AP News, January 30th, 2008
Hillary Rodham Clinton's daily schedules as first lady will be forwarded to former President Clinton by Friday for review, the first of two steps without a fixed time limit before any are released to the public, the National Archives said Wednesday.
Former President Clinton will have 30 days — possibly longer, if he requests an extension — to review the 10,000 pages of his wife's daily schedules before they will be sent to the White House for its review, said Susan Cooper, a spokeswoman for the National Archives. The Bush administration does not have a time limit to review the documents before they can be released, Cooper said.
Last year, Clinton faced criticism from her fellow Democratic presidential rivals over the number of White House documents from her husband's administration that have not been made public.
The daily schedules are currently held at Clinton's library here, which is part of the presidential library system operated by the National Archives.
The stack of schedules "still has two more layers of review to go through," Cooper told The Associated Press on Wednesday. Longtime Clinton adviser Bruce Lindsey will review the documents for Clinton.
Archivists have been sorting through 80 million pages of documents and 20 million e-mails at the library from Bill Clinton's eight years in office, but few records have come out of the library in response to Freedom of Information requests since it began accepting them in January 2006. The library processes requests based on when they were received.
The daily schedules are the focus of a lawsuit a conservative public interest group has filed against the archives seeking the release of the former first lady's records, including phone logs and other files. Judicial Watch has also sued in federal court seeking the release of documents related to a White House task force Clinton headed as first lady.
President Clinton put his wife in charge of the task force early in his presidency to propose an overhaul of national health care policy. The effort eventually failed to muster support in Congress.
Cooper said those documents are still being processed by library archivists and did not know when they would be forwarded to Lindsey.
