Clinton Schedule to Go Public

THE FIRST-LADY YEARS

Clinton Schedule to Go Public

The William J. Clinton Presidential Library in Little Rock plans to make public today more than 11,000 pages of Hillary Rodham Clinton's daily schedule for her eight years in the White House as first lady.

The documents, which could give the clearest picture yet of her role in her husband's administration, are being released in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed nearly a year ago. The Clinton library, part of the National Archives and Records Administration, notified a federal court this month that it had finally completed a line-by-line review of all the daily schedules it had found and would release them before a status hearing scheduled for tomorrow.

"It is about time," Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch, the watchdog group that spent much of the Clinton years probing various scandals, said in a statement. "We're pleased, thanks to Judicial Watch's lawsuit, that the American people will be able to review Hillary's daily schedule records. The Clintons slow-pedaled this process but were unsuccessful in delaying the document release any further."

The Clinton library is still reviewing another 20,000 pages of material that may be responsive to Judicial Watch's request, including telephone logs, and told the group that those may take one or two years to process. Fitton said it "would be an injustice" to not put out the telephone logs until after this year's presidential election and noted that his group went back to court Monday seeking a judge to intervene further.

The 11,046 pages to be released today include schedules of meetings, trips, speaking engagements and social activities for nearly the entire time that Clinton was first lady. The library said it initially found no schedules for 32 days in the files of Patti Solis Doyle, Clinton's scheduling director in the White House (and later her campaign manager until she departed last month after a series of primary losses). Subsequent searches found schedules for 27 of those missing days in other files, officials said. No schedules have been found for the remaining five.

Additionally, the library said it withheld schedules for the first 19 days of January 1993 before Bill Clinton's inauguration as president since she was not yet first lady.

Judicial Watch has a separate lawsuit pending against the archives seeking records related to the health-care task force that Hillary Clinton led during her husband's first term. Hillary Clinton has not released her most recent tax returns but promised to do so before the April 22 primary in Pennsylvania.

-- Peter Baker

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