So, this is a piece of ancient history of which I was unaware.

I read Pheobe's excellent piece on the current legal situation for the Secretary, but when I got to the Nixonian comparison article, it seemed ironic to me that Clinton was compared to Nixon since I'd read that Rodham had worked as a young lawyer on the impeachment.

Apparently, in the lead up to Hillary's previous run for President, Jerome Zeifman (former chief Democratic counsel on the House Judiciary Committee) had claimed in his 2006 book, Hillary's Pursuit of Power that he was had been her supervisor for her work on the Nixon impeachment and that he had terminated her employment. Snopes dispels this by saying the guy wasn't her supervisor, so he could not have fired her. Here's the quote from Zeifman in a 1998 article (link below) which demonstrates that Zeifman has misremembered what transpired:

If I had the power to fire her, I would have fired her.

Snopes dug up that quote from a Scripps Howard News Service article by Lance Gay from 1998 (pdf).* This article explains that in 1973-74, Hillary Rodham worked for the House Judiciary Committee. (BTW: the pdf is a Media Matters post - the irony compounds.)

As irony would have it, in the news when the article was written in 1998, Representative Bob Barr R-GA was thanking then First Lady Clinton for work she had done two and a half decades earlier:

Thank you, Mrs. Clinton, for giving Congress a road map for beginning our inquiry.

The inquiry in 1998, of course, was impeachment proceedings for then-president William Jefferson Clinton.

In the article, Rodham's position is described by a co-worker as a 'junior-level' attorney among 43 working on this issue for the House Judiciary Committee and describes this as part of her accomplishment:

...her more lasting role was assisting in the draft of a historical study of the legal underpinnings of the impeachment process - a 60 page document known as the "grounds memo" which the House Judiciary Committee still uses today.

Rodham and six other staffers were part of the Constitution and law task force that prepared the report released in February 1974. The report concluded that Nixon could be impeached even if he were not involved in any criminal activity himself.

"Some of the most grievous offenses against our constitutional form of government may not entail violations of the criminal law," the study said.

The framers of the Constitution intended that the reference to "treason, bribery or other high crimes and misdemeanors" could mean both a course of conduct or individual wrongdoings, the study concluded.

"The emphasis has been on the significant effects of the conduct - undermining the integrity of office, disregard of constitutional duties and oath of office, arrogation of power, abuse of the governmental process, adverse impact on the system of government," the report concludes. (emphasis mine for 2016 irony)

Given that he published a book about her ahead of her first run for the presidency, Zeifman was no Hillary fan. The 1998 article goes on to identify the crux of Zeifman's beef with Clinton:

Zeifman said Rodham sparked a bitter battle among Democrats by recommending the Judiciary Committee deny Nixon's lawyers the right to attend the closed door meetings.

"Can you imagine that? This was a committee of lawyers and members of the bar, and she was saying the committee should deny the president representation," he said.

According to the article, Rodham's suggested position was not adopted by the committee, and Nixon had counsel with him during Congressional interviews concerning impeachment. According to the Snopes entry, it was Committee Chairman Peter Rodino who was behind the idea of denying Nixon access to counsel, and that Rodham was directed to write the brief by her supervisor, John Doar.

Snopes also claims that Zeifman incorrectly accuses Rodham of removing critical documents from public view, and then goes on to say that it was Rodino who was responsible for removal of the documents. Snopes' focuses on the issue of responsibility for the absence of the documents rather than the content contained in them. Snopes links an article from 2008 by Dan Calabrese although the link is now dead- the following is apparently an except from that disconnected link:

When Hillary endeavored to write a legal brief arguing there is no right to representation by counsel during an impeachment proceeding, Zeifman says, he told Hillary about the case of Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, who faced an impeachment attempt in 1970.

"As soon as the impeachment resolutions were introduced by (then-House Minority Leader Gerald) Ford, and they were referred to the House Judiciary Committee, the first thing Douglas did was hire himself a lawyer," Zeifman said.

The Judiciary Committee allowed Douglas to keep counsel, thus establishing the precedent. Zeifman says he told Hillary that all the documents establishing this fact were in the Judiciary Committee's public files.

So, those public files were removed from circulation and held in the Judiciary Committee offices if Snopes provides accurate information. Snopes is apparently concerned about neither the documents purported to have been withheld from other interested parties had their been any, nor the missing reference in Rodham's brief to precedence having recently been set. Since Snopes existence is based on debunking misstated facts, perhaps no one has challenged the veracity of precedent having been set by the William O. Douglas matter. I'd be interested to see what they'd dig up if a question of missing precedent was put to them.

In dispelling the story of Hillary having been fired, Snopes' point, of course, was to discredit Zeifman's venom against Clinton, and they appear to make a case for something akin to actual Clinton-derangement syndrome. That said, the evidence they use to do so indicates a (worst case) rather unfortunate pattern of repetition or (best case) profoundly ironic thread through history tying Secretary Clinton back to the Nixon impeachment which included a stop with an impeachment of her husband. (For those who may not remember, 'impeachment' refers to Congressional proceedings being brought against the person in office, Nixon resigned rather than go through the ordeal, and Bill Clinton was not convicted in his.) The current references to Nixon with regard to Clinton are haunting given the actual history.

Consider my mind well-blown. Should she be elected and inaugurated, looks like she may have already handed a future Congress a road map for a second Clinton impeachment (which some members have already indicated they plan to pursue). What is it they say about those who do not learn from history?

Snopes quote from Zeifman's book seems an apt way to close this piece:

Hillary was twenty-seven when the impeachment inquiry staff was disbanded. The next morning she took a train down to Little Rock, Arkansas. She moved in with Bill Clinton and they eventually married.

Addendum: Snopes also mentions a 1996 book by Zeifman on the Nixon impeachment and the House Judiciary Committee investigation: Without Honor: Crimes of Camelot and the Impeachment of Richard Nixon.