A Witness Harassed,
Americans Fooled: The Foster Case
Clinton Investigation Headquarters
It the mid-1990s, those
of us closely following the cover-up of the obvious murder of Deputy White
House Counsel Vincent W. Foster, Jr., consisted of a rather small
fraternity. At the very heart of the fraternity was the conservative
media watchdog group, Accuracy in Media (AIM), and its director, the late Reed Irvine.
Christopher Ruddy, the one American reporter consistently writing critically on
the Foster case at that time, has claimed publicly that it was Irvine who first
interested him in the matter (although he told me that it was an unnamed
reporter from the conservative Washington Times who was not
permitted to write honestly about it by his editors). It was through AIM
that I came into contact with the New York-based writer, Richard Poe, with whom
I had several telephone conversations.
My dealings with AIM
were primarily through their media director, the late Bernard Yoh. I gathered that that was the case with Poe as well.
Depending upon one’s perspective, that may or may not be a good thing, because
we now know that had he talked to Irvine his conversation would have been
recorded and saved. Irvine taped all his telephone conversations without
alerting the person on the other end that he was doing so, which is quite legal
in Washington, DC. Those conversations are now making their way onto
YouTube.
Perhaps the most
important and the most exciting one to listen to yet is with the Washington
bureau chief for the respected Sunday Telegraph of London, Ambrose
Evans-Pritchard. It took place less than a week after Evans-Pritchard had
published his article based upon his interview of the elusive witness, Patrick
Knowlton, who had stopped to relieve himself at the secluded Fort Marcy Park on
the afternoon of July 20, 1993, when Foster already lay dead near the back of
the park. His name had appeared in the police report on the case
misspelled as “Nolton” and the address given for him
was also wrong. Evans-Pritchard had tracked him down by asking around the
small mountain community of Etlan, Virginia, where Knowlton
had been headed to a vacation home on that fateful day in July. Knowlton
learned from Evans-Pritchard that the FBI had falsified his testimony in a
couple of crucial ways. What seemed most significant at the time was what
was featured in his October 22, 1995 article. That is, that he had a very
clear recollection of the “menacing-looking” man who stared at him from one of
the two cars he saw parked in the Fort Marcy lot, and a drawing based upon
Knowlton’s description accompanied Evans-Pritchard’s article. Even more
importantly we would learn later, the empty Honda with Arkansas license plates
that Knowlton saw there was quite different from Foster’s Honda, according to
his clear recollection, and the FBI reported that he had seen Foster’s car.
The article hit U.S.
newsstands on Tuesday, October 24. I was working at the time only a block
from a very good news and magazine store on K Street next to a Farragut North
subway entrance in Washington, DC, which carried many foreign newspapers, including
the Telegraph. How exciting it was to read this
extraordinary report that never made it into the mainstream U.S. press in those
days before the widespread use of the Internet!
Two days later, on the
morning of Thursday, October 26, Knowlton received a subpoena to testify before
Kenneth Starr’s Whitewater grand jury. What happened that evening as
Knowlton walked with his girlfriend in the Dupont Circle neighborhood and the
next night Evans-Pritchard characterizes in his 1997 book, The Secret Life of Bill Clinton, as “bizarre beyond belief.” No written
description that I could give here can compare to the phone conversation
between Evans-Pritchard and Irvine immediately after the event (The “Chris”
referred to is Christopher Ruddy.) Go to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RE3-TxJajSA.
The Book to Read
If you are going to read
only one book on the corruption of the Clintons and our enabling government and
opinion-molding institutions, it should be the one by Evans-Pritchard,
not Hillary’s Secret War: The Clinton Conspiracy to
Muzzle Internet Journalists, by Richard Poe.
Poe does have a very good account of the harassment suffered by Knowlton as
recounted below, but Evans-Prichard actually witnessed some of it, and he has a
whole chapter in his book on it, which he entitles “Street
Fascism.”
Most tellingly, even
though he had finished his book just before Starr released his final report on
the Foster death and Poe had much more time to reach a firm conclusion as to
what Starr was all about, Evans-Pritchard’s assessment is much more accurate
and honest:
…there is [an] important
point to understand about Kenneth Starr. He is by character a servant of
power, not a prosecutor. One thing can be predicted with absolute
certainty: He will never confront the U.S. Justice department, the FBI,
and the institutions of the permanent government in Washington. His whole
career has been built on networking, by ingratiating himself. His natural
loyalties lie with the politico-legal fraternity that covered up the Foster
case in the first place. (p. 112)
Evans-Pritchard and his
book have their shortcomings. He may not trust or even glorify the
Clintons’ conservative critics as much as Poe, but he trusts them too
much. In his “Street Fascism” chapter he writes of the determined
Knowlton, “He gave a sworn deposition to Congressman Dan Burton, one of the few
stalwarts on Capitol Hill who refused to allow his independent judgment in the
Foster case to be swayed by mocking editorials.”
