I had interned for her, i think after my first year, maybe and again, i think thats right, i wanted to go to work with her so i moved to cambridge and began working, doing investigations and litigation around issues like the incarceration of juveniles with adults in adult prisons or the effort to give tax exempt status to private segregated academies so they didnt have to pay taxes issues like that. Expanding childcare, Getting Better conditions for migrant workers. Thats the kind of work we were doing. And thats what i started doing when i graduated and went right to cambridge to work for her. Please tell us about the call from sec. Clinton this is a very funny series of actions. I was down visiting bill in arkansas, i think it was right after christmas, if i remember. Either right before or after. Bills phone raining and rang and he got a call from john door. And john door said, i have been asked to put together a team of lawyers for the House Judiciary Committee to investigate whether there are grounds for impeachment of president nixon and i have a list of people that im going over and youre at the top of the list if you would like to come to work and bill said well, actually, im going to run for congress, so i cant. And then bill said, well who else is on your list . And john said, well, mike conway, Rufus Cormier and Hillary Rodham and bill said, oh well Hillary Rodham is standing right here so he passed me the phone and john door asked me if i wanted to go to work in washington for the impeachment inquiry staff. I said, yes im very honored to be asked and so shortly some time after the first of the year, i left my job at the Childrens Defense Fund and moved to washington and went to work for john door. Timothy how long did you think this was going to last . You said yes. Sec. Clinton i dont know that i thought like that, tim. I think when youre really young and just starting out, how long does a job take . I didnt even know what the job was at that point. I had no time table at all. Timothy was there any concern on the future president s and your part that your doing this might somehow affect his ability to run . Sec. Clinton no, no. First of all, he was running for congress a race which he lost, by the way. If he had not been running for congress, i believe its very likely he would have said yes because a chance to work with john door on such a historic assignment like this and youre just a really young, out of law school lawyer, hard to say no to that. Bill never gave it a Second Thought about my doing it. Timothy did he talk to ray thornton about this . Sec. Clinton i have no idea. Timothy so in january you arrive. Joe woods thinks it was january 19. It doesnt matter which day it was. When you arrive, youre among the first. Sec. Clinton i think thats right, yes. Those of us from yale who were going to be the youngest lawyers on the team, my memory is we all got there about the same time but thats just what i remember. And it was a startup law firm. It had to be put together. There were a group of senior lawyers that john either knew or knew of that he had recruited and then there were us. I mean, there werent very many lawyers in the middle between people like john door and joe woods and Bernie Nussbaum and richard gill, people like that, who had a lot of experience already in the law some of them in government. And then us newly minted lawyers. Timothy this may surprise people who watch this. But there was an effort to make this a single committee, though there were people chosen by the minority staff. And one of those that met you right off the bat was bill weld. Sec. Clinton thats right timothy can you tell us what you remember . Sec. Clinton there was an effort. The minority hired burt jenner who started this massive law firm, jenner and block. And both jenner and door were experienced lawyers had really done complicated cases either civil rights or business or any other of the challenges lawyers face. So bill weld was there very early. He was one of the first people that i met and i got to know and i worked with. And it was a great team. And i think we all felt like we were on the same team. I never had the feeling that there was the majority and the minority staff. Obviously, they were hired by different members but we worked very hard to overcome any sense of separation. Timothy people looking back on that era will think there was a certain inevitability about what happened. When you started out, you were supposed to look for grounds for impeachment but john door wasnt asking you for prosecutorial sec. Clinton thats right. I think there are several aspects of this that i hope historians and citizens, particularly young people, understand. There were three big challenges that door wanted us to meet. One was, well, what are the grounds for impeachment. There had been andrew johnson. There had been a number of judges who had been impeached. But the team looking at that and i was a very small part of that doing the research that team was looking all the way back to Early English precedent since the founders took the idea, obviously, from the common law. There was the issue of how do you proceed, how do you actually set up an appropriate process to consider all of these issues. And then the third was, what are the facts and how do we understand the facts. So there was a team working on grounds for impeachment how you described what high crimes and misdemeanors were, how it needed to relate to abuse of office and power, if it were in keeping with the precedents such as they were. And then there was the process standards that i worked on a lot about, ok, what do we do and how do we do it and what is our role compared to the role of the committee. And then finally the facts. And this was a method that door had used in the Justice Department