To belabor the obvious, she ignored a legal subpoena in order to keep her business records SECRET. Bottom line, she was subpoenaed to produce to a court her billing records from when she was a partner at the Rose law firm. Against the advice of counsel, she stonewalled and for two years, she insisted she had no idea where they were and they couldn't be found. According to Sid Blumenthal's Clinton era book, The Clinton Wars, HRC was the one who was against just putting out every detail they had on Whitewater and killing the issue. He wrote of her being extremely angry after several Democrats, including Moynihan, Kerry and Bradley - some former prosecutors, recommended that. And yes, that is the same Sid Blumenthal whose email correspondence with Hillary is much discussed in the current Clinton email hot mess.
So the Whitewater investigation dragged on for 2 years until a White House employee found a stack of files (the Rose billing records) on a table outside the door to HRC's office in the White House family quarters and turned them in. Ken Starr had pretty much shut down his investigation at that point, but the discovery of those documents led him to reopen it, and it was AFTER that that L'Affaire Lewinsky developed. THAT led to Bill being deposed about Monica, and getting caught (blue dress evidence)lying under oath and THAT led to his impeachment.
Interesting that the Republicans pushing on the email investigation and missing emails have not, as far as I've seen, mentioned the similarity to the missing Whitewater documents. That was some 20 years ago, so younger posters probably never heard of this, but I have no doubt that GOP oppo research team is drooling to throw this at HRC should she win the primary.
Those Whitewater documents had been subpoenaed from HRC and for 2 years she stoutly claimed she had absolutely no idea where they were. Then they were found on a table in the first family's private quarters - just outside the door to HRC's office. And she again disavowed any knowledge of how they got there.
Ted Koppel did a masterful Nightline report on the whole incident. Here's a link to the transcript of Ted Koppel's coverage of this nightmare. HRC is caught in mis-statement after mis-statement after mis-statement and keeps trying to spin and twist her way out of it.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/clinton/etc/01301996.html
The Whitewater Lost And Found Records
Correspondent: Chris Bury
Anchor: Ted Koppel
TED KOPPEL (VO): The accusation? Obstruction of justice, knowingly withholding subpoenaed documents. The location? A book room on the third floor of the White House, a room in the first family's private quarters. One clue? A White House log handed over today with the names of all the people who might have had access - from Mrs Clinton's chief of staff, to Chelsea Clinton's friends, to dignitaries visiting the President. Tonight, the mystery of the lost and found records.
ANNOUNCER: This is ABC News Nightline. Reporting from Washington, Ted Koppel.
TED KOPPEL: Almost exactly two years ago, a subpoena was issued for some billing records from the Rose Law Firm in Little Rock, Arkansas. These are records that go back about 10 years or so and that would, it was believed, shed some light on how much work attorney Hillary Clinton did on a particular real estate deal, and for whom she did that work. For the better part of these last two years, those records could not be found. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, they turned up earlier this month in the office of a woman named Carolyn Huber. What turned that into a major story is that Ms Huber works at the White House, and that she says she found the billing records in the private quarters of the first family - found them, in fact, last August, right outside Mrs Clinton's private office - didn't know what they were, packed them up, didn't realize what they were until a couple of weeks ago, when she was tidying up her own office. If someone has been deliberately concealing those records, that would be a federal crime. The White House says that a surprisingly large number of people actually had access to the Clintons' private quarters last August We'll tell you more about that later, but we want to use most of our time this evening to put this latest development into context. We begin by taking something both the President and the first lady have said recently.
CHRIS BURY, ABC NEWS (VO): The President and Mrs Clinton complain that the questions keep changing, but the controversies over Whitewater and the Travel Office have stayed alive, in large part, because the answers keep changing, too.
CHRIS BURY (VO): On January 15th, Mrs Clinton told a radio interviewer all documents had been released. Five days later, the White House issued a statement to The New York Times saying that wasn't quite true. On Castle Grande, Hillary Clinton's legal work for a land deal regulators describe as fraudulent: in May 1995 she told the Resolution Trust Corporation, quote, 'I don't believe I knew anything about any of these real estate parcels and projects.' But after billing records showed Hillary Clinton had at least 14 conversations with Seth Ward, the major player in the deal, Mrs Clinton told Barbara Walters she knew the project by another name.
HILLARY CLINTON: ('20/20,' January 19, 1996) And so when I was asked about it last year, I didn't recognize it, I didn't remember it. The billing records show I did not do work for Castle Grande. I did work for something called IDC, which was not related to Castle Grande.
CHRIS BURY (VO): That is not how Susan McDougal, the Clintons' former business partner, remembers it.
SUSAN MCDOUGAL: It was always the same thing. As far as I know, IDC and- and- and Castle Grande were one and the same.
Clinton cover-ups do not work out in the long run.
It's not the initial decision to use her own private email account, it's the perceived cover-up. It was an attempted cover-up by Bill Clinton which resulted in his impeachment. "Bill Clinton, the 42nd President of the United States, was impeached by the House of Representatives on two charges, one of perjury and one of obstruction of justice, on December 19, 1998."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impeachment_of_Bill_Clinton
It was so painful and ugly, for me as a Democrat who had worked for Bill's election and even been a guest at his first inauguration, to go through all the years of investigations and embarrassing results thereof. If she's the Dem. nominee, we will all have to go through months and months of rehashing this yet again. Horrifying to contemplate. If the Clintons had come clean and cooperated with the Whitewater investigations, Ken Starr would never have gotten around to Monica Lewinsky.
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