But that’s exactly what
he did do when push came to shove after he became a committee chairman. And, ironically enough, after encountering difficulties in
locating Patrick Knowlton because his name had been misspelled by the Park
Police, Evans-Pritchard spells Brett Kavanaugh’s name with a “C” instead of a
“K” and, like Poe, he leaves him out of his index, by whatever spelling.
In Evans-Pritchard’s or his publisher’s case, it’s probably caused by mere
inadvertence because John Bates and Miguel Rodriguez are there. Why that
is significant is explained in my original review of Poe’s book, published on
my web site September 9, 2007 and expanded on February 23, 2009.
The Original Review of Hillary’s Secret War
Thumbing through this
2004 book, with a foreword by Jim Robinson, founder of FreeRepublic.com, one
gets the impression that this is a much harder hitting and genuine effort than
Edward Klein's The Truth About Hillary: What She Knew, When
She Knew It, and How Far She'll Go to Become President.
Harder hitting?
Yes. More genuine? No.
The tip-off as to who is
expected to read this book is at the top of the dust jacket: "This
book is required reading," it says in bold italics. And
right under the quote in bigger, bolder, all capital letters is the name of the
professional polarizer being quoted, none other than Ann Coulter. With
such a recommendation, the publisher is assured that the only people likely to
spend more than five minutes with the book are hard core Fox News
junkies. And Poe gives them a lot more raw meat than Klein or even
Coulter, herself, ever did.
Recall that I faulted Klein for pulling
his punches on Hillary Clinton's likely lesbianism and the
various Clinton scandals, particularly the death of Deputy White House Counsel,
Vincent Foster. Hillary's domestic life is not a topic of his book, so
her sexual orientation is, appropriately, not addressed. * As for the
scandals, Poe can hardly be said to have gone easy on Hillary. Though
both Klein's and Poe's books are aimed principally at conservatives, Poe's is
obviously meant for only a small subset of that audience. The giveaway is that
Klein's book got tons of publicity and Poe's book got absolutely none. I
didn't even know of the existence of Poe's book until I stumbled across it at a
used book store a couple of months ago, even though it actually mentions me and
references my "America's Dreyfus Affair, the Case of the Death
of Vincent Foster." It is safe
for Poe to tell his readers about some of the worst of the Clinton scandals,
because only a very select group of people who already hate the Clintons with a
passion are likely ever to read it.
That is not to say that
Poe tells the whole truth. Far from it. His job is clearly to play
right-wing shepherd and to herd his assigned flock away from the corruption
that envelopes both the Democrats and the Republicans as well as our ruling
media elite.
Poe describes a shocking
manifestation of the corruption in his apparent gloves-off treatment of the
murder and cover-up in the Foster case. Revealing more than
journalist Christopher Ruddy, whom he praises to the skies and ridiculously
likens to Emile Zola in the Dreyfus case, he describes here the reaction of
Kenneth Starr's "investigative" team to the terrifying harassment**
that the inconvenient witness, Patrick Knowlton, whom British journalist
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard had ferreted out, received after being subpoenaed
to appear before a grand jury:
No one knows who ordered
the harassment team to begin its operation against Patrick Knowlton on October
26, 1995. However, someone close to the Starr investigation must have
tipped them off that Knowlton had received a subpoena.
Throughout Knowlton's
ordeal, Starr's team treated the beleaguered witness with extraordinary
contempt.
When the street
harassment began, Knowlton called the FBI and requested witness
protection. Nothing happened for two days. Finally, Agent Russell
Bransford—the same FBI agent who had delivered Starr's subpoena—showed up.
"He had this smirk on his face, as if he thought the whole thing was
amusing," says Knowlton. "I told him to get the hell out of my
house."
At the same time
Knowlton was calling the FBI, Ruddy and Evans-Pritchard called Deputy
Independent Counsel John Bates to report the intimidation of a grand jury
witness. Bates's secretary jotted down some notes. "An hour
later I called again," says Evans-Pritchard. "She let out an audible
laugh and said that her boss had received the message...Bates never called
back.
What did Starr's people
find so funny about the situation?
As a last resort, Knowlton
prepared a "Report of Witness Tampering" and took it personally to
the Office of the Independent Counsel. "It was their responsibility,
at the very least, to find out who leaked word of his subpoena," notes
Evans-Pritchard. According to Evans-Pritchard, John Bates responded by
calling security and having Knowlton removed from the building.
