Quote:Zeif-geist
Hillary Clinton was not fired from the House Judiciary Committee's Watergate investigation by Chief Counsel Jerry Zeifman.
www.snopes.com/politics/clintons/zeifman.asp
Quote:Claim: Hillary Clinton was fired from the House Judiciary Committee's Watergate investigation by Chief Counsel Jerry Zeifman.
FALSE
But as noted above, Zeifman had no authority to "terminate" Hillary. They were members of different staffs, and Zeifman had no hiring or firing authority over members of the Impeachment Inquiry staff for which Hillary worked. (That authority rested with Special Counsel John Doar and, ultimately, with House Judiciary Committee Chairman Peter Rodino.) Quite tellingly, Zeifman made absolutely no mention of having "fired" or "terminated" Hillary Rodham, nor of telling her that he "could not recommend her for any further positions,"
in his 1995 book; he only started claiming so much later. Back in 1995 he noted that Hillary had remained with the inquiry staff up until the end, leaving only when President Nixon's August 1974 resignation made the issue of impeachment moot and the Judiciary Committee's impeachment inquiry staff was therefore disbanded:
Hillary was twenty-seven when the impeachment inquiry staff was disbanded. The next morning she took a train down to Little Rock, Arkansas. She moved in with Bill Clinton and they eventually married.
And again in 1998, Zeifman was quoted in a Scripps Howard News Service article as unambiguously confirming that not only did he not "fire" Hillary, but that it was not even within his power to do so:
Jerome Zeifman, chief Democratic counsel on the House Judiciary Committee in 1974 ... does not have flattering memories of Rodham's work on the committee. "If I had the power to fire her, I would have fired her," he said.
Zeifman made no bones about having an ax to grind with Hillary Clinton (putting out the anti-Clinton paperback Hillary's Pursuit of Power in 2006), and as its blade grew sharper over the years, he quite obviously shifted his recollections of events from the 1973-74 timeframe to conform to his current point of view rather than the other way around.
Back in April 2008, Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign site responded to Zeifman's claims by asserting:
In a column circulating on the internet Jerry Zeifman alleges that Hillary was fired from her job on the House Judiciary Committee in the 1970s.
This is false. Hillary was not fired.
They also noted that the Washington Post's reviewer found (as we did) much of Zeifman's book to be mere repetition of speculation with little or no evidence to substantiate it:
[The book] will surely excite conspiracy buffs on the lookout for sinister coverups in high places. But those wary of such unsubstantiated theories (myself included) will find Zeifman's book an unconvincing, if imaginative, tale of intrigue.
The lack of evidence makes his theory hard to swallow. Zeifman's most reliable source — his diary — contains few revelations and seems little more than a chronicle of his suspicions and speculations. The book's jacket cover, which promises readers "truths even more startling than those brought out in Oliver Stone's movies 'Nixon' and 'JFK', " does not help matters. Perhaps the book's publicists forgot that "Nixon" and "JFK" were, after all, only Hollywood movies.
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