and probably in his law practice in wisconsin, and they were statements of information. They were not characterized as evidence because we concluded that it wasnt our job to make a prosecutorial case and present the evidence that supported that case, but rather to present the facts to the committee and then the committee would form their own conclusions. So i often laugh thinking about it but we had these little node cards and we were supposed to put one fact on a note card. For example, we were warring working on this and door said go back to the beginning, who is Richard Nixon, how did he get where he is. So a fact would be, richard mill house nick nixon was born on and in pennsylvania. And he would say no, those are two facts. Apparently in johns practice he would use cards to find patterns and if he didnt have enough of the facts, he couldnt deduce the patterns. So we learned i mean, thats why we had these little cards and they attempted, as i recall, some method in the library to organize and sort them. But, you know, really computers were not in common use and i think john preferred his system anyway. So we spent a lot of time doing these cards and looking for anything that could be a piece of information that might go into the presentation we would make to the committee. Timothy is it true they used knitting needles to sort the cards . Sec. Clinton i think that was a shortlived experiment. I dont remember because i wasnt really doing it. But, yeah, you took the fact which was predominantly handwritten, at least the ones i did were handwritten, then it was like transferred on to a punch card and then the punch cards had certain holes in them and the idea was, it was so primitive, that if you took a knitting needle and you had a stack of these cards and you were looking for his childhood experiences or the committee to reelect the president , whatever it might be, you would take a knitting needle and you would go through and pick up the cards that would have the hole in a certain place. I think it was a lot easier if you just kept the cards in front of you and shuffled them around and i would see john and some of the senior lawyers talking about that and whats the significance of this piece of information and how does it fit and what does it tell us. Timothy governor weld told a story, when you arrived, when both of you arrived, john door said to you on a friday, would you please produce a memo, grounds for impeachment, for tuesday. I wont ask for monday because i want you to have a weekend. It would take lawyers a long time to figure it out. How did you approach this problem . Im sure you didnt study this in law school. Sec. Clinton no, but bill weld is absolutely right. We never had a weekend. We worked, you know, 16, 18hour days. We sometimes would leave the building to go to dinner but then go right back. So this first assignment was just the beginning of what would be the most intense effort that one could imagine. And the grounds for impeachment was part of the research that i contributed to. The procedures how are we going to do this . Is this a trial . The trials really in the senate. So what is it that the house does . And how do we set ourselves up to serve the house . And so i worked closely with joe woods on what the procedures are. In fact, there is a picture of me sitting at the table with door and woods appearing before, if i remember right, one of the subcommittees of the Judiciary Committee to present ideas about process. Timothy maybe congressman castlemire . Sec. Clinton that sounds right yeah. Timothy and hungate . Sec. Clinton that sounds right. Timothy help people understand the difference between a committee and a grand jury. Sec. Clinton a grand jury is first and foremost part of the executive branch of our government. A grand jury, in a federal matter is convened by a u. S. Attorney or by the Justice Department for the purpose of presenting evidence to determine whether the grand jury will bring an information or indictment against whoever the target of the potential prosecution might be. Its proceedings are supposed to be absolutely secret. The person being questioned does not go in with a lawyer. You go in all by yourself and youre there with whoever the prosecutor has investigators f. B. I. Whoever it might be. And then theres a grand jury made up of citizens from the area. The Judiciary Committee is part of the congress and the congress has the Sole Authority for determining impeachment. The house brings the articles of impeachment, if they so decide. The senate conducts the trial. And for us, we were asked by door and i think this probably came frequently from rodino and others on the committee, to recognize that they were the authority. It wasnt our job to present an article of impeachment. It was our job to present information, to present the legal standards in whatever process we agreed upon and then it was up to the committee to determine whether it would move forward. Timothy to what extent were you involved in the debate over whether james sinclair, the president s lawyer, should be in the proceedings. Sec. Clinton i was not involved in that. I knew about it. That was really among the senior lawyers led by door and the house members. And my memory is that they were very expansive in permitting sinclair to be privy to information, to be part of the process. But i dont know that any more details timothy did you have to do any research on subpoenas . Sec. Clinton i dont recall doing that because we were in a position to negotiate. Remember the Watergate Committee had already subpoenaed and obtained a wealth of information and part of the process that door had to go through is to work out an agreement with the Watergate Committee senator irvin to share what theyd already gotten, either voluntarily or through