Title: Did Jerry Zeifman Fire Hillary Clinton from the Watergate Investigation? | Snopes.com
Headings: Did Jerry Zeifman Fire Hillary Clinton from the Watergate Investigation?
Did Jerry Zeifman Fire Hillary Clinton from the Watergate Investigation?
A 26-year-old Yale Law School graduate then known by her maiden name of Hillary Rodham worked on the Watergate inquiry.
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Content: She was an unethical, dishonest lawyer. She conspired to violate the Constitution, the rules of the House, the rules of the committee and the rules of confidentiality.” How could a 27-year-old House staff member do all that? Zeifman said she was one of several individuals who engaged in a seemingly implausible scheme to deny Richard Nixon the right to counsel during the investigation. The actions of Hillary and her cohorts went directly against the judgment of top Democrats, up to and including then-House Majority Leader Tip O’Neill, that Nixon clearly had the right to counsel. In order to pull this off, Zeifman says Hillary wrote a fraudulent legal brief, and confiscated public documents to hide her deception. The brief involved precedent for representation by counsel during an impeachment proceeding. When Hillary endeavored to write a legal brief arguing there is no right to representation by counsel during an impeachment proceeding, Zeifman says, he told Hillary about the case of Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, who faced an impeachment attempt in 1970. “As soon as the impeachment resolutions were introduced by (then-House Minority Leader Gerald) Ford, and they were referred to the House Judiciary Committee, the first thing Douglas did was hire himself a lawyer,” Zeifman said. The Judiciary Committee allowed Douglas to keep counsel, thus establishing the precedent.