Talk:Vince Foster

Can we haz more? I really don't remember Vince Foster or Whitewater(?). I would like some more info pleeze? - π 10:18, 18 August 2009 (UTC)

A bit more detail...

On July 20, 1993, six months to the day after Bill Clinton took office as President of the United States, the White House Deputy Council, Vincent Foster, told his secretary Deborah Gorham, "I'll be right back". He then walked out of his office, after offering his co-worker Linda Tripp, the leftover M&Ms from his lunch tray. That was the last time Vincent Foster was seen alive.

Contrary to the White House spin, Vincent Foster's connection to the Clinton's was primarily via Hillary, rather than Bill. Vincent and Hillary had been partners together at the rose law firm, and allegations of an ongoing affair had persisted from the Little Rock days to the White House itself.

Vincent Foster had been struggling with the Presidential Blind trust. Normally a trivial matter, the trust had been delayed for almost 6 months and the U.S. trustee's office was beginning to make noises about it. Foster was also the keeper of the files of the Clinton's Arkansas dealings and had indicated in a written memo that "Whitewater is a can of worms that you should NOT open!"

But Vincent's position at the White House did not sit well with him. Only days before, following a public speech stressing the value of personal integrity, he had confided in friends and family that he was thinking of resigning his position. Foster had even written an outline for his letter of resignation, thought by this writer to have been used as the center portion of the fake "suicide note". Foster had scheduled a private meeting with Bill Clinton for the very next day, July 21, 1993 at which it appeared Foster intended to resign.

Vincent Foster had spent the morning making "busy work" in his office and had been in attendance at the White House announcement of Louis Freeh as the new head of the FBI earlier in the day (passing by the checkpoint manned by White House uniformed guard Styles).

This is a key point. The White House is the most secure private residence in the world, equipped with a sophisticated entry control system and video surveillance system installed by the Mitre Corporation. Yet no record exists that Vincent Foster left the White House under his own power on July 20th, 1993. No video of him exiting the building exists. No logbook entry shows he checked out of the White House.

Several hours after he was last seen inside the White House, Vincent Foster was found dead in Fort Marcy Park, in a Virginia suburb just outside Washington D.C.

The death was ruled a suicide (the first major Washington suicide since Secretary of Defense James Forrestal in 1949), but almost immediately rumors began to circulate that the story of a suicide was just a cover-up for something much worse.

The first witness to find the body insisted that there had been no gun near the body. The memory in Foster's pager had been erased. Critical evidence began to vanish. Many witnesses were harassed. Others were simply ignored. There were even suggestions that the body had been moved, and a Secret Service memo surfaced which reported that Foster's body had been found in his car! The official reports were self-contradictory.

The Looting of Foster's office

While the U.S. Park Police (a unit not equipped for a proper homicide investigation) studied the body, Foster's office at the White House was being looted. Secret Service agent Henry O' Neill watched as Hillary Clinton's chief of staff, Margaret Williams, carried boxes of papers out of Vincent Foster's office before the Park Police showed up to seal it. Amazing when you consider that the official identification of Vincent Foster's body by Craig Livingstone did not take place until 10PM! Speaking of Craig Livingstone, another Secret Serviceman saw him remove items from Vincent Foster's office in violation of the official seal. Witnesses also saw Bernard Nussbaum in Foster's office as well. Three witnesses noted that Patsy Thomason, director of the White House's Office of Administration, was desperate to find the combination to Vincent Foster's safe. Ms. Thomason finally opened the safe, apparently with the help of a special "MIG" technical team signed into the White House in the late hours. Two envelopes reported to be in the safe by Foster's secretary Deborah Gorham, addressed to Janet Reno and to William Kennedy III, were never seen again. When asked the next day regarding rumors of the safe opening, Mack McLarty told reporters Foster's office did not even have a safe, a claim immediately shot down by former occupants of that office. The next day, when the Park Police arrived for the official search of Vincent Foster's office, they were shocked to learn that Nussbaum, Thomason and Williams had entered the office. Conflicts channeled through Janet Reno's Department of Justice resulted in the Park Police merely sitting outside Foster's office while Bernard Nussbaum continued his own search of Foster's office. During this search, he opened and upended Vincent Foster's briefcase, showing it to be empty. Three days later, it would be claimed that this same briefcase was where the torn up suicide note was discovered.

