Correct The Record Saturday October 11, 2014 Roundup

​Correct The Record Saturday October 11, 2014 Roundup:

Headlines:

Washington Post Opinion: Hillary Clinton’s increasing comfort with being a female almost-candidate

"Clinton, like her party, is prepared to put issues of gender equality front and center; the preponderance of female voters and the Democrats’ edge with them make that focus a no-brainer for candidates of both genders. 'We talk about a glass ceiling,' Clinton said at a forum on women’s economic security at the Center for American Progress last month. 'These women don’t even have a secure floor under them.'" 

Politico: “Final document dump spills Clinton White House secrets”

“The records released over eight months did little to fulfill the fevered imaginations of Clinton critics who pined for some revelation that would torpedo Hillary Clinton’s chances to attempt a return to the White House through a presidential campaign of her own.”

Time: “Hillary Clinton’s Burden of History”

“Clinton will benefit some, too. The documents are proof of her intimate involvement in nearly every aspect of professional Washington for more than two decades.”

New York Times: “National Archives Releases More Clinton-Era Documents”

“The National Archives released 10,000 more pages of previously undisclosed documents from the Clinton White House on Friday...”

Wall Street Journal: “Clinton Documents Show White House Scrambling to Do Damage Control”

“New records released from former President Bill Clinton’s administration depict a White House scrambling to defuse a series of scandals, with aides preparing detailed strategies to protect Bill and Hillary Clinton in the face of outside investigations that dogged them over two terms.”

MSNBC: “11 things we learned from today’s massive Clinton document dump”

"Here are the eleven most interesting revelations from the document dump, in no particular order:" 

Washington Post: “Clinton presidential documents show White House amid setbacks, scandals”

“White House aides raised questions about how to structure and describe then-first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton’s role in the 1993 attempt to overhaul the health-care system, including whether she would be considered a government employee and whether the group’s work could be kept secret, documents released Friday show.”

Bloomberg: “How Bill Clinton’s White House Handled Political Threats”

“The Clinton White House operated with a siege mentality for eight years, fashioning political strategies designed to preserve the first family and neutralize enemies both real and perceived, according to presidential documents released yesterday for the first time.”

Bloomberg: “Clinton Advisers Urged White House to ‘Defend HRC’”

“President Bill Clinton’s White House staff worked for years to keep Hillary Clinton from becoming a ‘political liability’ during investigations into the couple’s Arkansas land deal known as Whitewater.”

Wall Street Journal blog: Washington Wire: “Clinton Docs: Health-Overhaul Postmortem Identified ‘Disloyal’ Officials”

“A White House memo suggests that when Hillary Clinton was first lady in the early 1990s, she was unhappy about leaks that painted her husband’s White House in an unflattering light and wanted to know who was behind the disclosures.”

The Hill opinion: A. B. Stoddard: “Clinton’s calculus”

“For such a calculating and calculated politician, the volatility of the next three months will challenge Clinton’s best-laid plans.”

Articles:

Washington Post Opinion: Hillary Clinton’s increasing comfort with being a female almost-candidate

By Ruth Marcus

October 10, 2014 7:19 p.m. EDT

The 2008 campaign was the first with a woman as a serious presidential contender, so it was not surprising that gender was an uncomfortable, tiptoe-y subject. The male candidates weren’t sure-footed in dealing with it — recall Barack Obama’s “you’re likable enough, Hillary” and the debate discussion about the color of her jacket.

Neither, actually, was Clinton herself. Her campaign was never certain how, or even whether, to talk about gender. Often, it put the issue at arm’s length. “I am very proud to be making history running as a woman for president of the United States,” Clinton would say on the campaign trail, “but I’m not running because I am a woman.”

Sometimes, under pressure, her campaign unnecessarily turned the gender card face up, as when, after a bruising debate in November 2007, her allies complained of six guys “piling on” the candidate— as if anyone ever thought of Clinton as a defenseless victim.

If the pre-campaign season is any indication — and, yes, I do think we are in pre-campaign season — this time could be interestingly different.

Clinton, like her party, is prepared to put issues of gender equality front and center; the preponderance of female voters and the Democrats’ edge with them make that focus a no-brainer for candidates of both genders. “We talk about a glass ceiling,” Clinton said at a forum on women’s economic security at the Center for American Progress last month. “These women don’t even have a secure floor under them.”

More notable than the new focus on gender substance, though, may be Clinton’s newfound comfort — or new degree of comfort — with being the female almost-candidate.

Witness Clinton’s full-on embrace of grandma-hood, tweeting out pictures of her new granddaughter despite the twin potential pitfalls of gender andage. No one remarked on whether Mitt Romney’s passel of grandkids made him seem old. (By the way, Clinton is seven months younger.) And no one questioned whether being a grandpa would diminish his zeal for the presidency.

You might call it sexist — except that Clinton herself has raised that possibility. “I know I have a decision to make,” she told People magazine in June. “But part of what I’ve been thinking about, is everything I’m interested in and everything I enjoy doing — and with the extra added joy of ‘I’m about to become a grandmother,’ I want to live in the moment.”

Just last week, though, baby Charlotte made her first appearance — in name, not in fact — on the campaign trail. Touting her “grandmother glow,” Clinton, campaigning for Pennsylvania gubernatorial candidate Tom Wolf, noted that “there’s a lot of Philadelphia and a lot of Pennsylvania in Charlotte. . . . Her father’s already held her while watching the Eagles play.”

And Charlotte is not just a cute prop — she serves a substantive point: That “you should not have to be the grandchild of a president” — or perhaps two presidents — “to get a good education, to get good health care. Let’s make sure we give every child in Pennsylvania the same chance that I’m determined to give my granddaughter.” Get ready to hear that line on the presidential campaign trail.

At the same time, Clinton seems looser, almost playful about gender in recent appearances. There she was at the Economic Club of Chicago earlier in the week describing how she tried to turn down Obama when he asked her to be secretary of state.

“In my discussions with him, after he offered me the job here in Chicago and I said no, and I said no again, and I said no again, and finally I just gave in,” Clinton said. “And as I said to somebody the other day, I told my husband no and I wouldn’t get married, and no, and just gave in. So . . . I have a history with charismatic, attractive men. They just wear me out.”

Pretty edgy, with its coy, no-sometimes-means-yes connotations. Except that everybody understands that Clinton knows her mind; this girl is swept off her feet only when she’s so inclined. No one hearing it would think, “Gee, if she can’t say no to Barack Obama, how will she stand up to Vladimir Putin?” Clinton knows: Whatever criticisms she might encounter, not being tough enough won’t be among them.

We saw some glimmerings of this Clinton in 2008, but her comfort level with gender, her willingness to engage in a bit of post-feminist flirtatiousness, seems greater now. The 2016 campaign could be the one that lets Hillary enjoy being a girl.

