Senator Clinton’s First Lady Schedules are Released

On March 19, 2008, the William J. Clinton Presidential Library and the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) released 11,046 pages of First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton’s White House schedules. These records are available on-line at the Clinton Library website. (click here) The records are being released in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch.

Of the 11,046 pages of schedules that are being opened, 4,746 have redactions. The majority of the redactions initially appear to pertain to the privacy interests of third parties, including their social security numbers, telephone numbers, and home addresses, and security measures taken by the Secret Service. Given the sheer volume of the material, it will take some time for the media and Senator Clinton’s opponents to scour through the thousands of pages in search of anything potentially damaging to her presidential campaign.

These schedules are from the First Lady’s Staff files of Patti Solis Doyle, Special Assistant to the President and Director of Scheduling for the First Lady. Doyle was responsible for the First Lady’s schedule from 1993 to 1998, and then assumed additional responsibilities as Director of Advance for the First Lady throughout the rest of the Clinton Administration. Arranged chronologically, these records document in detail the activities of the First Lady, including meetings, trips, speaking engagements and social activities for the eight years of the Clinton Administration.

This file series includes schedules for 2,888 days. Clinton Library archivists processing these records subsequently determined that schedules for 32 days were not included in this series; however, schedules for 27 of those days have now been located, and will be processed as soon as possible.

In addition, schedules for the first 19 days in January 1993, prior to the inauguration of President Clinton and prior to Mrs. Clinton’s tenure as First Lady, have been closed in full in accordance with the Presidential Records Act.

In related news, this week a U.S federal district court judge granted Judicial Watch’s motion to conduct discovery into the procedures used by NARA to process its requests for records at the Clinton Library. In court documents filed earlier this month, the Archives told the court it would be one to two years before it could begin processing the approximately 20,000 pages of telephone logbooks that were requested by Judicial Watch under a Freedom of Information Act request filed in 2006.