Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton cites her experience as a compelling reason voters should make her president, but nearly 2 million pages of documents covering her White House years are locked up in a building here, obscuring a large swath of her record as first lady.
Clinton's calendars, appointment logs and memos are stored at her husband's presidential library, in the custody of federal archivists who do not expect them to be released until after the 2008 presidential election.
A trove of records has been made public detailing the Clinton White House's attempts to remake the nation's healthcare system, following a request from Bill Clinton that those materials be released first. Hillary Clinton led the healthcare effort in 1993 and 1994.
But even in the healthcare documents, at least 1,000 pages involving her work has been censored by archives staff because they include confidential advice and must be kept secret under a federal law called the Presidential Records Act. Political consultants said that if Hillary Clinton's records were made public, rivals would mine them for scraps of information that might rattle her campaign.
"Those files -- that's the mother lode of opposition research," said Ray McNally, a Republican political consultant in Sacramento. "Opposition researchers would be very hungry to see what's there." Robert Shrum, senior political strategist in Democratic Sen. John F. Kerry's 2004 presidential campaign, said: "In 2 million pieces of paper, would opposition researchers hope to find one where she wrote a memo saying, 'I wish I'd never gotten involved in healthcare?' Sure. That's what they'd love to find."
At the Clinton library overlooking the Arkansas River, federal archivists clad in protective smocks are sorting through 80 million pages of records and another 20 million e-mails from a Clinton presidency that ended in January 2001. About 2 million of those pages concern the first lady's office.
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