Fact Check: Was Hillary Clinton fired from Watergate investigation?

Note: June 2016:
For over 30 years I’d been tracking strange deaths near me, my employee, customers and friends.  My complaints well known with many public officials in the Bay Area.  Another real tragedy struck with the Strack Murders in Springville UT but this time is was my relatives but the murders and murder suicides kept roiling on. 

 

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By Carole Fader Sat, Mar 8, 2014 @ 9:48 pm | updated Sat, Mar 8, 2014 @ 10:01 pm

Pat Carter/Associated Press

Hillary Rodham Clinton was criticized for her conduct during the Watergate investigation.

Times-Union readers want to know:

An email says that Hillary Clinton — then Hillary Rodham — was fired for lying and being unethical when she was a 27-year-old working on the Watergate investigation. Is this true?

The viral email is mainly derived from a column published on March 31, 2008, by Dan Calabrese, founder of North Star Writers Group, according to fact-finder TruthOrFiction.com. North Star was a newspaper syndicate that provided services until early 2012.

Calabrese’s information came from Democrat Jerry Zeifman, a counsel and chief of staff of the House Judiciary Committee, who supervised Clinton on the Watergate investigation. Zeifman’s 2006 book, “Hillary’s Pursuit of Power,” states that she “… engaged in a variety of self-serving unethical practices in violation of House rules.”

On his now-shuttered website, Zeifman said, “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.”

Specifically, Zeifman contends that Rodham and others wanted Richard Nixon to remain in office to bolster the chances of Sen. Ted Kennedy or another Democrat being elected president.

Zeifman said that in 1974 a young lawyer who shared an office with Clinton came to him to apologize that he and Clinton had lied to him. The lawyer, John Labovitz, is quoted as saying that he was dismayed with “… her erroneous legal opinions and efforts to deny Nixon representation by counsel — as well as an unwillingness to investigate Nixon.”

Zeifman charges that Rodham regularly consulted with Ted Kennedy’s chief political strategist, a violation of House rules.

Hillary Rodham’s conduct, according to Zeifman, also was the result of not wanting Nixon to face an impeachment trial because Democrats worried that Nixon might bring up abuses of office by President John Kennedy.

Zeifman — ironically, a consultant to a member of the Judiciary Committee that impeached President Bill Clinton — said Democrats feared putting Watergate break-in mastermind E. Howard Hunt on the stand. Hunt, Zeifman said, might report on his knowledge of nefarious activities in the Kennedy administration “including Kennedy’s purported complicity in the attempted assassination of Fidel Castro.”

Zeifman also asserts that Rodham joined Burke Marshall, Ted Kennedy’s chief counsel in the Chappaquiddick affair and Rodham’s former law professor; special counsel John Doar; and senior associate special counsel (and future Clinton White House counsel) Bernard Nussbaum in trying to gain enough votes on the Judiciary Committee to change House rules and deny counsel to Nixon.

In order to pull this off, Zeifman said that Rodham wrote a fraudulent legal brief, and confiscated public documents.

After the Nixon impeachment investigation was finished, Zeifman fired Rodham and said he refused to give her a letter of recommendation.

According to the Calabrese column as reported by TruthOrFiction.com, Zeifman said he regrets not reporting Rodham to the appropriate bar association.

So what are we to make of all this? Calabrese’s interview with Zeifman has been published around the Internet and repeated by pundits such as Rush Limbaugh and Neil Boortz. But there is nothing to out-and-out confirm Zeifman’s rendition. That doesn’t mean it couldn’t be true, but it makes it difficult to arrive at the truth.

In addition, neither www.TruthOrFiction.com nor we could find any response from Hillary Clinton to Zeifman’s book or to his accusations.

