Bill Clinton’s team has already chosen its word, and the word is rerun. A Republican-led panel wants the former president back to answer more questions about his foundation’s old travel logs, and the people around him are treating the invitation like a rerun of a show they did not like the first time.
They say the logs have been gone over. They say the questions have been asked. They say a second sitting would be a photo opportunity with a binder, not a search for information. It is a dismissive frame, and it is also a focused one. If the story is a rerun, then the audience is being asked not to stay for it.
The panel is staying anyway. Members argue that travel records from the foundation years still have gaps, or at least gaps as they define them: a date without a satisfying explanation, a name without a tidy role, a trip that looks different depending on which page you start from. They want Clinton in the room to walk through the paper, line by line, on camera.
A Republican lead on the panel put it in the language of unfinished business. Old logs, he said, are still logs, and logs can be asked about twice if the first round did not close the book. A colleague added that no one is too famous to explain a schedule. The sentence was meant to sound egalitarian. It sounded like a teaser.
Clinton’s aides have responded with a chronology of prior cooperation, recited in the tone of people who keep a chronology for just this purpose. They can name dates of past production, past answers, past hours spent in rooms with bad coffee. They can also name, with some bitterness, the appetite for doing it all again.
There is a theater to these return engagements, and everyone involved knows the blocking. The witness sits. The chairman thanks him for his time in a way that does not mean thank you. A binder is opened to a tab that has been highlighted since last month. The first question is polite. The fifth is not.
Whether this particular return happens on the panel’s timetable is still a scheduling fight dressed as a principle fight. The panel talks about accountability. The team talks about harassment by photocopy. Both words are doing more work than the average travel log ever asked for.
A former foundation staffer, granted the usual cloak of not wanting to be in the story, said the logs are a pile of ordinary logistics that become extraordinary only when a hearing needs a prop. That may be true. It may also be beside the point for members who believe the pile still has a question mark in it.
Clinton himself has let the team do the talking, which leaves him slightly above the fray and slightly at its mercy. If he comes back, he will be the picture. If he does not, the refusal will be the picture. His aides understand both traps and are trying, as aides do, to call the whole set a rerun and walk away.
The public, asked to care about old itineraries, will split along the usual lines. Some will say a famous person should answer until the asking stops. Some will say the asking is the point, and the logs are only furniture. The panel is counting on the first group to tune in. The team is counting on the second to roll its eyes and change the channel.
For now the request sits on the table, formal enough to be serious and familiar enough to be mocked. A Republican-led panel wants Bill Clinton back. His team wants the country to recognize the plot. The travel logs, wherever they are filed, are about to be famous again, or at least famous enough for another afternoon.
