Over the weekend, the Washington Free Beacon began publishing some of the papers of the late Diane Blair.  Mrs. Blair’s husband was Jim Blair, a former Chief Counsel at Tyson Foods, and Diane Blair was a political science professor.  The couple were long-time friends of Bill and Hillary Clinton dating from the days before Bill Clinton became the Arkansas Attorney General, and Mrs. Blair conversed with both Clinton’s on a regular basis until her death in 2000.  She also kept detailed records of the conversations in the form of diaries, correspondence, memos, etc., all of which her husband donated to the Special Collections library at the University of Arkansas after his wife’s death.

As one might expect, the collection includes many potentially embarrassing revelations about the Clintons, and particularly about Hillary.  If she runs in 2016, some portions of the papers from this collection will come to the fore.  This one, for example:

On February 23, 1993, Blair joined the Clintons for a family dinner at the White House.  The subject of health care reform came up.

“At dinner, [Hillary spoke] to [Bill] at length on the complexities of health care—thinks managed competition a crock; single-payer necessary; maybe add to Medicare,” Blair wrote.

The account is at odds with public statements by the former First Lady that she never supported the single-payer option.  In an interview with the New York Times as she ran for president in 2008, Hillary Clinton said she had never seriously considered adopting a single-payer system, in which the government, using funds appropriated from taxpayers, pays for all health care expenses.

“You know, I have thought about this, as you might guess, for 15 years and I never seriously considered a single payer system,” said Clinton in the interview.

The Washington Free Beacon article is HERE, and the transcription of the Diane Blair papers is HERE.