Politico: “Final document dump spills Clinton White House secrets”

By Josh Gerstein

October 10, 2014, 1:04 p.m. EDT

It was the document dump to end all document dumps.

Tens of thousands of pages of previously-secret files detailing the inner workings of the President Bill Clinton’s White House as it struggled with then-first lady Hillary Clinton’s high-profile failure on health care reform, as aides sought to manage a slew of actual or perceived scandals, and as the White House staff reeled from disclosure of the Monica Lewinsky affair.

However, the records released over eight months did little to fulfill the fevered imaginations of Clinton critics who pined for some revelation that would torpedo Hillary Clinton’s chances to attempt a return to the White House through a presidential campaign of her own.

The papers show a White House unabashed in its desires to manipulate the media through selective leaks and carefully-chosen interviews. But they’re also a reminder that many of the techniques the Clinton team innovated are now commonplace in the political arena.

The set of files posted Friday spilled secrets on the creation of the “don’t ask, don’t tell policy,” heated controversies involving Whitewater and the White House Travel Office, and how White House aides encouraged the president to use a State of the Union address to defend his wife against Republican criticism.

Among the most notable disclosures Friday:

Gays in the military

A fly-on-the-wall view of an early meeting Bill Clinton held with the joint chiefs of staff over his pledge to reverse the ban on gays in the military. The closed-door session, held just five days after Clinton took office, featured a spirited back-and-forth about the policy.

Joint Chiefs Chairman Colin Powell and Vice President Al Gore faced off over whether the issue of gay rights was parallel to that of African Americans, the detailed notes show.

Powell declared that the comparison with blacks was “off-base” because race is a “benign” characteristic and “sexuality is” different.

Gore responded that he saw “some parallels” between discrimination against gays and African Americans and that a gay person kicked out of the military just for being gay “is discriminated against in a way similar to black[s,]” the notes show.

Marine Corps Commandant Carl Mundy, who died earlier this year, equated announcing “I’m gay” with declaring “I’m KKK, Nazi, rapist,” the notes indicate.

Clinton suggested he was open to kicking some gays out of the military, even if they were identified through their advocacy. “People I would like to keep [in the military] wouldn’t show up at a Queer Nation parade,” the president said.

It’s unclear who took the 34-pages of richly-detailed notes, but National Archives notations indicated they came from the files of National Security Council staffer Richard Beardsworth.

Whitewater independent counsel

Notes detail opposition by both Bill and Hillary Clinton to the naming of an independent counsel to investigate their Whitewater investment.

One in a series of files pertaining to Whitewater contains a series of handwritten notes that appear to be minutes or a meeting or a survey of opinion. One entry, that appears to say “Mack” next to it, as in Chief of Staff Mack McLarty, reads, “Let’s get off whether we’ll have spcl pros or counsel, HRC + BC don’t want it.”

Militia group regulations

In the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing, the Clinton administration considered the possibility of aggressive new regulation of domestic militia groups, including publishing membership lists of such organization, requiring them to register with the federal government or to get permission before offering “paramilitary” training.

Some of the ideas were championed by Clinton adviser Dick Morris, who was known for advancing policy proposals that resonated well in polls.

“The public overwhelmingly supports a significant expansion in the FBI’s ability to investigate militia groups. If you and the Justice Department believe such an expansion would be in the public interest, I would recommend that we go ahead with it with a high profile announcement,” Morris wrote in an Oct. 6, 1995, memo to Chief of Staff Leon Panetta, as well as Deputy Chiefs of Staff Erskine Bowles and Harold Ickes.

The proposals seem to have produced widespread alarm in the administration, among Justice Department officials, White House lawyers and even other political advisers. Some worried that even reducing the proposals to writing could provoke a backlash from conservatives already wary of the federal government following high-profile showdowns at Ruby Ridge, Idaho and Waco, Texas.

“The Justice Department has stopped working on the terrorism question. They say this is because [White House Counsel Ab Mikva] instructed them that this is not information that should be on paper,” wrote Clinton White House aide Jennifer O’Connor. She’s now back at the White House, working in President Barack Obama’s counsel’s office after serving as a crisis-response lawyer handling problems at the Internal Revenue Service and with the roll-out of Obamacare.

O’Connor wrote that Mikva concluded “politically, the ideas we talked about are really bad ideas.”

“All of the lawyers analyzing these proposals (in this office and at DOJ) strongly believe it is a serious mistake—as a policy but especially as a political matter to impose militia controls of the type now being discussed, even if they would be constitutional,” Mikva and others wrote, warning that measures already announced had prompted “an unprecedented alliance” between the American Civil Liberties Union and the National Rifle Association.

“We worry that further proposals of the type being discussed could be depicted in very menacing terms to average citizens and could tip the political balance against the President,” Mikva added.

Behind closed doors

The records also offer colorful, behind-the-scenes glimpses of Bill Clinton’s candor with aides. One document shows a side of Clinton rarely seen in public as he spoke frankly about what could and could not be in his 1999 State of the Union speech.

“We can’t go around and bash the s*** out of all these people using child labor to produce all these cheap manufacturing projects and say, but we can’t sign this convention because we want to keep the Mexican children working on our farms,” he said during a discussion of child labor.

His remarks, peppered with profanity, sounded notes of humor and impatience, and underscored his desire to make the speech accessible.

“If I were listening to this pension thing, I wouldn’t know what in the living hell we were talking about,” Clinton said.

He also said one draft of the speech spent too much time on Saddam Hussein.

“It looks like we are obsessed with Saddam Hussein,” he said. “I mean, it looks like, Jesus, he’s the only guy we ever think about. There’s a whole world out there.”

An affair to remember

One former Clinton aide, speechwriter Lowell Weiss, sent a colleague a magazine article he wrote summing up the love-hate relationship many White House staffers have with their jobs.

“It has been said, accurately I think, that working in the White House is like dating the hottest woman (or man) you’ve ever seen,” Weiss observed. “You know the relationship can’t last. You know it’s not healthy for you. But man, it’s hard to give up.”

Previously secret documents

The legal authority relied on to withhold the Clinton Library records made public on Friday and earlier this year expired in January 2013, 12 years after Clinton left office. However, none of the records were released until February of this year, after POLITICO reported that the long-secret files were in limbo.

The records releases have been closely watched by political operatives and journalists alike since the files could shed light on Hillary Clinton’s White House activities and fuel questions she faces about aspects of her record as she prepares for a possible bid for the presidency.

Three days after POLITICO inquired with President Barack Obama’s White House in February about why none of the so-called previously withheld records had been released, White House lawyer David Sandler emailed the Archives, approving the release of thousands of pages of documents, records obtained under the Freedom of Information Act show.

The very next day, Clinton representative Bruce Lindsey signed off on disclosing the same batch of records — a trove so large that it has taken the library months to organize and post online.

Either Obama or Clinton could have moved to prevent disclosure of some of the records. Despite the lengthy review process, neither did, according to an Archives spokeswoman.

