Hillary Clinton's chickens coming home to roost

When the Antoin “Tony” Rezko story broke, followed by the ABC News report on the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah Wright Jr., a number of pundits responded by saying, “This is why Hillary Clinton is still in the race—if she hangs in long enough, something may come up that knocks Barack Obama out of it.” Now, however, it looks like that might have backfired on her. Having first undermined her own credibility (and taken some of the heat off Sen. Obama) with her Tuzla story, which gave the Obama campaign a wonderful opportunity to call her a liar who can't be trusted, now she's facing an accusation from the past along the same lines. As a 27-year-old lawyer, thanks to a recommendation from one of her former law professors, Hillary Rodham was given a job on the staff of the House Judiciary Committee, working on the Watergate investigation, under the supervision of that committee's chief of staff and general counsel, a lifelong Democrat named Jerry Zeifman. When President Nixon's resignation ended the investigation, Zeifman unceremoniously fired her and refused to give her a recommendation.

Why?

“Because she was a liar,” Zeifman said in an interview last week. “She was an unethical, dishonest lawyer. She conspired to violate the Constitution, the rules of the House, the rules of the committee and the rules of confidentiality.”

The reason for her “unethical, dishonest” behavior was an attempt to deny President Nixon legal counsel during the investigation, a point which was ultimately rendered moot by his resignation. Whether it makes matters better or worse that her motives were political rather than personal, I'll leave to others to decide; but as Ed Morrissey observes, “all of this forms a pattern of lies, obfuscations, deceit, and treachery.”

And for anyone who might want to argue that it's his word against hers, or that Zeifman is making stuff up, not so fast: he kept a diary at the time in which all this is recorded, and at the time, “he could not have known in 1974 that diary entries about a young lawyer named Hillary Rodham would be of interest to anyone 34 years later.” Voters may well decide that this doesn't really matter (especially since it was only Nixon, after all), and Sen. Clinton's campaign may survive this; but there's no honest way to pretend it didn't happen, and to my way of thinking, it casts a truly ugly light on both her character and her judgment.

HT: Power Line