clinton administration has successfully stonewalled the Independent Counsel and Congress for five years on a whole array of serious scandals. Yet private citizen Paula Jones, pursuing justice in civil court, turned Clinton into the only elected American president ever to be impeached.

As with the Jones case, civil court is where Americans will eventually learn the truth about Filegate and the White House’s attempts to cover it up, thanks to Dennis Sculimbrene.

How much Hillary used those files or threatened to use them we may never know. How much info was put into that Big Brother computer? People should have gone to jail for a long, long time. The Clintons have never paid the price they should have paid.

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