However, the release Friday of the final set of previously restricted records does not mean all the Clinton-era White House records are now available for public view. Far from it.

Tens of millions of pages and millions of emails have yet to be processed by archivists. In addition, some of the records that have been processed remain off-limits to the public on national security or privacy grounds. It also appears that some legal advice given to the Clintons has been deemed to be personal records, not covered by the Presidential Records Act. Records related solely to political matters have also been put off-limits under the same rationale.

Time: “Hillary Clinton’s Burden of History”

By Zeke J. Miller

October 10, 2014

[Subtitle:] Everything old is new again for the Clintons, as documents reveal White House secrets.

Buried in the 10,000 pages of documents released by the Clinton Presidential Library Friday is one bearing the customized stamp “Document Produced To Independent Counsel.”

Created to help track the untold number of documents produced for independent counsel Ken Starr’s investigations of the Clintons, the stamp is a totem of the problem that has dogged Hillary Clinton since she ran for the U.S. Senate in 2000: her history.

The Library made the documents available Friday, completing the release of 30,000 pages of previously restricted White House records on everything from the failed HillaryCare push to the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Those controversies generated internal debates and gotcha-moments now bearing out 14 years after the former First Lady and her husband vacated the White House, complicating her bid to be a repeat occupant.

Deliberations over Supreme Court appointments, controversial pardons, and meetings with foreign leaders are bared for the world to see. Even personal feuds, like that between the former president and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, are on display in the margins of official documents and notes to staff. To read the document trove is to reenter a White House at the center of political and personal maelstroms.

The stamped memo captures the mid-1990s Clinton White House at a peak of high drama. Written by Deputy White House Counsel Bruce Lindsay to prepare President Bill Clinton for an interview on the Whitewater scandals, it strikes a familiar chord for those who view the former president as deceptive and those who view him as unfairly besieged by enemies. “NOTE: Of course, it is strongly recommended that you not answer specific factual questions about Whitewater, using the appointment of a special counsel as a legitimate way to deflect questions.”

Other documents reveal Hillary Clinton’s distaste for the press, her staff’s attempts to crack down on internal leaks, and the influence of donors in the White House. Ultimately, the documents, with an audience of Washington politicos, appear neither good nor bad for Clinton as she moves towards a run for the White House in 2016. Many simply reveal another perspective of issues well-covered twenty years ago. As much as anything else does, they simply define who she is and where she’s come from, even as she contemplates a new chapter in her life.

Conventional wisdom holds that longtime Senators with equally long voting records have a harder time running for the White House than governors do, a problem that Clinton has on steroids. Unending media interest in her and her husband, a sped-up news cycle, and the country’s increasingly short attention span have made even old news of interest as Clinton looks to 2016. Republicans will try to use these documents to revive the “Clinton Fatigue” that plagued the couple’s last years in office and cast a tall shadow over her failed 2008 presidential bid.

But Clinton will benefit some, too. The documents are proof of her intimate involvement in nearly every aspect of professional Washington for more than two decades. They show the Clintons and their aides tangling with complicated policy challenges, and reveal them slowly developing skills to manage the national media amid scandal.

Ultimately, the greatest challenge Clinton faces in the documents may not be answering for past political maneuvers or the snide remarks of aides, but finding a way to simply leave the past behind.

New York Times: “National Archives Releases More Clinton-Era Documents”

By The New York Times

October 10, 2014

The National Archives released 10,000 more pages of previously undisclosed documents from the Clinton White House on Friday, with topics including Hillary Rodham Clinton’s ill-fated attempt as first lady to overhaul the health care system.

Previous disclosures often shed new light on elements of the Clinton presidency, including the administration’s scrambles after the Republicans won control of the House in 1994 and after the Monica Lewinsky scandal began to envelop the White House in 1998.

The latest disclosures are posted on the website of the William J. Clinton Library.

A First Lady Plots Her Own Political Path

In the fall of 1999, Mrs. Clinton’s staff faced a unique challenge: Figuring out how a sitting first lady could explore a run for the United States Senate. Should Mrs. Clinton’s exploratory campaign committee or taxpayers pay for her trips to New York? What if she meets with United Nations officials and attends a fund-raiser?

The conclusion: The government would pay travel costs of Secret Service agents, the White House photographer, doctors and personal aides when Mrs. Clinton traveled to New York; the campaign would pay for travel of any aides related to her run for Senate.

The math over how to split these costs was broken down in excruciating detail in these memos. A trip to Binghamton, N.Y., and New York City included “43 percent official; 22 percent exploratory committee; 36 percent political,” read one memo from the first lady’s office.

The memos highlight the untraditional tenure of Mrs. Clinton, whose political ambition and policy involvement often overshadowed the traditional role of a first lady.

Continue reading the main story

Clinton Documents

Mrs. Clinton’s role in overseeing the secretive Health Care Task Force prompted a lawsuit over whether the first lady was a private citizen or a public official. (A United States Court of Appeals declared the first lady to be a government official exempt from some disclosure requirements.)

The attempt at a health care overhaul represented a trial by fire for Mrs. Clinton, who was accused of overseeing a secretive and dysfunctional task force led by an aide, Ira Magaziner.

In a memo dated April 1995, Mr. Magaziner explains in detail his efforts to persuade the news media to report more positively on the failed task force, including a list of names of Clinton aides whom he believed to be sources on articles critical of the president and first lady’s efforts at a health care overhaul.

“I seethe inside when I think of how disloyal some administration officials have been to you and the president and how hurtful they have been to me in their private discussions with the press,” Mr. Magaziner wrote to Mrs. Clinton.

— Amy Chozick

After a Suicide, a Cryptic Note From the President

One of the most intriguing documents released on Friday is an otherwise blank sheet of paper with a cryptic note in President Clinton’s familiar left-hand scrawl.

The paper is dated June 14, 1994. “H.R.C.,” it says, using the initials for Hillary Rodham Clinton. “What did we ever decide to do on this?” And then it is signed, “B.C.”

Whatever “this” was is not mentioned. The paper was in a file marked “Vince Foster,” referring to the longtime friend of Mrs. Clinton who came from Arkansas to serve as White House deputy counsel but then committed suicide. The day before the date marked on the document, both Mr. and Mrs. Clinton were interviewed by Robert Fiske, the independent counsel then looking into Mr. Foster’s death.

— Peter Baker

Managing a Sex Scandal

On March 26, 1996, a young White House aide sent an email message up the chain of command. “This is an official request to hang the picture of President Clinton signing the telecomm bill in our office,” the aide wrote. It was signed, “Thank you. Monica Lewinsky.”

A month later, the young Ms. Lewinsky would be banished from the White House, dispatched to the nether regions of the administration by presidential advisers trying to protect the president. “Our direction is to make sure she has a job in an agency,” Patsy Thomasson, the deputy White House personnel director, wrote in a message. “We are working toward that end.”

