Tuesday, April 01, 2008

Ask not for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee, Hillary.

 
A new book on Hillary Clinton's first years after graduating law school may signal the end of her final campaign for public office.

Jerry Zeifman, a former counsel to the House Judiciary Committee for 17 years, takes you to a behind the scenes account of Hillary Clinton, in a book based on his personal experiences in dealing with her. In 1974, he had supervisory authority of a staff that included Hillary Rodham – who was then engaged in a variety of self-serving unethical practices in violation of House rules. In 1998, as consultant to a member of the Judiciary Committee that impeached President Clinton, he gained extensive personal insights into the unethical practices of Hillary Clinton in her White House “West Wing” office.

A lifelong Democrat, Jerry Zeifman has concluded that Hillary Clinton is ethically unfit to be either a Senator or President – and if she were to become President, the last vestiges of the traditional moral authority of the party of Roosevelt, Truman and Johnson will be destroyed.

Why is Zeifman so dead-set against Hillary?

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.

Dan Calabrese of North Star Writers Group provides an excellent summary.

...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.”

Aside from that, she was completely above-board.

Calabrese goes on to list a series of extremely disturbing practices initiated by Ms. Rodham, culminating in a startling turn of events. Hillary argued that the accused Watergate conspirators had no right to counsel.

The Judiciary Committee allowed [Justice William O.] 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.

So it would appear Hillary's pattern of ethical and behavioral lapses aren't exactly a recent phenomenon.

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