http://www.nytimes.com/politics/first-draft/2015/02/20/hillary-clinton-begins-process-of-vetting-herself/?_r=14:10 pm ET 4:10 pm ET
By Maggie Haberman
Hillary Rodham Clinton, the subject of intense news media attention and public scrutiny for the last three decades, is preparing for another thorough vetting as she plans for a likely presidential campaign. In this case, however, it’s not Republicans trying to thwart her or journalists looking for a juicy scoop, but researchers she herself has hired.
Mrs. Clinton, who is all but assured to seek the Democratic presidential nomination for a second time, has hired the firm New Partners, an outfit with a history of doing deep research projects, to handle at least some portion of the work, known in the political world as “self-opposition research.”
She is also close to hiring a research director for her likely campaign, a role that in the 2008 race was filled by Judd Legum, currently the editor in chief for the liberal news site ThinkProgress.
Three people familiar with the early stages of research work for Mrs. Clinton described her plans on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss them. A spokesman for Mrs. Clinton would not comment, and officials with New Partners did not respond to requests for comment.
The scope of the firm’s work is unclear. But self-research is considered critical in campaigns. And in the six years since Mrs. Clinton was last a candidate, she has created a paper trail of paid speeches, charitable donations and diplomatic decisions as secretary of state.
For months, Democrats not aligned with Mrs. Clinton had privately wondered whether she had started the process of assessing the scope of existing documents, information and other potential material her rivals could use against her. Some expressed concern that she was beginning this self-scrubbing process relatively late, and might not leave herself enough time to learn about her own potential vulnerabilities to be able to respond effectively.
Their concerns were prompted by a string of stories by The Washington Free Beacon, a conservative website that extensively reviewed archival material at the Clinton presidential library in Little Rock, Ark., and came up with an audio tape of Mrs. Clinton discussing a rape case she had worked on as a defense lawyer in the 1980s.
The tape was a reminder that, with so much scrutiny applied by the news media and Mrs. Clinton’s opponents in her public life, it’s a challenge for rivals to come up with new material, and to make any fresh information stick. That was a frequent problem for President Obama’s campaign when he ran against Mrs. Clinton in the primaries in 2008, when both were senators.
More recently, Republicans and reporters have turned their sights to the Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation for accepting donations from foreign countries after Mrs. Clinton left the State Department. The scrutiny has focused on which entities donated to the foundation, and whether there was any overlap with Mrs. Clinton’s diplomatic work.
Dennis Cheng, who led the foundation’s recent endowment drive to alleviate some of the fund-raising pressure on former President Bill Clinton, recently departed and is expected to play a big role raising money for another Clinton presidential campaign.
Foundation officials often point out that the entity is a charity, and that many of the foreign donations are targeted grants for programs in places rife with diseases like AIDS and HIV. Still, the focus on the foundation and its work is likely to be a source of ongoing focus for Mrs. Clinton’s opponents. And the spate of recent stories underscore why the self-research process is a relatively urgent task.