The ultimately tragicomic White House tenure of Ms. Lewinsky echoes through some of the documents released on Friday. In hundreds of pages related to the scandal that would, to her everlasting chagrin, forever bear her name, Ms. Lewinsky is largely an off-screen character discussed endlessly by all the other players, with her own voice coming through in just that single banal, one-sentence request.

Also missing from the file are the voices of two other protagonists, Mr. and Mrs. Clinton. But the papers pull back the curtain a bit on the frenzied efforts by the people around them to deal with the burgeoning political furor touched off by the president’s sexual liaison with Ms. Lewinsky that would lead to his impeachment by the House and acquittal by the Senate.

According to the papers, Mr. Clinton received a letter from Keith Olbermann, who had left sportscasting to become a political broadcaster, apologizing for “whatever part I may have played in perpetuating this ceaseless coverage” and promising to leave the news business and head “back to my previous career in sports as quickly as possible.”

A note drafted for Mr. Clinton to send in reply had the president saying, “I’m grateful you got in touch with me, and I send you my very best wishes.”

White House aides debated whether to forgive others they deemed complicit in fanning the flames. Mickey Ibarra, a White House aide, wrote about speaking with Gov. Parris Glendening of Maryland after he criticized Mr. Clinton. “I delivered our message (it does not help any of us to pile on),” Mr. Ibarra wrote.

When the radio host Tom Joyner made comments on his show that irritated Clinton aides, one sent a message saying they should remember that the next time he asked for an interview. Another countered that Mr. Joyner was mostly on the president’s side and besides they would need him in the future. “Politics baby!!!!!” the aide wrote.

Sidney Blumenthal, a White House adviser close to Mrs. Clinton, wrote a series of messages aimed at undercutting key players in the episode. He referred to “the plotters” who were promoting the scandal and called the journalist Michael Isikoff, then of Newsweek, a “coconspirator.”

He suggested that Linda Tripp, who taped Ms. Lewinsky talking about her relationship with the president and then turned over the recordings to the independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr, may have falsified talking points she said Ms. Lewinsky had given her. If so, Mr. Blumenthal wrote, “Tripp would be a liar, a worthless witness and open to prosecution herself for lying to F.B.I. investigators.”

As for Lucianne Goldberg, the literary agent who helped Ms. Tripp bring the original accusations to Mr. Isikoff at Newsweek, Mr. Blumenthal sent a message to the reporter David Corn questioning her integrity. In the message, Mr. Blumenthal wrote that Ms. Goldberg had been sued by the author Kitty Kelley “for stealing a lot of money from her” and suggested Mr. Corn call Ms. Kelley. “Do you want Kitty’s phone number?” he asked. “I think she’d talk on background.”

Also evident in the files is a certain resignation by Clinton aides mystified by the whole episode. Paul Begala, the longtime Clinton strategist, wrote to a White House aide in 1999 looking for help in coming up with lines for an event to be presided over by the NBC journalist Tim Russert. Mr. Begala wanted to be prepared for what he presumed would be the line of questioning.

“Russert asked me 13 times in one interview what the president’s relationship with Monica Lewinsky was,” Mr. Begala wrote, trying out a line. “Hell, I don’t even know what his relationship with Al Gore is.”

— Peter Baker

Damage Control Over Whitewater Deal

More than 1,000 pages of the documents released on Friday concern the Whitewater investigation in the mid-1990s of an Arkansas real estate deal involving the first couple. Among the legal opinions, talking points and chronologies in the documents are many memos focused on how to portray the Clintons in the most favorable light.

• An unsigned memo for the president from March 1994, titled “Key Points on Whitewater for Press Conference,” said, “You and Hillary have done nothing wrong. This whole affair involves an unsuccessful investment in a minor real estate deal nearly 16 years ago. Defend H.R.C. Stress her ethics and accomplishments as a lawyer and in doing public service work. A person whose life and career have exemplified highest ethical standards and integrity.

• In another memo written that same month, a political adviser, Paul Begala, urged the Clintons to do a joint interview on primetime television. “They must be relaxed, open and forthcoming. Any sense of bitterness, anger or righteous indignation will not work,” he wrote. “A word about interaction: Mandy observes that in many joint interviews, the president defers to the first lady. This may or may not be real, and it might be as simple as Southern manners, but it’s important that the president take the lead on this issue.”

• A January 1995 memo suggests that a “Whitewater Team” be formed, the purpose of which would be to “develop and implement a coherent offensive and defensive White House strategy for responding to inquiries directed at the character of the president or Mrs. Clinton.” The proposed team was to include more than a dozen people, including lawyers, press assistants and a researcher. “The team’s central focus will be issues that involve direct challenges to the character of the president or Mrs. Clinton,” the memo said.

— Kitty Bennett

Last-Minute Pleas for Clemency

In his final days in office, President Bill Clinton and his staff were being lobbied by a host of friends arguing for pardons or other executive clemency, including one of his former lawyers, a former president and a future adviser to the current president.

But none of the documents released on Friday warned him of the firestorm that would erupt with his last-minute acts of clemency.

The most controversial of the pardons eventually issued went to the financier Marc Rich, and the documents include a letter from Dec. 19, 2000, about Mr. Rich that was sent to a Clinton aide, Bruce Lindsey, by a former White House counsel, Jack Quinn. In the letter, Mr. Quinn cited a conversation with Mr. Lindsey while in Belfast about the pardon request for Mr. Rich, his client.

“You expressed a concern that they are fugitives; and I told you they are not,” Mr. Quinn wrote, referring to Mr. Rich and Pincus Green, his partner. Mr. Quinn went on to explain that Mr. Rich and Mr. Green were living in Switzerland when they were indicted in 1983. So rather than fleeing the indictments they simply “chose not to return to the U.S. for a trial.”

“Their failure to return to New York was not a crime, and no one has ever accused them of a crime for failing to come to the U.S. for a trial,” Mr. Quinn wrote.

The letter came just a few days after Mr. Quinn sent a handwritten note to Mr. Lindsey. “I am told that Barak also raised the Marc Rich matter with the president, as has at least one other person who was told that you and I should discuss it,” Mr. Quinn wrote in that note, referring to Ehud Barak, then the Israeli prime minister.

In another plea, former President Jimmy Carter and his wife, Rosalynn, weighed in on behalf of two inmates on death row, Juan Raul Garza and David Paul Hammer, arguing that Mr. Clinton should spare them because of problems with the application of capital punishment in America.

“Renewing federal executions under these circumstances would undermine your lifelong commitment to equal justice at home,” they wrote.

And Harold Hongju Koh, then the assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights and labor who would go on to become President Obama’s top State Department legal adviser for a time, also wrote the White House about Mr. Garza, who was then scheduled to be the first federal inmate executed in nearly 40 years.

Mr. Koh advocated a moratorium on federal executions because of evidence of racial disparity in the justice system. “One of President Clinton’s greatest legacies will be his commitment to racial justice and equality,” Mr. Koh wrote. A moratorium “would reaffirm that legacy.”

