In an interview with C-SPAN’s Brian Lamb slated to air tomorrow, former President Bill Clinton discussed his presidential records and the recent debate over their release.
“I want the records out there,” said Clinton. “I want to push the release of more, including the request for documents about Hillary’s time in the White House. They’ll show how hard she worked on a wide variety of issues, and what she did in her travels around the world to advance America’s cause. So, I’d like it if the records got out there.”
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But Clinton rejected that he or his wife, Sen. Hillary Clinton, have anything to hide. “I don’t think people understand how time consuming it is,” said Clinton. “If there’s anything tobe learned by the records, let them show it. …I think that I’m entitled to the benefit of a doubt here. Obviously, I’m not trying to cover anything up. I’m trying to get this stuff out.”
“I think we have to follow the law,” Clinton told Lamb. They’re not my records, and it’s not my law.
Lamb conducted the interview at the Clinton Presidential Library and got the former president to open up on some other topics.
Osama Bin Laden: “In my second term we were virtually obsessed, my security team and I were, with Osama bin Laden. I knew he was an intelligent, resourceful, profoundly committed person. I thought he had the courage of his convictions, which I deplored. I completely disagree with him. But it made him a very formidable adversary. And we spent an enormous amount of time, both the – tracking him before the embassy bombings and afterward. It was only after 9/11 that it looked as if Al Qaeda might have had some involvement in Black Hawk Down in Somalia. No one thought that at the time, nobody thought they were operational. We had no information that they were involved in that or the first World Trade Center bombing. But we knew by certainly this last three years of my second term that he was a very formidable, dangerous person who ought to be thwarted wherever possible and captured if possible, and if not killed if possible. Because he was determined to do that to us.”
On his impeachment: “So it was a fight for power. It was nothing but power. And almost 70 percent of the American people saw it for that. They knew exactly what was going on. And if you remember, there were hundreds and hundreds of constitutional scholars, including a lot of Republicans, who didn’t vote for me ever who signed an ad, a full-page ad in The New York Times, 800 of them against impeachment. They knew it was a total abuse of the constitution. And it shows you the difference in their party and ours. There’s no question that Iran-Contra, for example, constituted impeachable offenses. That is there were high crimes and misdemeanors of a political nature.”
On whether his library gives the impeachment an honest, fair treatment: “My presentation of this in the library is what I honestly believe it was, and people are perfectly free to disagree with me. But when they do, they ought to be called upon to talk about the facts that they don’t discuss, and I would be happy actually at some point we probably ought to have a broader treatment of it, you know, let people come in and argue both sides. But the public rendered their judgment, and they were right, and they helped to save the Constitution. The American people helped to save the Constitution against people who wanted power more than Constitutional government.”
On Newt Gingrich’s role in the impeachment process: “It was – and exactly what Newt Gingrich admitted to Erskine Bowles, my chief of staff, it was. When Erskine asked him if he thought he was being hypocritical, and he said ‘of course.’ ‘And he said do you think this is justified byconstitution law or history?’ ‘Of course not.’ ‘Why are you doing it?’ ‘Because we can.’ ‘We’re doing it because we can, and because we know once we do it we can rely on many people in the press to always say we did it without ever saying it was illegitimate.’ I mean, I like Gingrich because I like a fellow that’ll tell you the truth about what his motivations are and why they’re doing it. He thought it was something where he could manipulate the press in the present and the historians in the future. And maybe spook the Democrats into running me off. And I think he knew me well enough by then to know that he couldn’t spook me and run me off.”