Carole Fader: (904) 359-4635

State Department claims processing Clinton records request would take 75 years

The State Department has told a federal court that processing a Republican National Committee demand for documents relating to Hillary Clinton and her aides would take as long as 75 years – and would stretch “generations.”
The department made the argument in a bid to fight the request, just one of several legal battles still unfolding over the former secretary of state’s personal email use.
The RNC had sued the department back in March for the records. The party is seeking years’ worth of emails for top Clinton aides including former chief of staff Cheryl Mills, adviser Jacob Sullivan and Bryan Pagliano, an IT specialist who helped set up Clinton’s server and struck an immunity deal with the Justice Department in the ongoing FBI probe.
A court filing last Wednesday before the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia estimated that -- not counting the Pagliano request – processing the records would take 75 years, considering the time it takes to review what would be hundreds of thousands of pages.
“FOIA requests are not supposed to be labored over for generations,” said the court filing, which sought summary judgment on the basis the RNC request was too broad and burdensome.  
State Department officials defended the court filing on Tuesday.
Spokesman Mark Toner told Fox News the claim it could take 75 years is “not an outlandish estimation, believe it or not.”
Meanwhile, Pagliano also moved Tuesday to keep his own records under wraps in a separate case.
The ex-staffer who set up Clinton's home email server filed documents under seal in response to a judge's directive that he reveal his immunity arrangement with the Justice Department.
The motion was hidden from public view, and two exhibits were also sealed.
Pagliano last week said he would not testify in an upcoming deposition sought by conservative legal advocacy group Judicial Watch, which has sued for information about Clinton's email server.
In response, U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan gave Pagliano until Tuesday evening to file with the court a copy of his immunity agreement.
On another front, the State Department said Tuesday that Clinton’s use of private email was not widely known, further undercutting claims she made as recently as Sunday.
Speaking with ABC News, Clinton said, “Everybody in the department knew that I was emailing from a personal address. Hundreds of people knew it.”
Toner, though, said Tuesday that “really no one among the senior staff had a full and comprehensive knowledge of how much she was using her personal email and if they had, they probably would have done it differently.”
The State Department was responding to questions about the deposition of aide Stephen Mull in a civil lawsuit. Mull, who ran Clinton's office, said he couldn't remember when he first learned about her private email, or why he suggested she get a government email account instead.
Fox News’ Catherine Herridge and The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Foxnews: Secret Service officer's book details Clintons' 'crisis of character'Enter a post title

A forthcoming book from a former Secret Service officer assigned to the White House during Bill Clinton’s presidency alleges that presumptive 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton “lacks the integrity and temperament to serve in the office.”

The book, “Crisis of Character,” is due to be released June 28 – a month before Hillary Clinton is likely to take the stage to accept the Democratic presidential nomination in Philadelphia. Written by ex-Secret Service Officer Gary J. Byrne, who was “posted directly outside President Clinton’s Oval Office,” the 285-page book describes Hillary Clinton’s “appalling leadership style” as being “volcanic, impulsive, enabled by sycophants, and disdainful of the rules set for everyone else.”

While most of the book’s contents have remained under wraps so far, the Amazon.com preview features large sections from the introduction, first two chapters and afterward. It also shows the title page, featuring a Chapter 11 titled “Wild Bill.”

In the introduction, Byrne said he “personally observed” President Clinton’s infidelities and was complicit in covering them up.

“I even secretly disposed of sordid physical evidence that might later have been used to convict the president,” Byrne wrote.

Byrne recalled an alleged fight between the first couple during the summer of 1995 in Chapter 1, “The Vase.” Byrne said a vase was smashed during the loud argument and the next morning President Clinton sported “a shiner, a real, put-a-steak-on-it black eye.” Clinton’s personal scheduler Nancy Hernreich allegedly told Byrne the eye condition was a result of Clinton’s allergy to coffee.

The book is not solely about the Clintons, however.

While writing about his career prior to the Oval Office post, Byrne revealed an incident on May 30, 1983, when he said Russian bombers were spotted 5 miles off the U.S. coast while President Ronald Reagan was holding an economic summit in Williamsburg, Va. Byrne said U.S. fighter jets ended up shooting a warning missile “right past a bomber’s nose” and the Soviet bombers turned around.

“The media never heard of it,” Byrne wrote.