In the end, Mr. Clinton pardoned Mr. Rich and Mr. Green. He postponed Mr. Garza’s execution, but the convict was put to death in June 2001 after President George W. Bush refused to grant clemency.

Mr. Hammer’s execution was postponed and his death sentence was later overturned by a judge because the prosecution had withheld statements that might have helped him. He was resentenced to life in prison, a sentence reaffirmed this summer.

— Peter Baker

Was Bill Clinton a Trekkie?

The revelation of presidential affair with a young aide would be a public relations nightmare for any White House, but some aides kept a sense of humor about it in their correspondence.

Mr. Clinton was preparing for a news conference in 1999 a week before an interview Ms. Lewinsky gave to Barbara Walters was set to air. Anticipating that reporters would ask the president whether he planned to watch the interview, James Kennedy, a White House spokesman, passed along a suggested response to his colleague, Amy Weiss.

Mr. Kennedy wrote that Mr. Clinton should say, “I have already expressed my regret for what she and others have had to go through because of things I have said and done. I wish her well in whatever she does.”

But that was not Mr. Kennedy’s original idea. He first thought about letting Mr. Clinton say bluntly that he would not be watching television that day. Frustrated that a lawyer struck that line from the proposed response, Mr. Kennedy suggested that Joe Lockhart, the White House press secretary, offer an intergalactic response.

“Perhaps Joe, if asked, can say he usually watches ‘Star Trek: Voyager’ at that hour,” Mr. Kennedy wrote. Here’s the interview Mr. Clinton might have missed while he was possibly watching the prequel to the original “Star Trek” series:

— Alan Rappeport

Hollywood Strikes Back

Mr. Clinton found some of his strongest financial support among Hollywood moguls who were not too happy when the White House introduced a Summit on Violence in the Media in the wake of the 1999 high school shooting in Columbine, Colo. In one memo, a senior adviser, Minyon Moore, writes that Andy Spahn, an adviser to several megadonors in the entertainment industry, had expressed concern about the summit meeting.

“He indicated that if this was another attempt by the White House and Congress to attack the entertainment industry and not to talk specifically about guns, that this would greatly affect” a fund-raiser scheduled with Mr. Clinton in Los Angeles, Ms. Moore wrote.

In another memo, a White House aide informs Mr. Clinton’s office that David Geffen, the producer and prominent Democratic donor, wanted his foundation mentioned at the summit meeting. “Andy Spahn from his office will try to roll us on this,” the aide wrote. “How do you want me to handle their pressure?”

— Amy Chozick

Wall Street Journal: “Clinton Documents Show White House Scrambling to Do Damage Control”

By Peter Nicholas and Colleen McCain Nelson

October 10, 2014, 7:08 p.m. EDT

[Subtitle:] Whitewater, Lewinsky Affair, Vince Foster Suicide Among Scandals Detailed in Newly Released Pages

New records released from former President Bill Clinton’s administration depict a White House scrambling to defuse a series of scandals, with aides preparing detailed strategies to protect Bill and Hillary Clinton in the face of outside investigations that dogged them over two terms.

The nearly 10,000 pages of material made public Friday by the William J. Clinton Presidential Library show White House advisers who were sometimes as suspicious of each other as of the prosecutors examining the first family’s financial dealing and use of power in the 1990s.

Files made public covered some of the lowest points of the Clinton presidency: the Monica Lewinsky sex scandal, the death of former White House Deputy Counsel Vince Foster, and the series of Arkansas and White House dealings known collectively as Whitewater.

In a five-page memo written in 1995, then-White House adviser Ira Magaziner tells Hillary Clinton of how “disloyal” administration officials had “hurt” her and her husband.

“You asked who in the administration was responsible for the harmful accounts" that had appeared in books about the White House, Mr. Magaziner wrote, suggesting who might have might have been behind the leaks.

“I seethe inside when I think of how disloyal some administration officials have been to you and the president,” he added.

The documents are part of a cache of 30,000 pages of material that had been previously withheld under laws exempting certain presidential records from disclosure. Those exemptions have expired and the library has been putting out the material on a rolling basis since February. With the release Friday, the library said it has made public all the material that had been previously held back.

Many of the records lay out intricate plans to guard the Clintons ’ public image as outside investigations ramped up.

In June 1994, White House aide David Dreyer laid out a draft communications plan for responding to Whitewater allegations. Congressional hearings on Whitewater were set to begin, and Mr. Dreyer wrote, “This is going to be a bad story. The hearings are a forum for our opponents.”

In a lengthy memo, he laid out an all-hands-on-deck approach to controlling the story line, suggesting that members of Congress should be recruited to give brief speeches saying nothing happened.

Mr. Dreyer wrote that Republicans “will stop at nothing, including torment the family of Vince Foster to advance their narrow political interests, to stop progress on health care or to hurt the president and Mrs. Clinton.”

The following month, Mr. Dreyer wrote another memo outlining the White House’s strategy for dealing with congressional hearings into Whitewater.

Among the plans: The Democratic National Committee created a video of Republican speeches during the hearings on the Iran-Contra scandal that occurred on GOP President Ronald Reagan ’s watch—to “show members what it means to be on message in support of the administration.”

Also that year, Clinton adviser Paul Begala wrote a memo to Lisa Caputo, the first lady’s press secretary, outlining a strategy for Bill and Hillary Clinton to do a joint television interview.

“In this situation, the Clintons’ attitude is their message,” he wrote in the memo, dated March 1994.

“They must be relaxed, open and forthcoming. Any sense of bitterness, anger, or righteous indignation will not work.”

One word of caution he offered, referencing campaign adviser Mandy Grunwald : “Mandy observes that in many joint interviews, the president defers to the first lady. This may or may not be real, and it might be as simple as Southern manners, but it’s important that the president take the lead on this issue.”

The trove of documents includes 229 pages related to the Lewinsky scandal—a PG-rated collection of emails and talking points that show a White House scrambling to protect Bill Clinton.

As details of the president’s relationship with Ms. Lewinsky emerge and as the threat of impeachment looms, the White House correspondence often focuses on coordinated talking points emphasizing that “a private mistake does not amount to an impeachable action.” Several emails from White House aides discuss whether someone in the West Wing was the source of stories calling Ms. Lewinsky “a stalker.”

The documents also include the White House’s response to an email from journalist Keith Olbermann, who wrote to apologize for “whatever part I may have played in perpetuating this ceaseless coverage" of the Lewinsky story.

“I’ll be heading back to my previous career in sports as quickly as possible,” Mr. Olbermann wrote.

MSNBC: “11 things we learned from today’s massive Clinton document dump”

By Alex Seitz-Wald and Aliyah Frumin

October 10, 2014, 7:37 p.m. EDT

The Clinton presidential library on Friday released almost 10,000 pages of never-before-seen documents that shed new light on the inner workings of the Clinton White House, from the salacious (Monica Lewinsky) to the political (Mike Huckabee hates Bill Clinton) to the comical (a future Supreme Court justice’s profane apology to her boss).

