By Jim Popkin, NBC News Senior Investigative Producer
Former First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton's calendar entries are full of unexplained private meetings on key dates when she and President Clinton were fending off a variety of scandals, the newly released White House records show.
Take Jan. 21, 1998. That's the day when most Americans first learned, courtesy of the Washington Post, that President Clinton had had a relationship with Monica Lewinsky. Mrs. Clinton's calendar entry shows that she left the White House at 7:25 pm that evening and returned 25 minutes later. The National Archives, which released the 17,484 calendar pages today, has excised the reason for the brief trip and the names of any of the people whom Mrs. Clinton may have met. The Archives, working in consultation with President Clinton's representatives, cite privacy concerns in blacking out all details of the trip.
Dec. 22, 2000 also remains a bit of a mystery. That's the day when Mrs. Clinton and the President met in the White House with a New York rabbi who successfully lobbied President Clinton to commute the sentences of four Hassidic men who had been convicted of massive fraud and conspiracy. The commutations were extremely controversial at the time, and photos of the meeting exist. And yet, there's no mention of it in Mrs. Clinton's daily log. The calendar simply lists four separate "private meetings" in the Map Room that day, with no names attached.
On Jan. 4, 1996, the calendars also record four "private" meetings that the First Lady held with her chief of staff, Maggie Williams, and undisclosed others. That's the same day that one of the First Lady's aides discovered a stack of Mrs. Clinton's law-firm billing records in the private quarters of the White House. Whitewater investigators had been searching for the subpoenaed documents for months.
A team of NBC News producers, correspondents and researchers pored over the White House logs today. The calendar entries show, as Sen. Clinton has argued on the campaign trail, that as first lady she had a continuing interest in substantive foreign policy matters, including Bosnia and the effort to find peace in Northern Ireland. “These documents are outlines of the First Lady's activities and illustrate the array of substantive issues she worked on,” Clinton campaign spokesman Jay Carson said. “Her daily schedules also list some of the meetings and travel she conducted to more than 80 countries in pursuit of the Administration's domestic and foreign policy goals.”
Foreign Policy Experience?
But the calendars also seem to show that, on occasion, Mrs. Clinton was not substantively involved with foreign affairs when a real 3 a.m. crisis hit the White House.
Take, for example, when Al Qaeda terrorists bombed the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, killing hundreds of people. Mrs. Clinton’s schedule does not show any foreign policy meetings in the aftermath of the crisis, only a trip to Andrews Air Force Base to console victims and their families as they returned from Africa to the United States. And when, in retaliation for those embassy attacks, President Clinton bombed Al Qaeda terrorist camps in Afghanistan, where was Mrs. Clinton? The records show that she was vacationing at a “private residence” in Martha’s Vineyard, Ma., and had no official events.
Foreign trips offer a mixed review of Mrs. Clinton’s national-security experience. On a trip to Japan and Korea in 1993, for example, her schedule was filled with teas, tours of gardens and other traditional first lady fare. And on a trip to Russia in 1994, Mrs. Clinton met with other first ladies and attended coffees and tours, separate from her husband or the Russian president. Clinton campaign spokesman Carson described the calendars as only a “guide,” and said that they “of course cannot reflect all of Senator Clinton's activities as First Lady.”
Indeed, on overseas trips in 1996, Mrs. Clinton held "private" or "closed" meetings with foreign heads of state in Greece, Turkey, and Bosnia--without the president's attendance. And on dozens of times throughout her White House years, she attended White House meetings with Cabinet secretaries, was briefed by senior National Security Council officials and met with foreign dignitaries from around the world.
--NBC News contributors to this report include: Erika Angulo, Rich Gardella, Alicia Jennings, EJ Johnson, Mike Kosnar, Luke Mayo, CarrollAnn Mears, Amna Nawaz, Aram Roston, Antoine Sanfuentes and Ken Strickland.