Perhaps the most telling
indication of Starr's attitude toward Knowlton is the humiliating
cross-examination to which this brave man was subjected before the grand
jury. Knowlton says that he was "treated like a suspect."
Prosecutor Brett Kavanaugh appeared to be trying to imply that Knowlton was a
homosexual who was cruising Fort Marcy Park for sex. Regarding the
suspicious Hispanic-looking man he had seen guarding the park entrance,
Kavanaugh asked, Did he "pass you a
note?" Did he "touch your genitals?"
Knowlton flew into a
rage at Kavanaugh's insinuations. Evans-Pritchard writes that several
African American jurors burst into laughter at the spectacle, rocking
"back and forth as if they were at a Baptist revival meeting.
Kavanaugh was unable to reassert his authority. The grand jury was
laughing at him. The proceedings were out of control."
It was at that point,
reports Evans-Pritchard, that Patrick Knowlton was finally compelled to
confront the obvious: "the Office of the Independent Counsel was itself
corrupt." (pp. 106-107)
Indeed it was, which
explains how it could come to the conclusion that Foster committed suicide in
Fort Marcy Park against the compelling testimony of Knowlton that the extra car
in the park parking lot was not that of the already dead Foster, plus a ton of
additional suicide-contradicting evidence.
Where Poe intentionally
misleads us, to his eternal discredit, has to do with the nature, the depth and
breadth, and the origin of the corruption of Starr and his team.
Consistent with his book's title and its general orientation, Poe would have us
believe that the Clintons were behind the cover-up and that George H.W. Bush's
former solicitor general, Kenneth Starr, went along with it out of simple
timidity and cowardice:
As Ruddy paints him,
Starr was the sort of man who makes police states work. He may well have
been the decent fellow whom his friends describe, upright and diligent in his
work. But Starr had a vice that outweighed all his virtues. He was
a coward, so paralyzed with fear in the face of naked evil that he would look
the other way and pretend not to see it. He was just the sort of man that
Bill and Hillary needed. (p. 103)
Actually, it's not quite
that simple. Really effective police states need effective propaganda
that is believed by a high percentage of the population. That's where the
layers of propagandists, from the mainstream journalists, to the Edward Kleins, the Ann Coulters, the Christopher Ruddys, the Richard Poes, and the
various "persecuted," "heroic," Internet journalists in
Poe's book, Joseph Farah, Jim Robinson, Matt Drudge, David Horowitz, and a host
of others come in (entering stage right, of course). And here's the proof
of the pudding.
Note carefully the names
of those two Starr underlings involved in the harassment of the witness,
Knowlton. They are John Bates and Brett Kavanaugh. On page 143 Poe says, not surprisingly, "Like most
Americans I support George W. Bush and his War on Terror." But Poe
conveniently neglects to tell his readers that this president, whom he praises
as a "decent, God-fearing man," has made federal judges—with the
approval of the United States Senate—of these two accomplices after the fact of
a high-level murder.
Poe's omission of this
fact is surely intentional. To impart this information would be to
completely undermine his simple-minded message aimed at simple-minded readers,
that is, that the deep, pervasive national corruption that he reveals in his
book essentially begins and ends with Bill and Hillary Clinton, and that his
right-wing heroes are free of the taint. His editors apparently
recognized the risk he was taking of giving the game away by telling us of the
cover-up role of Bates and Kavanaugh in the Foster murder, because neither name
appears in the book's detailed, extensive index.
Again, this omission
could hardly be unintentional. Even the brief mention of my "America's Dreyfus Affair" got my name into the index. Poe must be pretty sure
that the true believers who read his work are not going to go to the trouble to
track down my six-part Internet article and actually read it. Were they
to do so, they would see how his beloved "conservative" crowd did as
least as much as the hated, pro-Clinton liberals to cover up the Foster murder. These include Ann Coulter,
FBI agent Gary Aldrich, and the late Barbara Olson, whom Poe praises so highly
in his book. On the role of conservatives in particular, see "Vince Foster's Valuable Murder." With this broader education, one should not be at
all surprised that George Bush should reward obstructers of justice by giving
them positions of great importance in our "justice" system. Who
is a nominal Democrat or Republican in this corrupt apparatus is completely
beside the point.
Finally, and again, not
surprisingly, a name that you will not find anywhere in either Poe's or Ruddy's account of the cover-up of the Foster murder is
that of George Bush's current head of the Department of Homeland Security,
Michael Chertoff. He was minority counsel in the first Senate
investigation related to the death of Vincent Foster and majority special
counsel in the second such Senate inquiry. Readers can see how cleverly
he labored to prevent the truth from getting out at "Michael Chertoff, Master of the Cover-up.