While books about the Clintons written by supposed insiders are plentiful, Byrne’s credibility is bolstered by reporting at the time of the Monica Lewinsky-Bill Clinton sex scandal. A New York Times article from April 1998 reported that Byrne, “a uniformed member of the Secret Service assigned to the White House,” told the deputy chief of staff in 1996 about concerns he had regarding Lewinsky’s visits to the West Wing of the White House. A CNN article from April 1998 said Byrnes’ complaints about Lewinsky ultimately led to her being transferred to the Pentagon.

Byrne said in the introduction to “Crisis” that what he saw in the 1990s “sickened me.”

“We were supposed to lay our lives – not our consciences – on the line,” he wrote.

Neither Clinton has commented on the book.

State Department audit faults Clinton on emails, says she broke records rules

 State Department audit faults Clinton on emails, says she broke records rules

The State Department watchdog, in an extensive and detailed report, accused Hillary Clinton of flouting federal records rules and cybersecurity guidelines while secretary of state by exclusively using personal email for government business.

The forthcoming audit, a copy of which was obtained by FoxNews.com, faults Clinton and her predecessors for poorly managing email and other computer information.

The report says the department and its secretaries were "slow to recognize and to manage effectively the legal requirements and cybersecurity risks associated with electronic data communications." It cites "longstanding, systemic weaknesses" related to communications that started before Clinton's appointment as secretary of state.

But the report singles out Clinton’s failures as more serious.

It specifically accuses her of violating department policy by not giving over emails when she left office.

The report says: "Secretary Clinton should have preserved any Federal records she created and received on her personal account by printing and filing those records with the related files in the Office of the Secretary. At a minimum, Secretary Clinton should have surrendered all emails dealing with Department business before leaving government service and, because she did not do so, she did not comply with the Department's policies that were implemented in accordance with the Federal Records Act."

The report said while there were many examples of staff using personal accounts for official business, they could only find three cases where officials used non-department accounts “on an exclusive basis for day-to-day operations”: former Secretary of State Colin Powell, former Ambassador to Kenya Jonathan Scott Gration and Clinton.

In the case of Gration, the department initiated disciplinary action against him, though he resigned before that materialized. The IG report said of Gration, “the Department’s response to his actions demonstrates how such usage is normally handled when Department cybersecurity officials become aware of it.”

The report noted that by the time Clinton took the helm of the department, internal guidance was “considerably more detailed and more sophisticated.”

Yet, the report said, “Secretary Clinton used mobile devices to conduct official business using the personal email account on her private server extensively, as illustrated by the 55,000 pages of material making up the approximately 30,000 emails she provided to the Department in December 2014.” The report said investigators found “no evidence that the Secretary requested or obtained guidance or approval to conduct official business via a personal email account on her private server.”
While some officials said they were unaware of the extent of Clinton’s personal email use, the report said they found evidence “that various staff and senior officials throughout the Department had discussions related to the Secretary’s use of non-Departmental systems, suggesting there was some awareness of Secretary Clinton’s practices.”

The review came after revelations Clinton exclusively used a private email account and server while in office. Clinton is now the likely Democratic presidential nominee.

The audit comes as the FBI is thought to be nearing the final phases of its own investigation into Clinton’s email use as secretary of state.

State Department spokesman Mark Toner said the agency is "already working" to improve its email and records management system.

Toner said "it is clear that the department could have done a better job preserving emails and records of secretaries of state and their senior staff going back several administrations." He said the State Department also agrees that compliance with its rules has been "inconsistent across several administrations."

On another front, Romanian hacker Guccifer – who recently claimed he breached Clinton’s server – pleaded guilty in federal court on Wednesday to separate hacking charges.

Under a deal struck with the federal government, he has agreed to cooperate with federal authorities in the future. The plea agreement does not mention the FBI investigation of Clinton's email practices or his claims that he accessed her private server in March 2013. Such agreements typically do not stipulate how a defendant will aid the government.

Fox News’ Chad Pergram and The Associated Press contributed to this report.