subpoena. That included the tapes, to a great extent. So i dont recall us but i dont have perfect knowledge of this, either. I dont recall us having to subpoena. We had to work out agreements and maybe as part of that there was a subpoena that had to be either issued or quashed. I dont recall. Timothy that was a long time ago. But were in your 20s and youre part of a group thats trying to figure out an issue that this country hadnt looked at for a century. Sec. Clinton right. Timothy some people like bill weld, for example, started out by thinking that an Impeachable Offense is a crime and then he changed his mind. I know it was a long time ago. Can you remember how the research affected the way you thought about it . Sec. Clinton similar to bill weld, once i had done the research, it seemed clear to me that the president was not above the law, the president did have certain authorities certain standing. So it didnt require that there be a crime charged in order for there to be an Impeachable Offense. But what that Impeachable Offense was often keyed to what we think of as criminal behavior. So obstruction of justice is a crime and whether a president is ever charged with obstruction of justice or not would be, the obstruction of an investigation can represent abuse of power that rises to the level of high crimes and crimes and misdemeanors and be the basis of an article of impeachment. Timothy do you remember thinking about the theme of standards of evidence, such as beyond a reasonable doubt the constitution didnt say anything about that. Sec. Clinton right. But thats why i think door was very careful in what he eventually presented to the committee. I think he believed that the whole enterprise really turned on their being sufficient evidence not necessarily to the level of beyond a reasonable doubt, for a criminal matter, but certainly enough to be persuasive, clear and convincing because this was in effect the charging mechanism. If there had been a trial, then i think door would have had to pivot toward a more explicit reliance on beyond a reasonable doubt because that would be how the public would perceive it but there was no real guidelines for that because what did it mean and who got to determine it. Well, in the end of the day, the articles were passed. Some came out by the house. The trial was held by the senate. And they had the right, under the constitution, to impose their own understanding of what an Impeachable Offense was. Timothy one the debates that some of the fence sitters had was should you vote for an article of impeachment if you dont think the senate will vote to remove. So they were already thinking about the trial. Sec. Clinton right. Well, i think thats one way of looking at it and it certainly is defensible but i think another way of looking at it is that if you are persuaded that the president has abused power committed a high crime or misdemeanor, then its up to the proof that has to be presented in a trial to determine whether twothirds of the senate agrees with that. And remember, the senators could bring whatever assessment they wanted to this determination. And you couldnt secondguess that. You wouldnt preempt that. It had to be left to them. Timothy as you were doing this research, what were the surprises for you . Sec. Clinton well, it hadnt happened in a president ial setting for 100 years and there was a lot wrong with what was done to andrew johnson. He was hardly a paragon of political rectitude. But it was more than it should have been, in our assessment, a proceeding based on politics, not on evidence of high crimes or misdemeanors, however one defined that. So 100 years later you have a crime, the breakin of watergate. You have a very vigorous investigation going on through the congress already, through the Watergate Committee. And so we were trying to impose an understanding of the law and the history combined with a process that would be viewed as fair, providing due process, to the president if articles of impeachment were decided. So we were trying to rely on precedent as much as we could but we were kind of making it up based on our best understanding of the law as we researched it. Timothy secrecy was important. Sec. Clinton totally. Timothy how did mr. Door enforce secrecy . Sec. Clinton i think that, first of all, there were no cell phones. That makes a big difference. But i think he, by just force of character, made it clear to all of us. We did not know where this was going to end up. I certainly didnt. I didnt come in to it with any preconceived notion that, ok, this will be easy, well lay out this stuff and the house will be impeached and hell be convicted in the senate. I certainly didnt do that. Because it was such a historic experience, we all felt the weight of that responsibility. And john made very clear that we would be betraying our duty as lawyers and our historic obligation if we talked. And when we would occasionally go out for lunch the building where we were working would be staked out by reporters who would be yelling at us. I particularly remember Sam Donaldson who had a really loud yell and he got to know the names of the lawyers so he would yell hillary, hillary, come talk to me. So we would walk by. I remember when i appeared at one of the hearings with door and joe woods before i went over there, because door wanted to take me because i had done so much of the work and i appreciated it. He said dont talk to anybody. Dont make facial expressions dont betray any opinion. Were there just to make a presentation to the members of the committee. So it was a matter of honor that we would maintain the secrecy that was so critical for this whole investigation. Timothy there were a lot of leaks but they werent from the staff. Sec. Clinton no, they werent they werent. Not from the