Action Sports with Leigh Roche

It was the document dump to end all document dumps.

Tens of thousands of pages of previously-secret files detailing the inner workings of the President Bill Clinton’s White House as it struggled with then-first lady Hillary Clinton’s high-profile failure on health care reform, as aides sought to manage a slew of actual or perceived scandals, and as the White House staff reeled from disclosure of the Monica Lewinsky affair.

However, the records released over eight months did little to fulfill the fevered imaginations of Clinton critics who pined for some revelation that would torpedo Hillary Clinton’s chances to attempt a return to the White House through a presidential campaign of her own.

The papers show a White House unabashed in its desires to manipulate the media through selective leaks and carefully-chosen interviews. But they’re also a reminder that many of the techniques the Clinton team innovated are now commonplace in the political arena.

(PHOTOS: Speechwriter doodles in the Clinton files)

The set of files posted Friday spilled secrets on the creation of the “don’t ask, don’t tell policy,” heated controversies involving Whitewater and the White House Travel Office, and how White House aides encouraged the president to use a State of the Union address to defend his wife against Republican criticism.

Among the most notable disclosures Friday:

Gays in the military

A fly-on-the-wall view of an early meeting Bill Clinton held with the joint chiefs of staff over his pledge to reverse the ban on gays in the military. The closed-door session, held just five days after Clinton took office, featured a spirited back-and-forth about the policy.

Joint Chiefs Chairman Colin Powell and Vice President Al Gore faced off over whether the issue of gay rights was parallel to that of African Americans, the detailed notes show.

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Powell declared that the comparison with blacks was “off-base” because race is a “benign” characteristic and “sexuality is” different.

Gore responded that he saw “some parallels” between discrimination against gays and African Americans and that a gay person kicked out of the military just for being gay “is discriminated against in a way similar to black[s,]” the notes show.

Marine Corps Commandant Carl Mundy, who died earlier this year, equated announcing “I’m gay” with declaring “I’m KKK, Nazi, rapist,” the notes indicate.

Clinton suggested he was open to kicking some gays out of the military, even if they were identified through their advocacy. “People I would like to keep [in the military] wouldn’t show up at a Queer Nation parade,” the president said.

(Also on POLITICO: Clinton, Powell talked gays in military)

It’s unclear who took the 34-pages of richly-detailed notes, but National Archives notations indicated they came from the files of National Security Council staffer Richard Beardsworth.

Whitewater independent counsel

Notes detail opposition by both Bill and Hillary Clinton to the naming of an independent counsel to investigate their Whitewater investment.

One in a series of files pertaining to Whitewater contains a series of handwritten notes that appear to be minutes or a meeting or a survey of opinion. One entry, that appears to say “Mack” next to it, as in Chief of Staff Mack McLarty, reads, “Let’s get off whether we’ll have spcl pros or counsel, HRC + BC don’t want it.”

Militia group regulations

In the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing, the Clinton administration considered the possibility of aggressive new regulation of domestic militia groups, including publishing membership lists of such organization, requiring them to register with the federal government or to get permission before offering “paramilitary” training.

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Some of the ideas were championed by Clinton adviser Dick Morris, who was known for advancing policy proposals that resonated well in polls.

“The public overwhelmingly supports a significant expansion in the FBI’s ability to investigate militia groups. If you and the Justice Department believe such an expansion would be in the public interest, I would recommend that we go ahead with it with a high profile announcement,” Morris wrote in an Oct. 6, 1995, memo to Chief of Staff Leon Panetta, as well as Deputy Chiefs of Staff Erskine Bowles and Harold Ickes.

The proposals seem to have produced widespread alarm in the administration, among Justice Department officials, White House lawyers and even other political advisers. Some worried that even reducing the proposals to writing could provoke a backlash from conservatives already wary of the federal government following high-profile showdowns at Ruby Ridge, Idaho and Waco, Texas.

“The Justice Department has stopped working on the terrorism question. They say this is because [White House Counsel Ab Mikva] instructed them that this is not information that should be on paper,” wrote Clinton White House aide Jennifer O’Connor. She’s now back at the White House, working in President Barack Obama’s counsel’s office after serving as a crisis-response lawyer handling problems at the Internal Revenue Service and with the roll-out of Obamacare.

O’Connor wrote that Mikva concluded “politically, the ideas we talked about are really bad ideas.”

“All of the lawyers analyzing these proposals (in this office and at DOJ) strongly believe it is a serious mistake—as a policy but especially as a political matter to impose militia controls of the type now being discussed, even if they would be constitutional,” Mikva and others wrote, warning that measures already announced had prompted “an unprecedented alliance” between the American Civil Liberties Union and the National Rifle Association....