Ken Starr’s
Contempt for Your Intelligence
Imagine if some two decades later one of
the lawyers who was primarily responsible for the Warren Commission Report were
to write a book accentuating the report’s virtues and attacking its many
critics. Actually, you don’t have to
imagine it, because just such a book was written by David Belin, whose articles
used to show up with some regularity in the mainstream media doing just that. Now, a very similar book has come out that
does the same thing with regard to the death of Bill Clinton’s Deputy White
House Counsel, Vincent W. Foster, Jr.
One of its revelations is that its author is a former colleague and
apparent admirer of Belin and his work:
Years earlier I had worked with lawyer David
Belin, who had been senior counsel to the Warren Commission, chaired by Chief
Justice Earl Warren, to investigate the assassination of JFK. Warren was a man in a hurry and believed the
nation needed to know what had happened as soon as possible.
Belin concurred in the commission’s findings, but lamented that in the final report they had not
discussed and debunked various conspiracy theories. Released on September 24, 1964, the report
failed to knock down the wilder stories that sprang up. Consequently, they grew exponentially. Belin was so upset by this fallout that he
wrote his own book: November 22, 1963: You Are the Jury. (p. 70)
If you, too, are a David Belin or Warren
Commission admirer, this newer book, written by the Independent Counsel in the
Foster death case, Ken Starr, might be for you.
Published in 2018, but only
recently discovered by this writer, it is entitled Contempt: A Memoir
of the Clinton Investigation.
Starr does differ from Belin in one major
way, however. Belin might have, like
Starr, freely used abusive language to describe doubters of the official truth,
but I don’t recall that he was sanctimonious.
By contrast, from the picture that Starr paints of himself in his book,
the first thing that comes to my mind is the Groucho Marx line, “Integrity is
everything. If you can fake integrity,
you’ve really got it made.”
The son of a Texas minister in a conservative Church
of Christ congregation that doesn’t permit musical instruments in its services,
Starr was a smart kid, as he tells it, and also very ambitious, as you can read
easily enough between the lines.
Unfortunately, the values with which he might have been imbued by his
home life and the ambition that he has displayed in his chosen legal and
political field don’t make a very good match for one another in modern America,
so the values have had to go, only to be worn by the grown-up Ken Starr as a
sort of useful ornament for display purposes.
If all you knew of the man was what you
learned from reading the book, you’d never guess that he had been relieved of
his duties as President of Baylor University two years before the book’s
publication for his role in the cover-up of rampant sexual
offenses
by members of the football team or that prior to that he had been a member of
the all-star legal
team
for Jeffrey Epstein that managed to get Epstein a virtual slap on the wrist for
taking sexual liberties with minors that would have landed almost anyone else in
the slammer for a very long time. You
might say that Starr was just being a good lawyer, but that’s not really the
sort of feather in one’s legal cap that you’re likely to find this preacher’s
kid boasting about. You can bet that the
gig paid quite well, though, so he’ll be crying all the way to the bank about it,
as they say.
Bit Part for
Foster
The first thing one notices about the book
is how little of it is devoted to Foster’s death. Chapter 5 is entitled, “The Vince Foster
Death Investigation,” and it is only a scant 12 pages in length. Starr picks the narrative up again in Chapter
15, entitled “Shift to Washington, D.C.,” but we find there only a couple of
pages of misinformation about the resignation of his first lead investigator of
the Foster death, Miguel Rodriguez. We
shall have more to say about that later.
That Starr should devote only 14 pages to
the Foster death out of a total of 315 pages to memorialize his investigation
of Bill Clinton fits the narrative that we have been sold, though. By the end of 1993, the first year of the
Clinton presidential administration, the realization had set in that some more
authoritative voice had to be invoked than that of the U.S. Park Police that
Foster had committed suicide in July. The
New York Times had been running a series of articles probing a shady real
estate venture in which Bill and Hillary had been engaged with Jim and Susan
McDougal known as Whitewater. The
catalyst for the appointment of an independent counsel to give his imprimatur
to the suicide conclusion was a December 20, 1993, Washington Times
article that the Park Police had discovered that Whitewater documents had been
removed from Foster’s office by White House staff on the night of Foster’s
death. An investigation of Whitewater
would be begun that included looking into the Foster death mystery.
Crime writer Dan E. Moldea
gave away the game that was being played in his 1998 book, A Washington
Tragedy: How the Death of Vincent Foster Ignited a Political Firestorm. He interviewed the Park Police officers
who did the investigation and they revealed to him that, as we had suspected,
they had never even heard of Whitewater at that point and therefore could not have
told the Washington Times reporter that the missing documents were
“Whitewater related,” although he had given them as the source of his information. The stage had been set, though, for another
“investigation” of Foster’s death by special prosecutor Robert Fiske—the independent
counsel law having been allowed to expire—under the general rubric of a
Whitewater investigation. When the
independent counsel law was renewed the next year, Starr replaced Fiske, and
the same game was played all over again, as it is now one last time with this
memoir in which Starr intentionally gives the least attention to that which is
most important.
