Nicholas reports that large amounts of the records for other First Ladies have been made public. The issue is not one of privacy or of privilege except as it pertains to her advice to her husband. After all, Hillary can hardly argue that she’s entitled to executive privilege on her own, since she never served as an official member of the White House staff, let alone as President. Furthermore, Rosalynn Carter and Barbara Bush never ran for the Presidency on the strength of their experience as First Ladies.While Hillary might not be able to claim executive privilege as the First Lady, she can probbably claim spousal privilege in most cases (assuming she is asked to testify about that material--I am not sure if it applies to her "work" during her tenure as First Lady in terms of documentary releases).
Hillary can’t have this both ways. If she wants to run on her record as First Lady, then let’s see the record and find out what exactly she did. She needs to open the files — all of the files — and allow voters to see her actions and how her experience would benefit her candidacy.
However, Morrisey is right, it seems hardly politic to claim experience and then fail to release documents related to that experience. From the limited amount of material released so far, mostly having to do with her health care experience, there are some contradictions. Haynes Johnson and David Broder wrote a book called The System: The American Way of Politics at the Breaking Point, about the effort on the Clinton Healthcare plan, and the reporting on Hillary Clinton's activities was none to flattering.
Opening up those documents would be a treasure trove for opposition research, but with over 2 million documents and problably uncounted emails, such material would take a very long time to go through and would probably reveal an awful lot of mundane material for just one or two real nuggets. Is it worth the effort for opposition research? Maybe, but it would be expensive.
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