In May 1996, when Clinton appeared on the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, she was asked if she planned to write a book someday about her experiences in the White House. “Are you keeping a diary?” Lehrer asked. “Are you keeping good notes on what’s happened to you?”

“Heavens no!” Clinton responded with a laugh. “It would get subpoenaed. I can’t write anything down.”

People around her didn’t write anything down, either. “I don’t put anything down in writing,” Clinton loyalist Sidney Blumenthal told the Washington Post during the scandal years. (That policy eventually changed; Blumenthal was one of the first discovered to be sending emails to Secretary of State Clinton’s private address, clintonemail.com.)

Others in the Clinton White House followed the first lady’s example. Top aide George Stephanopoulos, for example, told investigators he did not keep a diary and never made notes about work at the White House. Later, when Stephanopoulos published a highly-detailed memoir of those years, he explained that he used a friend, the liberal journalist Eric Alterman, to help him record his thoughts away from prying subpoenas.