Washington Free Beacon reporter Alana Goodman discussed her explosive report on a trove of archived documents once belonging to Hillary Clinton confidante Diane Blair Monday on CNN. Blair, a former University of Arkansas political professor, kept detailed records her friendship with the former first lady which spanned from the 1970s through the Clinton administration.
Goodman said she was alerted to the existence of the archives by a 2007 Jake Tapper report. The Free Beacon reporter added she discovered the records were opened in 2010 and decided to travel to Arkansas and look through the documents firsthand:
BROOKE BALDWIN: […] Let me begin there. Alana, tell me, who was Diane Blair and how did you find yourself in Fayetville, Arkansas flipping through all of her papers?
ALANA GOODMAN: Diane Blair was a very close friend of Hillary Clinton. Hillary actually called her one of her closest friends from the 1970s until when Diane passed away in 2000. Jake Tapper actually wrote about this existence of an archive of Blair's files which included accounts of contemporaneous conversations with Hillary Clinton, letters, memos and things like that. They reported on this in 2007. The archive was not open to the public at the time. I went back and checked just to see if it was open, and saw it opened in 2010 and went down to Arkansas, honestly didn't think there would be much there, because I feel like so much of the Clintons' especially 1990s related stuff has been so picked over by reporters, but yeah went down and surprisingly there were interesting things there.
[…]
BROOKE BALDWIN: Alana, back to this cache of papers you discovered thanks to our own Jake Tapper's reporting some years ago, you go out there to Fayetville, and what else did you find?
ALANA GOODMAN: I thought one of the most interesting things that we found was the conversation between Blair and Hillary on Monica Lewinsky, which happened just days after President Clinton had admitted to the affair. It's interesting because there are so few accounts of what Hillary was really thinking candidly at the time. She's written about this in her biography, it was a very difficult time for her, that she had been doing a lot of thinking about it, she had to make some hard choices. What's really displayed in this conversation is how candid she is talking about Monica. "Narcissistic loony toon" is the word that Diane quotes her to use to describe Monica, defending Bill and all of that. I thought that was very interesting.
Some other notable revelations include Blair documenting conversations appearing to show discrepancies between Hillary Clinton's official positions and her candid thoughts on issues ranging from single-payer healthcare to American intervention in Bosnia.