Hillary in 2004: The Mystery Ends

It's the hot rumor of the Internet. Folks have discovered a filing at the Federal Election Commission for Hillary Clinton for President in 2004. The listing is very bare and contains no real information, especially on who filed the document, or triggered its filing.

WorldNetDaily, with Insight Magazine, has an article that claims to clear up the confusion. They contacted the FEC and asked some basic questions. A group called "Draft Hillary 2004 For President" had filed the enticing document, said WND. It was a private filing, not an official one, required by the FEC for draft organisations. End of mystery, yes?

Well, not quite. The document WND found and researched was this one. Note that the filing number is C00390468. It lists some contact information. A simple Google search quickly turned up two webpages connected to the DH04FP group. This one is their press release that doesn't seem to have attracted too much press attention.

The other one is the main page for VoteHillary.org. Here you will find some of the information listed in the FEC filing above. A simple call to Adam Parkhomenko showed that they were in fact the group responsible for this filing.

But, the mystery filing is this FEC page. Note that its filing number is P00003392. This is not the Draft Hillary / Vote Hillary filing. Note, too, that the Draft Hillary filing has a Committee Designation (unauthorized) and a Committee Type (Independent Expenditure). There is no party affiliation listed.

The P00003392 mystery listing has this curious information:

Office Sought: President
Election Year: 2004
State: Presidential Candidate
District: 03
Party: DEM (Democratic Party)

This does list a party affiliation, but has the strange "District: 03" denotation. And since when is "Presidential Candidate" a state of the Union?

So, I made a quick call to the FEC and the mystery was cleared. The gentleman I spoke to immediately knew I was calling about the "Clinton listing." He was a bit amazed at the amount of calls he was receiving, even international calls, but was also somewhat bemused. He seemed to be taking things in good spirit.

He said that the P00003392 document was initially triggered somewhere in 1997 or 1998 by the first group to ever mount a "Draft Hillary"-type campaign. This is a standard document created every time a candidate either files or has an organisation file on their behalf, including completely unaffiliated ones. As long as there is some organisation active on their behalf the document is actively retained in the system. While the "Draft Hillary 2004" movement, which filed on September 17 of this year, is only the latest, its creation means that the P00003392 listing will still be found in a search for "Hillary."

The gentleman at the FEC was unable to explain the "District: 03" line. It seems to be a mistake of some kind. On the initial filing forms, like this one from Friends of Hillary (her official campaign committee) for her Senate run in 2006, there is a line asking for district up in the address field, but this has been left blank in the forms I looked through.

Maybe that's the mystery? That she will be rerunning for her Senate seat, instead of leaving the Senate to campaign full-time? Many of the conspiracy theories I've heard have her being a one-term Senator in order to avoid having to face a challenger.

Anyway, it seems the current mystery has been laid to rest. Ah well....