Here are the eleven most interesting revelations from the document dump, in no particular order:

Before she was a Supreme Court justice, Elena Kagan “really f—ked up:” While working as a lawyer in the Clinton White House in 1996, Kagan apologized to him for not keeping him informed about a television segment on the Paula Jones lawsuit. “I realize now that I may·have really f–ked up in not mentioning to you,” Kagan wrote to then-White House Counsel Jack Quinn. “God, do I feel like an idiot.” Fortunately, her career seems to have survived.

Mike Huckabee “hates” Bill Clinton: After the Columbine school shooting, Bill Clinton’s successor as governor of Arkansas, Mike Huckabee, urged the president to issue a national proclamation to promote “positive television programing.” Clinton aide appended a handwritten note to the Republican’s letter urging a “quick/warm response,” because Huckabee “hates BC [Bill Clinton]” and “is planning a Senate race against [Sen. Blanche] Lincoln.”

Pressure from Hollywood: As the White House was preparing an event that would highlight the problem with violence in the media for young people, a key Democratic money man warned of a backlash in Hollywood. Andy Spahn, an advisor to some of Hollywood’s biggest political donors, warned White House political aide Minyon Moore that the “attack [on] the entertainment industry … would greatly effect the [fundraising] event that this community will be hosting with the POTUS on May 15th in LA,” as Moore summarized it to Gore advisor Bruce Reed. “I would appreciate being kept up to date on these activities to I avoid a backlash.”

Tensions with Jimmy Carter: After Clinton launched missile strikes against a factory in Sudan thought to be used by al-Qaida in retaliation for the U.S. Embassies bombing, his Democratic predecessor called for an investigation into whether the factory actually had been producing chemical weapons. “Oh yeah, Carter’s on the case,” a national security aide commented sarcastically. ”Carter is not persuadable. His comments are over the top, no?” 

An apology on Monica Lewinsky: In 1998, then-MSNBC host Keith Olbermann wrote to Clinton apologizing for “whatever part I may have played in perpetuating this ceaseless coverage” of the Lewinsky affair story. In a reply, Clinton thanked Olbermann for his “kind message,” adding “I’m grateful you got in touch with me, and I send you my very best wishes.” Another document shows Lewinsky performing normal White House intern duties, requesting that a portrait of Clinton be hung.

Internal concern over Marc Rich pardon: Clinton’s eleventh hour pardon of billionaire would leave a black mark on his legacy, something longtime Clinton aide Bruce Lindsey foresaw before the pardon, the new documents show. Lindsey was alarmed that Rich and his wife were fugitives, but White House counsel Jack Quinn dismissed the concern. “They (understandably in my mind) chose not to return to the U.S. for a trial in light of all that had happened to them; particularly the enormous and overwhelming adverse and prejudicial publicity generated, I am sure, by the U.S. Attorney [Rudy] Guiliani.” He also criticizes Giuliani for refusing to hear “highly respected independent legal scholars” on the matter.

“A terrific backlash:” A coming back Top Health and Human Services official Peter Edelman, who would later resign in protest from the administration, expressed concern over the confirmation process for Lani Guinier, Clinton’s nominee for assistant attorney general for the Civil Rights Division. Clinton eventually – and controversially – pulled the nomination following negative press from the right attacking Guinier’s views on voting and democracy. “I am hearing that there will be terrific backlash in the black community if Lani’s nomination is pulled now … She has to have the chance to make her case,” Edelman warned the White House’s top lawyer on June 2, 1993.

“Riding a roller coaster in a hurricane:” As Hillary Clinton’s health care reform task force was getting under way, its leader Ira Magaziner warned the Clintons it would not be easy. “The health care effort is going to be like riding a roller coaster in a hurricane,” he wrote in a memo to the first couple. “If we are well organized, persistent and ‘fight like hell’ every day for the next nine months, we will succeed.”

A health care autopsy: The effort failed and Magaziner conducted an autopsy of sort in 1995, while providing extensive help to journalist  David Broder on a book about the process. “I see the inside when I think of how disloyal some administration officials have been to you,” he wrote to Hillary Clinton, “and how hurtful they have been to me in their private discussions with the press.” In addition to disloyal officials and the press, Magaziner also said the delayed process was “fatal.” He added that the delay was not the task force’s fault, but the result of external events.

Keeping the committee secret: The documents show the great lengths the administration went to keep the members of the health care task force and its proceedings secret. Top officials in various parts of the government strategized from the outset how to keep records private, and individual Freedom of Information Act Requests were elevated for discussion about senior White House lawyers. The administration was eventually sued to make the documents public, but a court sided with the White house.

Two president-elects at once? In 2000, weeks after Election Day, with no clear winner, the White House asked the Department of Justice if it could start helping both Al Gore and George W. Bush in their transition efforts. Nope, the department ruled, “since there cannot be more than one ‘President-elect’ and one ‘’Vice-President-elect’ under the Act.”

Washington Post: “Clinton presidential documents show White House amid setbacks, scandals”

By Anne Gearan

October 10, 2014, 11:57 p.m. EDT

White House aides raised questions about how to structure and describe then-first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton’s role in the 1993 attempt to overhaul the health-care system, including whether she would be considered a government employee and whether the group’s work could be kept secret, documents released Friday show.

The lawyerly exchanges among aides in the Clinton White House include suggested talking points to back up the administration’s position that Hillary Clinton could head up a task force on health-care reform without triggering a federal open-meetings requirement.

Scores of documents about the failed health-care effort were among about 10,000 pages of documents released Friday by the Clinton Presidential Library — the last batch in a series released over the past eight months. The trove of unclassified memos, correspondence, phone logs and other papers initially withheld by Clinton charts his administration’s responses to a series of scandals and setbacks.

There is a communications plan for answering questions about the Whitewater affair and the suicide of deputy White House counsel Vince Foster, and discussions about Monica Lewinsky, the Kenneth Starr report on her dalliance with Clinton, the White House travel office debacle and more.

There is also a one-line handwritten note from “BC” to “HRC” asking how one internal strategy discussion turned out.

On health care, which was the new president’s signature first-year effort, the documents show initial qualms within the administration about Hillary Clinton’s role and the plan to do much of the initial work in secret.

A Feb. 3, 1993, legal memo to Hillary Clinton offers several possible ways to structure her participation and notes potential pitfalls. Calling her a consultant, for example, could be seen as a “gimmick.”

On Feb. 17, 1993, a few weeks after Bill Clinton had announced that his wife would lead the work to draft a new federal health-care mandate, a senior lawyer at the agency then known as the General Accounting Office wrote to White House counsel Bernard W. Nussbaum.