David Martin
September 9, 2007
* Poe later more than
made up for that omission in spades with a friendly interview of Klein about
his phony Hillary attack book on FrontPage Magazine, along with a glowing review.
** For a detailed
account of that harassment, see the statement that Knowlton and his lawyer, John Clarke, prepared and a
3-judge panel had Kenneth Starr append to his report on Foster's death over
Starr's strenuous objections.
Addendum
It has been called to my
attention that the names of future federal judges John Bates and Brett
Kavanaugh were not the only ones strategically left out of the book's
index. The long passage above ends at the bottom of page 107. Here
we pick up the narrative at the top of page 108, without skipping a word.
As you read it, see if you can guess the name that didn't make the index:
Ken Starr's lead
prosecutor Miquel [sic] Rodriguez had reached that same conclusion seven months
earlier (that Starr's investigation was corrupt ed.). Starr hired him as
a lead prosecutor in September 1994. Soon after, Rodriguez was told that
he was expected to back up the conclusion of the earlier Fiske report—that
Foster had committed suicide. Rodriguez refused. He insisted on
conducting a real investigation. But the harder he tried, the more
resistance he got from Starr's team.
The last straw came on
January 5, 1995, when the Scripps Howard News Service ran a story claiming that
"sources familiar with the Starr inquiry," said that Kenneth Starr
was ready to announce that Vincent Foster "committed suicide for reasons
unrelated to the Whitewater controversy."
Rodriguez was
furious. He had just begun grand jury proceedings the day before.
Who on earth would have leaked the news that the probe was finished?
Rodriguez stuck it out for a few more weeks but finally resigned in March,
returning to his former job as assistant US attorney in Sacramento.
"As an ethical person, I don't believe I could be involved with what they
were doing," he told Ruddy.
Rodriguez's sudden
resignation could have exploded in scandal. But Big Media virtually
ignored it. Indeed, Rodriguez claims that he tried to go public with his
story, giving extensive interviews to reporters from Time,
Newsweek, ABC's Nightline, the Boston
Globe, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and the NewYork Times. Rodriguez says he spent six hours
with the New York Times reporter alone. To all of them,
Rodriguez told the same story: Starr's probe of Vincent Foster's death was a
sham.
"I was told what
the result [of the Starr investigation] was going to be from the get-go,"
Rodriguez later said in a taped conversation, excerpted inWorldNetDaily.com. "This is all so much nonsense; I
knew the result before the investigation began, that's why I left. I
don't do investigations to justify a result."
None of the news
organizations that interviewed Rodriguez aired or published his account.
Several reporters admitted to Rodriguez that their editors had spiked the
story. Rodriguez also claims that FBI agents bullied him, making threats
against his "personal well-being," if he did not shut up.
"The FBI told me back off, back down. I have been communicated with
again and been told to be careful where I tread," says Rodriguez.
To this day, Rodriguez
still serves as an assistant US attorney in Sacramento.
On July 15, 1997, Starr
reached his inevitable conclusion. He issued a two-paragraph statement,
saying, "Mr. Foster committed suicide by gunshot in Fort Marcy Park,
Virginia, on July 20, 1993." (pp. 108-109)
You guessed it.
The additional name missing from the index is "Miguel
Rodriguez." Book editors, like newspaper editors, can be leaned
upon.
Knowlton and his lawyer
supplied three more tapes to World Net Daily, and the reporter promised a
follow-up story, but none was ever forthcoming. You can read the
transcripts of the additional tapes, which came from telephone conversations
with Reed Irvine of Accuracy in Media, at https://www.fbicover-up.com/miguel-rodriguez.html.
David Martin
February 23, 2009
You can listen to the
Rodriguez recordings here. You can also
have a very depressing experience by reading the customers’ reviews of Poe’s
book here. Everyone, it would seem, with the exception of the present
writer, has gone for the bait. None of the people who loved the
book—which includes almost all the reviewers—have noticed the book’s essential
treachery. Poe wants them to believe that their salvation lies with
“conservatives,” almost all of whom pulled their punches on the numerous
Clinton scandals. He also expects that they will not notice the smooth
continuity in policy from Clinton to Bush to Obama when it comes to the
important matters of foreign policy, Wall Street, immigration, civil liberties,
and endemic corruption, including the unpunished—nay, the rewarded—corruption
of the Clintons. The Poe believers have swallowed it all hook, line, and
sinker, while a couple of “liberal” reviewers have panned the book without
reading it, letting the rest of their cohorts have gone off to swallow their
own rat poison on PBS.
David Martin
February 23, 2012
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