staff. Timothy how many women were with you on the team . Sec. Clinton i dont know. I want to say maybe i can call the names, see the faces of five. There might have been more but those are the ones i interacted with the most. Timothy i think on joe woods team on his task force, you had john linwoods, david haines. After mr. Woods leaves in may, is that when you moved to bernies team . Or did bernie take over . Keithcan you remember what happened when mr. Woods left . Sec. Clinton i really cant remember. I remember working closely with joe, particularly with the standards to be applied. Working with john llamavits on the grounds for impeachment along with bill weld. I shared an office with tom bell who was very focused on agri get igating and recording the facts, statements of information. So i dont remember. I do remember that starting in early summer, maybe this was through bernie i began listening to tapes and i began to listen to the tapes of president nixon talking to his staff members, talking to henry kissinger, talking to his filipino valet. And i particularly remember what we call the tape of tapes which was Richard Nixon taping himself listening to tapes. And i was one of several people whose job it was was to try to, insofar as possible, perfect the transcription. So we would sit there with the headphones on just exhaustingingly listening, trying to make out words. Some of the transcription already occurred but some of it was garbled. It was not at all clear. But the tape of tapes was a big revelation to me. I had no idea that we would be taping himself listening to tapes and coming up with rationalizations so he would call somebody into the room and he would say i want to play this for you now, when i said that, heres what i meant. It was really a shocking experience. Timothy what do you think you concluded that the president then president , was involved in a coverup . Sec. Clinton i think for me it was listening to the tapes, and particularly the socalled tape of tapes, because it was almost a textbook example of someone trying to get stories straight and getting other people to get their stories straight. I tried really hard not to have an opinion during the winter and spring. But then we would hear from john and bernie and others how they were piecing together the facts that they had had us accumulate and there were a couple of facts that they found particularly telling, like this has been written about numerous times but when nixon threw the ash tray. And i think that fact had a big impact on some of the members of the House Committee because when youre given information that you expect but it doesnt come out the way you wanted it to, so you pick up an ash tray and out of frustration anger disappointment you throw it, i had the feeling that that was a turning point when that fact was placed in with Everything Else for a number of the lawyers. Timothy you actually can remember that moment . Sec. Clinton yeah. Because that was just a a turning point, because either he didnt know and we and hed been manipulated by his staff or he did know and he was trying to cover it up. Thats how it came across. Timothy i think that information came frequently coulson. Sec. Clinton could be. Timothy the day before article one was passed by a bipartisan majority congressman sandman and wiggin went on an attack against congressman sarbanes. It had an effect on the staff because that night the attack was you dont have enough specifics, and you cannot impeach a president without specifics. And that night staff worked tirelessly to put together specifics for every charge in article one. Did you participate in that . Sec. Clinton i recall that. See, that was the necessary transitions away from just presenting the statements of information. I think door and the other senior lawyers were very aware that they didnt want to get ahead of the committee, which i think was the right position for them to be in. But then when the committee was saying, wait a minute, i cant wade through all of this, you got to tell me what it means you have to construct an argument. And if youre looking at article one, you have to tell me what are the pieces of information that either supported or disproved it and thats when we had to pivot into producing much more a much more detailed case if you will. Timothy do you remember the work done by woodforde . Sec. Clinton i do, i do, yes. I dont know whether john knew him or Burke Marshall knew him i dont remember that. But he was brought on board to provide Historical Perspective and analysis. Timothy were you the liaison . Sec. Clinton i cant say i worked for him, he produced his own material. But i was available to do whatever he needed done. Timothy we dont have a lot of time. Do you remember working with [indiscernible] sec. Clinton very closely, yes. Fred is a meticulous lawyer. He had a very clear view about how to gather facts, how to evaluate them and how to present them. He worked incredibly hard. He was somebody that i admired and really valued as a colleague. Timothy did you do any research on the abuse of powers . Sec. Clinton i dont remember. I dont know. I probably pitched in on everything but i cant remember. Timothy where were you when the articles were being passed . Sec. Clinton i think i was in the office. I think thats where i was. Timothy was it a surprise . Sec. Clinton was it a surprise . By the time they actually were voted on, it wasnt a surprise, because i think rodino and his Committee Staff had a pretty fair idea of who was going to vote for it by then. Timothy what was your reaction to the Supreme Court case, u. S. V nixon . Sec. Clinton about the tapes . Timothy yeah. Sec. Clinton i thought the outcome was really required because president tapes were done in the course of his official role as president. And so i