Noting that the White House position was that the presence of Hillary Clinton on the panel did not constitute “outside influence” under a 1972 public disclosure law, lawyer Henry R. Wray asked for “further elaboration of your analysis.”

If the White House position that the task force would not be covered under the Federal Advisory Committee Act was based on a finding that its membership was made up of federal employees, “on what basis does the first lady qualify under this exemption?” Wray asked. “Are there other reasons why you believe the task force is not subject to FACA? What are the Supreme Court cases on which you are relying, and how do they apply to your analysis of the status of the task force?”

The makeup and operations of the task force quickly became the subject of a federal lawsuit, which the White House ultimately won years later. An initial procedural ruling could have slowed the task force or impeded its work, however, leading to an internal debate about whether to appeal.

Appealing might open the White House to questions about why spokespeople had initially said they were unconcerned or even pleased with the initial decision.

Proposed talking points would have had the press secretary explain it this way:

“As we told you last week, the president was pleased with the district court’s decision because the court held that everything that has happened to date is legal . . . however our lawyers at the Justice Department felt strongly that the court had made substantial errors,” that could negatively affect future cases.

The health-care effort fell apart in 1994. It remains the largest federal policy initiative closely associated with Hillary Clinton, a potential 2016 Democratic candidate for president.

She has since said that the proposed overhaul was too large and too complicated and that the Clinton administration made mistakes.

Bloomberg: “How Bill Clinton’s White House Handled Political Threats”

By Jonathan Allen, Angela Greiling Keane and Toluse Olorunnipa

October 11, 2014

The Clinton White House operated with a siege mentality for eight years, fashioning political strategies designed to preserve the first family and neutralize enemies both real and perceived, according to presidential documents released yesterday for the first time.

Those files shed new light on the approach President Bill Clinton, First lady Hillary Clinton and their aides took to dealing with political threats, including never-give-an-inch aggressiveness, detailed preparation and efforts to get favorable stories in the media.

Clinton White House aides kept track of administration officials who spoke ill of Hillary Clinton’s health-care push. The communications team asked “Sophie’s Choice” author William Styron to write an op-ed noting the 1994 anniversary of deputy White House counsel Vince Foster’s suicide to discredit a congressional investigation into an Arkansas land deal known as Whitewater.

“The one-year anniversary of Vince Foster’s suicide on July 20th in conjunction with the beginning of congressional Whitewater hearings presents an appropriate opportunity to rebut conspiracy theories over his suicide, and to directly address the political motivations of those who continue to exploit the issue,” White House officials David Dreyer and Julia Moffett wrote in a June 1994 memo.

Clinton Culture

It all added up to a fight club culture that permeated the White House and remains a part of the ethos of two-headed Clinton political operation, which would be put to work should Hillary Clinton run for president in 2016.

The documents were published online yesterday by the William J. Clinton Library in Little Rock, Arkansas, as part of a regular release of documents from his presidency.

Two of President Barack Obama’s top legal picks -- Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan and White House Counsel W. Neil Eggleston -- appear throughout the documents due to their work as Clinton associate counsels, and both were involved in seeking to limit congressional access to White House information.

A particular focus of White House aides was protecting Hillary Clinton during the Whitewater investigations.

After Bill Clinton became president in 1993, the couple endured scrutiny over a 1978 Arkansas real-estate deal they had taken part in. While several Clinton associates were convicted of fraud in the failed venture, the Clintons were eventually cleared of wrongdoing.

‘Defend HRC’

The investigations included inquiries into Hillary Clinton’s legal work for a savings and loan that failed.

For a March 24, 1994, presidential news conference, the second bullet point on a draft of talking points reads: “Defend HRC,” using the acronym for Hillary Rodham Clinton.

“Stress her ethics and accomplishments as a lawyer and in doing public-service work,” it reads. “No distance between you and HRC regarding Whitewater.”

As Bill and Hillary Clinton prepared to do a joint television interview in March of 1994, a memo from Democratic strategist Paul Begala urged the president to “take the lead.”

“In many joint interviews, the president defers to the first lady,” the memo reads. “This may or may not be real, and it might be as simple as Southern manners, but it’s important that the president take the lead on this issue.”

Other points in the Begala memo relate to defending the first lady from the public perception that she had become a “political liability” and wielded too much power in the White House.

Op-Ed Response

“Every first lady has had her share of controversy,” the memo reads. It goes on to cite high approval ratings for her in polls.

In January 1996, at least six White House aides -- including Bill Clinton’s campaign strategist Dick Morris -- helped Hillary Clinton craft an op-ed column giving her side of the story, according to the documents.

In the piece, which ran in newspapers including the Spokesman-Review in Spokane, Washington, Clinton defended herself against what she called “outrageous accusations.”

“Close to $30 million in taxpayer money has been spent investigating Whitewater,” she wrote. “But none of these exhaustive inquiries has turned up evidence that we did anything illegal, unethical or wrong.”

The current-day Obama picks -- Kagan and Eggleston -- were among Clinton aides who sought to limit how many documents were released to congressional and Government Accountability Office investigators probing Whitewater and the 1993 firings of seven employees in the White House travel office.

“The committee’s attempt to push its investigation to invade the relationship between the president and his private counsel, however, goes too far,” Kagan wrote Dec. 13, 1995 about the special Senate committee investigating Whitewater. “We cannot responsibly accede to this flagrant abuse of Congress’s investigative powers.”

Lawmaker’s Pursuit

William Clinger, Jr., a Pennsylvania Republican who served two terms in Congress, pursued the Clinton White House as chairman of the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee with his investigation of the travel office firings and subsequent response.

White House staff wrote memos detailing efforts to keep documents relating to the travel office and Whitewater investigations confidential and out of the hands of U.S. lawmakers and the GAO.

Losing Control

“We need to treat all of these investigations with the utmost seriousness,” Eggleston wrote in a June 7, 1994, memo to Lloyd Cutler, working as a special counsel to Clinton. “We will lose all control,” he wrote, if the GAO “is permitted to wander the halls and conduct interviews and review documents at its whim.”

Kagan in May 1996 apologized in a memo to Jack Quinn, then White House counsel, for not informing him of a conversation about an appearance on the “Crossfire” political TV show, using an expletive to express how much she thought she’d erred.

“God, do I feel like an idiot,” Kagan concluded in the explanation to Quinn about an appearance scheduled for “Ab” on the show. Abner Mikva was White House counsel before Quinn. The show was about a lawsuit filed by Paula Jones, a former Arkansas state employee, against Bill Clinton for sexual harassment, alleging it occurred when he was governor of the state.

Kagan spent time defending Clinton in the Jones case, which settled before going to trial. Kagan worked on it with lawyers from Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom. The team was afraid the Supreme Court would agree to hear the case, which it never did.

While most of her work related to Clinton damage control, Kagan in 1996 had to help smooth the fallout when an Olympic kayaker was arrested while paddling on the flooded Potomac River. Kagan refrained from offering a recommendation on that issue, ending her e-mail with, “What next?”