The boxes of documents removed from Foster's office by Hillary Clinton's chief of staff, Margaret Williams, were taken to the private residence area of the White House! Eventually, only 54 pages emerged.

One set of billing records, under subpoena for two years, and thought to have originated in Foster's office, turned up unexpectedly in the private quarters of the White House, with Hillary's fingerprints on them!

So, who ordered the office looting?

Bill Clinton was unavailable, being on camera with Larry King. But Hillary Clinton, who had only the day before diverted her planned return to Washington D.C. to Little Rock, was on the phone from Little Rock to someone at the White House in the moments before the looting took place.

The initial reactions

Back in Little Rock, Foster's friends weren't buying it. Doug Buford, friend and attorney, stated, "...something was badly askew." Foster's brother-in-law, a former congressman, also did not accept that depression was what had been behind the "suicide": "That's a bunch of crap." And Webster Hubbell, former Clinton deputy attorney general, phoned a mutual friend to say, "Don't believe a word you hear. It was not suicide. It couldn't have been." Outside experts not connected the official investigation also had their doubts.

Vincent J. Scalise, a former NYC detective, Fred Santucci, a former forensic photographer for NYC, and Richard Saferstein, former head of the New Jersey State Crime Lab formed a team and did an investigation of the VWF case for the Western Journalism Center of Fair Oaks, Calif. They arrived at several conclusions:

(1) Homicide cannot and should not be ruled out.

(2) The position of the arms and legs of the corpse were drastically inconsistent with suicide.

(3) Neither of VWF's hand was on the handgrip when it was fired. This is also inconsistent with suicide. The investigators noted that in their 50 years of combined experience they had "never seen a weapon or gun positioned in a suicide's hand in such an orderly fashion."

(4) VWF's body was probably in contact with one or more carpets prior to his death. The team was amazed that the carpet in the trunk of VF's care had not been studied to see whether he had been carried to the park in the trunk of his own car.

(5) The force of the gun's discharge probably knocked VF's glasses flying; however, it is "inconceivable" that they could have traveled 13 feet through foliage to the site where they were found; ergo, the scene probably was tampered with.

(6) The lack of blood and brain tissue at the site suggests VF was carried to the scene. The peculiar tracking pattern of the blood on his right cheek also suggests that he was moved.

Despite numerous official assurances that Vincent Foster really did commit suicide, more and more Americans, over 70% at the last count, no longer believe the official story. TV specials, most notably the one put out by A&E's "Inside Investigations" with Bill Kurtis, have failed to answer the lingering questions, indeed have engaged in deliberate fraud to try to dismiss the evidence that points to a cover-up.

No sooner had questions surfaced regarding the circumstances of Vincent Foster's death than a crowd of people surged forth to assure America that Vincent Foster had indeed been depressed even though he had clearly concealed it from everyone around him. Leading the attack was CBS "60 Minutes", which had openly admitted biasing its handling of the Gennifer Flower's segment in 1992 to help Bill Clinton win the nomination. Quit a far cry from the media handling of Gary Hart's infidelities!

So, when reporter Chris Ruddy started writing a series of article for the New York Post regarding the inconsistencies in the Vincent Foster case, "60 Minutes" again stepped again to Bill Clinton's defense with a hit piece on Ruddy. The mis-reporting was so outrageous and error filled that Accuracy in Media and issued some highly critical reports, as did Congressman Dan Burton.

Next came a segment of the A&E program "Inside Investigations" with Bill Kurtis, which attempted to explain the absence of fingerprints on the gun found with Foster's body by showing how the deep grooves of a modern automatic pistol simply do not provide the surfaces needed to capture fingerprints. That Foster's body was not found with a modern automatic pistol with deep grooves and heavy texturing, but with a smooth metal revolver, was not mentioned.

uh...huh. Can you back this up? --Revolverman (talk) 21:51, 13 May 2013 (UTC)