All in good time, my pretty…

What does Hillary Clinton have to hide? Maybe nothing, but if so, why is she refusing to make public the papers that she accumulated when she was First Lady? That includes nearly 2 million pages of documents covering her White House years — including calendars, appointment logs and memos — according to the Los Angeles Times.

To be fair, Mike Huckabee is also refusing to release thousands of boxes of papers from his tenure as governor of Arkansas. But Mike Huckabee is a long-shot candidate for the Republican presidential nomination. Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, is the leading candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, and her own campaign takes every opportunity to suggest that her nomination is inevitable. So the refusal of Bill Clinton to release his presidential papers is of particular importance.

What is particularly telling is how the Clintons run the William J. Clinton Presidential Library, which has earned the moniker “Little Rock’s Fort Knox.” Newsweek reported in its October 27 issue that “Nearly three years after the Clinton Library opened—and more than 21 months after its trove of records became subject to the Freedom of Information Act—barely one half of 1 percent of the 78 million pages of documents and 20 million e-mail messages at the federally funded facility are public, according to the National Archives.” Keep in mind that the Clinton Library is funded by federal tax dollars, not by the Clintons, who are certainly wealthy enough to fund it on their own, should they wish to.

To make matters worse, Bill Clinton has tried to mislead the public about his attempts to prevent release of his presidential papers, and Hillary’s campaign refuses even to respond to questions for comment. The former president has tried to blame his successor for the non-release of his presidential papers, but documents obtained by Newsweek — including a letter from Bill Clinton dated 6 November 2002 to the National Archives — clearly indicate that it is the Clintons themselves who are preventing the public release of their White House papers. While Bill Clinton may be within his legal rights to put his presidential papers under lock and key, Newsweek concludes, “Clinton’s directives, while similar, also go beyond restrictions placed by predecessors Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, neither of whom put any controls over the papers of their wives.”

It is sheer hypocrisy on Hillary’s part to keep her papers out of public reach until after November 2008 while at the same time blasting the Bush administration for its culture of secrecy. The Bush/Cheney culture of secrecy is not limited to the Bush White House and there is every prospect that it will continue if Hillary Clinton is elected president.