Bloomberg: “Clinton Advisers Urged White House to ‘Defend HRC’”

By Toluse Olorunnipa

October 10, 2014

President Bill Clinton’s White House staff worked for years to keep Hillary Clinton from becoming a “political liability” during investigations into the couple’s Arkansas land deal known as Whitewater.

After Bill Clinton became president in 1993, the couple endured scrutiny over a 1978 Arkansas real estate deal they had taken part in. While several Clinton associates were convicted of fraud in the failed venture, the Clintons were eventually cleared of wrongdoing.

The investigations included inquiries into Hillary Clinton’s legal work for a savings and loan that failed.

For a March 24, 1994, press conference president Bill Clinton was giving, the second bullet point on a draft of talking points reads: “Defend HRC,” using the acronym for Hillary Rodham Clinton. The memo was among the papers published online today by the William J. Clinton Library in Little Rock, Arkansas, as part of a regular release of documents from his presidency.

“Stress her ethics and accomplishments as a lawyer and in doing public service work,” it reads. “No distance between you and HRC regarding Whitewater.”

As Bill and Hillary Clinton prepared to do a joint television interview in March of 1994, a memo from Democratic strategist Paul Begala urged the president to “take the lead.”

“In many joint interviews, the president defers to the First Lady,” the memo reads. “This may or may not be real, and it might be as simple as Southern manners, but it’s important that the President take the lead on this issue.”

Career Controversy

Other points in the Begala memo relate to defending the first lady from the public perception that she had become a “political liability” and wielded too much power in the White House.

“Every First Lady has had her share of controversy,” the memo reads. It goes on to cite poll numbers that showed high approval ratings for the first lady.

“Hillary is the first First Lady to come to the job from a distinguished career of her own, independent of her husband’s,” Begala wrote. “Like many two-career couples, the Clintons have had to find their own way in uncharted waters, juggling career and family.”

In an undated document laying out questions President Clinton might receive about his wife at a news conference, he was told to tell reporters who asked when Hillary learned about a criminal referral on Whitewater to say it was “in the newspapers.” The memo recommends running that answer by lawyers before using it.

Strategic Deflect

Bill Clinton’s prepared answer, if questioned about whether he and Hillary Clinton talked about their work when he was Arkansas governor and she worked at Rose Law Firm, redirected the conversation to the issue of working women.

“Working mothers should be able to have successful careers,” Bill Clinton was told to say. “We should not be making rules that limit the career of one spouse because of the career of the other.”

In January 1996, at least six White House aides -- including Bill Clinton’s campaign strategist Dick Morris -- helped Hillary Clinton craft an op-ed column giving her side of the story, according to the documents.

In the piece, which ran in newspapers such as the Spokesman-Review in Spokane, Washington, Clinton defended herself against from what she called “outrageous accusations.”

“Close to $30 million in taxpayer money has been spent investigating Whitewater,” she wrote. “But none of these exhaustive inquiries has turned up evidence that we did anything illegal, unethical or wrong.”

Wall Street Journal blog: Washington Wire: “Clinton Docs: Health-Overhaul Postmortem Identified ‘Disloyal’ Officials”

By Peter Nicholas

October 10, 2014, 3:28 p.m. EDT

A White House memo suggests that when Hillary Clinton was first lady in the early 1990s, she was unhappy about leaks that painted her husband’s White House in an unflattering light and wanted to know who was behind the disclosures.

Ira Magaziner, then a senior adviser who helped lead Mrs. Clinton’s effort to overhaul the health-care system, sent a private memo to her in 1995 that served as a postmortem on the project’s collapse.

In the memo, Mr. Magaziner discussed his frustrations with White House colleagues who had been talking to the press and passing information he believed to be damaging.

He told her he wouldn’t retaliate in his own discussions with journalists, in part because he worried that could backfire in the 1996 reelection campaign.

He mentioned that he had been meeting with authors of a book chronicling the health-care fight, “The System” by David Broder and Haynes Johnson.

“Although I see the inside when I think of how disloyal some administration officials have been to you and the president and how hurtful they have been to me in their private discussions with the press, I decided to stick to the principle of not being critical of other administration officials and I withheld materials that would cast our colleagues in a bad light,” Mr. Magaziner wrote. “Although it is tempting, I just don’t feel it’s right to do and it could sew discord in 1996 when the book appears, which would not be helpful to the campaign.”

The memo was part of a batch of about 10,000 pages of material released Friday by the Clinton Presidential Library. Since February, the library has been releasing archival records that were previously withheld under various exemptions to public records law. Those exemptions have expired, prompting the library to put forward the records on a rolling basis. (See more coverage here.)

Mr. Magaziner’s memo goes on to discuss two other books that had come out in 1994: Bob Woodward’s “The Agenda” and Elizabeth Drew’s “On the Edge.”

“You asked who in the administration was responsible for the harmful accounts in their books,”  Mr. Magaziner wrote. “The Drew book has been especially harmful.”

He went on to list various senior Clinton administration officials he said were responsible for unflattering information in the books.

He mentioned Donna Shalala, the former Clinton Health and Human Services secretary and now president of the University of Miami.

Ms. Drew’s accounts “are mainly derived from extensive discussions she had with Donna Shalala, which were very damaging to you, me and the president,” Mr. Magaziner wrote.

He advised there was not much they could do in response.

“Unless we are prepared to show Woodward or Drew documents and respond in kind to other administration officials who trashed us, there is little we can do to make their accounts more accurate,” he wrote.

There doesn’t seem to be any lingering ill will. In February, Mrs. Clinton, a potential presidential candidate in 2016, gave a paid speech at the University of Miami. Ms. Shalala later said she negotiated a discount in which Mrs. Clinton lowered her standard price.

One who provided information for the Woodward book was Gene Sperling, Mr. Magaziner wrote.

Mr. Sperling served as an economic adviser in both the Clinton and Obama White Houses.

But he, too, appears to be on good terms with the Clintons, taking part in various panel discussions hosted by the family’s charitable foundation.

Mr. Magaziner told Mrs. Clinton that he wanted to ensure the Broder-Johnson book – which would be published two years later — wouldn’t be overly influenced by the Woodward and Drew books.

“I have shared my responses to Woodward and Drew with Broder and Johnson so they will not accept as uncontested the gossip, false descriptions and false accusations in those books,” he wrote.

The Hill opinion: A. B. Stoddard: “Clinton’s calculus”

By A. B. Stoddard

October 10, 2014, 5:30 p.m. EDT

It must be hectic at Clinton Inc. these days, what with the excitement of a newborn granddaughter, a busy speaking schedule, that yoga she’s doing and now the need to game out multiple scenarios for a coming political storm.

Sure, there is a national election in a few weeks, but commenting on the results will be the easy part for Hillary Clinton. It is what will happen after the election, and all the unknowns, that will confound a candidate so fond of painstaking planning.