Reply #35: Redacted!

[ProSense]

***Redacted! So how scrubbed were those Hillary Clinton schedules? Scrubbed enough that the names of David "redacted" Kendall and Bob "redacted" Bennett apparently never appeared on them. As expected, the schedules didn’t reveal that much. If anything, they only served as a tool to distract a lot of media to comb through them to find, well, nothing other than to attempt to recreate salacious days during some of the more dramatic moments of the Clinton years. The collective press corps now eagerly awaits those tax returns. When they’re released, will Yucaipa become a household name? Of course, the release of these schedules gives the appearance of transparency, even though there was a lot that was redacted. This could turn out to be a helpful talking point for the Clinton campaign as they fight this message meme that they aren't being transparent about their post-presidency income and the Clinton library donations.

(emphasis added)

The Early Word: Clinton Papers Reveal Little

By Ariel Alexovich

More than 11,000 pages documenting Hillary Rodham Clinton’s tenure as first lady were released yesterday, and they contain “all the emotional punch of a factory-worker’s timecard,” concludes John M. Broder of The New York Times.

After poring over the data, he notes that the documents’ many redactions make it difficult to judge the scope of Mrs. Clinton’s influence on policy, since many of the pages include vague listings such as “private meeting.”

<...>

“What the schedules do show, however,” writes The Wall Street Journal, “is that Mrs. Clinton had some involvement in an issue that she now says she opposed: the North American Free Trade Agreement. As first lady, Mrs. Clinton presided over meetings where Nafta was discussed, the schedules show. Her husband signed the accord.”

And The Washington Post notes other “tantalizing tidbits”:

She spent time with fundraiser Denise Rich at a New York ball in late 2000, just weeks before the president provoked wide criticism by pardoning Rich’s ex-husband, Marc, a commodities trader who had fled the country to avoid tax-evasion charges. She held four private meetings with her chief of staff, Maggie Williams, on the day in 1996 that an aide presented old law firm billing records subpoenaed two years earlier in the Whitewater investigation.

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