think that having to turn them over and having to get them cataloged and be available for the public was the right decision. Timothy ok. Three more questions and well be done. What do you remember of pistons resiugination . Sec. Clinton i was not at all happy or jubilant about him resigning. I thought it was a very sad chapter in our history. I thought the actually did departure was a really poignant, painful moment for him and his family as well as the country. So i watched it on tv like i guess everybody else did. And it was it was a really very unfortunate, sad outcome. Timothy what was it like to meet president nixon later . Sec. Clinton i met him when bill was in the white house. I dont recall ever meeting him before. But i havent thought hard about that. He had been to russia. He called the white house and asked if he could come by and brief bill about his trip to russia. Bill was fascinated by the idea because despite his resignation and his abuse of power, he was an incredibly experienced intelligent person who knew a lot about the world. And so chelsea and i and bill he was brought into the white house and brought up the elevator to the second floor, because bill was going to meet him in his private study. He came at night, as i recall. But maybe just right after he got back from russia. So chelsea and i and bill greeted him, welcomed him back to the white house. He had obviously thought about what he wanted to say so he saw me, he said, i know youre working hard on healthcare thats really a big task. And when he saw chelsea, he said oh, my daughters went to sidwell like you are. So he had something that he had prepared to say to us and he had a folder so i think he had written a memo but then he and bill went off to talk about russia. Timothy you went to his funeral. Sec. Clinton i did. I went to his funeral. One of the really few regrets i have about our eight years in the white house is that i didnt go to pat nixons funeral. I think we were just not well informed or understanding of the protocol. We had other things and i think the schedulers or whoever was looking at this basically didnt appreciate the significance that it should have had so i deeply regret not going to mrs. Nixons funeral but we did go to president nixons funeral. Timothy president clinton gives a eulogy. Were you involved at all in how he described nixon . Sec. Clinton i dont recall. He probably talked to me about it. We bounced ideas off of each other. I may have seen a draft but i dont recall specific advice i gave him. Timothy what was it like to be you were among people you had studied. How did it make you feel . Sec. Clinton by that time i was much more familiar with the role of being first lady and it was the right and proper thing to be at his funeral, to represent the country as we were all doing. So i talked to a number of the former president s whom i knew, the former first ladies whom i knew. I think it was a Beautiful Day in yorba linda and it was a very touching, touching funeral memorial service. Timothy what should the country have learned from the houses role in impeachment in 1974 . Sec. Clinton i think that its such a serious undertaking. Do not pursue it for trivial partisan political purposes. If it does fall to you while youre in the house to examine abuses of power by the president , be as circumspect and careful as john door was. Restrain yourself from grand standing and holding news conferences and playing to your base. This goes way beyond whose side theyre on and whos on your side. And try to be faithful purveyors of the history and solemnity of that process. Timothy i guess that lesson was not learned. Sec. Clinton that lesson was not learned. And thats why i think its important to keep talking about how serious this is. It should not be done for political partisan purposes. So those who did it in the the late 1990s, those who talk about it now, should go back and study the painstaking approach that the impeachment inquiry staff took and it was bipartisan. You had a bipartisan staff and you had both dick and republican members of the committee reaching the same conclusions that there were grounds for impeachment. Timothy secretary clinton thank you for your time today. Sec. Clinton thank you. Good to talk to you. Announcer this evening, nbc news is reporting that the Trump Administration has rejected the House Judiciary Committees invitation to take part in the impeachment proceedings against the president. In a letter to chairman Jerrold Nadler, white House Counsel said in part, adopting articles of impeachment would be a reckless abuse of power and would constitute the most unjust, highly partisan, and unconstitutional peachment of impeachment in our nations history. That prompted a response from Jerrold Nadler saying, we gave President Trump a fair opportunity but having declined this opportunity, he cannot claim that the process is unfair. The president s failure will not prevent us from carrying out our solemn constitutional duty. This ahead of monday when cspan will cover the House Judiciary Committee hearing where evidence will be presented in the ongoing impeachment inquiry against President Trump. Members plan to hear testimony from democratic and republican counsel on the findings from the inquiry. Live coverage starts at 9 00 a. M. Eastern on cspan online at cspan. Org or listen live on the free cspan radio app. Now, former Massachusetts Governor bill weld recalls his time as a lawyer on the House Judiciary Committee staff during the impeachment inquiry of president Richard Nixon. The interview is from the Richard Nixon president ial Library Oral History collection and was conducted by former library director, timothy naftali, in 2011. Mr. Weld was hired by Committee Republicans who were in the minority. He is currently running for