Obama Hires MORE Clinton Team Players

UPDATE, November 29, 2008: Milwaukee native back in D.C., ready for key role in Obama administration
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What is this?

Bill Clinton's third term?

Where's the change?

Barack Obama's administration doesn't have a new, fresh look. It looks like Bill Clinton's White House.

From the Wall Street Journal:

Obama Hires More Clinton White House Veterans

President-elect Barack Obama continued to fill out staff positions for his incoming administration during the weekend, with many of the new appointees having Clinton White House pedigrees.

Gregory B. Craig, a former State Department official who also served as former President Bill Clinton's impeachment lawyer, will be named White House counsel, serving as Mr. Obama's chief lawyer, Democratic officials said.

Mr. Craig advised Mr. Obama on foreign policy during the presidential campaign and was one of the first prominent aides to Sen. Hillary Clinton to defect from her campaign during the primaries.

The Obama transition team also said Mr. Obama's former Senate chief of staff, Pete Rouse, will serve as a senior White House adviser. Mr. Rouse had previously been Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle's chief of staff before the South Dakotan's election defeat in 2002, and with Mr. Daschle's aid, he helped build Mr. Obama's Senate office.

Mona Sutphen, a former special assistant to Mr. Clinton's national-security adviser, Sandy Berger, was named deputy chief of staff. Ms. Sutphen had been a managing director of Stonebridge International LLC, an international consulting firm that advises multinational corporations. Another Stonebridge managing director, Michael Warren, is leading the transition's auditing team at the Treasury Department.

Jim Messina, a veteran Senate aide and Mr. Obama's campaign chief of staff, will also serve as White House deputy chief of staff. Phil Schiliro, a veteran House aide, will be the president's liaison to Congress.

The new names join a list that includes senior Clinton White House veterans, such as Rahm Emanuel, now Mr. Obama's White House chief of staff, and Ron Klain, a top aide to Vice President Al Gore who will be Vice President-elect Joe Biden's chief of staff.

I don't know about the wisdom of bringing on all these people from the Bill Clinton era.

I am concerned about "Mona Sutphen, a former special assistant to Mr. Clinton's national-security adviser, Sandy Berger."

Remember that Sandy Berger is very sloppy. Bill Clinton said so.

On the evening of Oct. 2, 2003, former White House national security adviser Samuel R. "Sandy" Berger stashed highly classified documents he had taken from the National Archives beneath a construction trailer at the corner of Ninth Street and Pennsylvania Avenue NW so he could surreptitiously retrieve them later and take them to his office, according to a newly disclosed government investigation.

The documents he took detailed how the Clinton administration had responded to the threat of terrorist attacks at the end of 1999. Berger removed a total of five copies of the same document without authorization and later used scissors to destroy three before placing them in his office trash, the National Archives inspector general concluded in a Nov. 4, 2005, report.

After archives officials accused him of taking the documents, Berger told investigators, he "tried to find the trash collector but had no luck." But instead of admitting he had removed them deliberately -- by stuffing them in his suit pockets on multiple occasions -- Berger initially said he had removed them by mistake.

The fact that Berger, one of President Bill Clinton's closest aides from 1997 to 2001, illicitly removed the documents is well-known: A federal judge in September 2005 ordered him to pay a $50,000 fine for his actions and forfeit his security clearance for three years.

What Berger did, and the ham-handed and comical methods by which he did it, are freshly detailed in the National Archives report, which the Associated Press obtained first under a Freedom of Information Act request.

Although the report reiterates that Berger's main motive was to prepare himself for testifying before a commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks, it makes clear that he not only sought to study the documents but also destroyed some copies and -- when initially confronted -- denied he had done so.

I wonder about Sutphen.

Did she keep a diary when she served as special assistant to Berger?

Didn't she have to fill out the Obama questionnaire?

(14) Diaries: If you keep or have ever kept a diary that contains anything that could suggest a conflict of interest or be a possible source of embarrassment to you, your family, or the President-Elect if it were made public, please describe.

(61) Have you had any association with any person, group or business venture that could be used - even unfairly - to impugn or attack your character and qualifications for government service?

I'm surprised the Obama team is comfortable with Obama's deputy chief of staff being someone who served closely with Berger.

I would think that association would qualify as an extreme embarrassment to Sutphen, her family, and the President-Elect.
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Here's more on Mona Sutphen:

Sutphen is a foreign policy expert who has had several federal government positions, including as an aide to Bill Richardson when he was ambassador to the United Nations. In that role, Sutphen helped conduct a 45-minute job interview with Lewinsky in late 1997 at the request of John Podesta, who had the same deputy White House chief of staff title for Clinton that she is about to fill for Obama.

The interview led to Sutphen's offering Lewinsky a job at Richardson's direction, shortly before the scandal was about to break publicly. Lewinsky ultimately declined the offer, but Sutphen's name ended up in the Starr Report because of the interview she conducted with Richardson and another one of his aides.

Sutphen most recently has been at Stonebridge International, an Washington-based consulting firm that advises multinational corporations on worldwide business opportunities. She has previously worked as a lobbyist for the firm and on behalf of food distributor Angliss International of London. Her brother is David Sutphen, a top entertainment industry lobbyist for Viacom and the Recording Industry Association of America.

Good grief!

How did Sutphen pass the Obama questionnaire?

She was tied to Bill Clinton's Monica Lewinsky - lying under oath - obstructing justice scandal.

She was a lobbyist and her brother CURRENTLY is a lobbyist.

Right. Barack is changing Washington. Sure he is.
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Video of Mona Sutphen.

(h/t Right Pundits)