On page 69, well into his Vince Foster
chapter, Starr pays the Arkansas lawyer his supreme compliment:
Vince Foster’s death haunted me. In many ways, I was a lot like him: serious
to a fault. Foster had been needled by
the media, which I knew all too well could be brutal, especially for someone
not used to the public eye.
At the beginning of the chapter, on page
63, we have this:
Often referred to as courtly, regarded as
one of the most talented lawyers in Arkansas, Foster had been at the vanguard
of the incoming Clinton administration.
A smooth professional who carried himself with great dignity, Vince
Foster was perfectly situated to be a franchise player. Smart and experienced in Arkansas legal
matters, he went way back with the Clintons.
But then the further picture he proceeds
to paint of the very stable and dignified family man with great experience in
the rough and tumble world of the law and not a little bit in sordid Arkansas
politics is of a fragile hot house plant who wilted at a little criticism from only
one source, the Wall Street Journal.
At this point, something I wrote back in October of 2017 is worth
repeating:
I was rummaging through my files a few days ago and stumbled
across a copy of The Wall Street Journal that I had saved that
had a lead editorial entitled “Vincent Foster’s Victory.” It
appeared on June 24, 1993, exactly a week after the “Who Is Vincent Foster?”
editorial. It is in no way an attack on the man. Rather,
it offers rather backhanded praise for his lawyerly skill in arguing what
the Journal sees as the right legal principle in support of
what they also see as the Clinton administration’s wrongheaded purpose, that
is, keeping the deliberations of Hillary’s Health Task Force
secret. The editorial was so unremarkable that I had apparently
saved the edition because of a critical op-ed piece about the National
Endowment for the Arts that ran beside it, where I see I had underlined a
sentence that I liked. The editorial reinforces my point that The
Wall Street Journal’s writings about Foster were in no way
vicious. In fact, they stand in stark contrast to what one sees
these days in virtually all the newspapers daily about anyone you might name in
the Trump administration, especially about Donald Trump, himself.
It’s no wonder that when the Park Police
interviewed all the key Foster family members, which included Vince’s wife Lisa
and his older sister, Sheila Foster Anthony, on the night of
the death, no one could think of any reason why Foster might have been
motivated to take his own life. And
there was no mention by anyone of any sort of depression or psychiatric
problems. That is likely why The
Washington Post found it necessary to lie outrageously in a July 30, 1993,
article
and say that, according to the White House’s spokesman, David Gergen, the Park Police were turned away from the Foster
home that night by the Foster family lawyer, because “Lisa Foster and family
members were too distraught to talk.” The
Post’s reporter, Walter Pincus, was at the Foster residence as he would later report, so the newspaper
had to have known that the story, written by Michael Isikoff
and the late Ann Devroy, was false. The ridiculous motivation for the “suicide”
had to be concocted later.
In the pitifully little attention Starr
gives to the actual details of the Foster death case, he manages to get some
facts wrong:
Shortly after lunch on July 20, Foster
grabbed his coat; bade farewell to his executive assistant in the White House
Counsel’s office, Linda Tripp; gave her some mints from the White House Mess,
and left.
Tripp was the last known person in the
White House complex to see Vince alive. (p. 68)
Tripp was not “his” executive assistant;
as the office executive assistant, she was Bernard Nussbaum’s executive
assistant. The “mints” were actually M
& M’s that came with the cheeseburger that Foster ate for lunch. And, officially, Tripp was not the last known
person in the White House complex to see Foster alive. That was the uniformed Secret Service officer
at the West Wing door, John S. Skyles, who exchanged
pleasantries with Foster as he left.
These are really just small
technicalities, though. The very important point missed by Starr and by all of
the press accounts is that when Foster left the White House proper, he had not
yet left the White House compound. It
is a point that has also been overlooked, no doubt intentionally, by the
various “investigations” that have taken place of Foster’s death. The large Eisenhower Executive Office
Building a few steps to the west is also within the compound, and it houses
most of the White House staff, including those of the White House legal staff,
of which Foster was a part. For Foster
to leave his office without saying where he was going, and then to go out the
West Wing exit, the most likely conclusion is that he was going over to the big
building next door for some sort of meeting.
From there, he likely left the White House compound in the company of
someone else as a passenger in that person’s vehicle.
We say that because FBI agent William Columbell testified before the Senate Whitewater Committee
on July 29, 1994, that Foster’s car was never parked in its allotted space in
the White House compound on July 20, 1993, the day of his death, and the key
witness in the case, Patrick Knowlton, who drove his car into the parking lot
for Fort Marcy Park for an emergency urination by a nearby tree, described a
Honda Accord with Arkansas plates quite different in age and color from the one
that belonged to the Foster family. The
White House compound security cameras would have shown exactly when, and likely
with whom, Foster left the compound, but that was a point that neither Starr
and his investigative team, the FBI, the Senate Whitewater investigators, nor
any member of our stellar press ever raised.
Agents Columbell
and Larry Monroe also falsified Knowlton’s testimony, saying that the car that
he saw in Fort Marcy Park was Foster’s.
After Knowlton had been subpoenaed to testify before the Whitewater
grand jury but before he testified, he and his girlfriend were harassed on the streets of the capital by
a number of extremely intimidating young men, and Knowlton filed a lawsuit over
the matter. All of this was ignored by
the American press, of course. The 20-page letter that Knowlton’s
lawyer, John Clarke, submitted to Starr and the 3-judge panel that appointed
Starr ordered him to include as an appendix to his official report on Foster’s
death, a letter that demolishes Starr’s suicide conclusion, was ignored by the
press, as well.
Miguel Rodriguez, Ken
Starr’s Alter Ego
The names of Knowlton, Clarke, Columbell, and Monroe don’t come up in Starr’s book. They don’t fit his narrative. We were surprised to find that another really
big name that doesn’t fit the narrative, the aforementioned Miguel Rodriguez,
is there, however. We are also quite
sure that the mention of Rodriguez is a surprise to the typical readers of
Starr’s book, but for a quite different reason.
Thanks to the American press’s blackout of the rather stupendous news
that Starr’s first chosen lead investigator had actually demonstrated the
integrity and courage to resign rather than to participate in what he had come
to believe was a murder cover-up, this is likely the first time they would have
encountered his name.
Perhaps Starr felt that too many people
had learned through sources like reporter Christopher Ruddy’s
1997 book, The Strange Death
of Vincent Foster, about the Rodriguez episode that he couldn’t give it
the blackout treatment he gave to so much else, like to Knowlton or to the checkered history of James Beyer, the autopsy
doctor in the case, who described a half-dollar sized exit wound in the back of
Foster’s head that none of the witnesses at the park saw and checked the
“X-rays taken” box on his autopsy chart, but later claimed that he had taken no
X-rays because his X-ray machine was not functioning.
In mentioning Rodriguez, of course, Starr
has to trash him:
Miguel began bringing witnesses before a
Washington grand jury, but raised eyebrows by his
accusatory questioning of U.S. Park Police officers and other witnesses. He seemed to believe—before hearing all the
evidence—that Foster had been murdered in a different location, then dumped at
Fort Marcy Park. This was the stuff of
the conspiracy theories that flourished immediately after the reports of
Foster’s death. We were after the truth
and only the truth, yet there was no justification for browbeating or
mistreating any grand jury witness. (p. 142)
Perhaps Rodriguez asked Park Police
investigator Cheryl Braun how they made the determination that the death was a
suicide even before they looked at the body, as she testified before the Senate
Whitewater Committee. And as for that
anti-browbeating policy, that would come as big news to Patrick Knowlton. Rodriguez’s successor, Brett Kavanaugh, in attempting
to paint Knowlton as a cruising homosexual at the park before the grand jurors
and thereby discredit him, asked him if the one other person he had seen in the
parking lot had touched Knowlton’s
genitals.
Starr’s mention of Rodriguez is really a
step too far for him to take with any open-minded reader willing simply to
avail himself of the resources available through the Internet. He doesn’t even need to consult Ruddy’s book or that of the British reporter, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard,
The Secret Life of
Bill Clinton: The Untold Stories or my recent The Murder of
Vince Foster: America’s Would-Be Dreyfus Affair. All one need do is
to use any search engine you choose and search “Miguel Rodriguez resignation
letter” and to follow the leads that come up.
What you will discover, Starr’s assertions
notwithstanding, is that Rodriguez had uncovered an abundance of evidence
calling the suicide conclusion into question, and, equally importantly, you
will discover that none of the sources discussing Rodriguez is what you would
call mainstream media. America’s
mainstream media, including the “conservative media,” reported nothing about
his resignation at the time that it happened, and when his resignation letter
was discovered some years later by Hugh Turley in the National Archives and
reported by this writer on his web site, they blacked that news out, as
well. That’s why the typical reader of
Starr’s book would have never heard of the man until he reached Chapter 15,
only to be treated to a well-nigh slanderous description of Miguel Rodriguez, who had proved
himself to be the sort of person that Ken Starr has made a career, most
recently as a paid commentator on Fox News, pretending to be.
David Martin
March 23, 2021
Addendum
Patrick Knowlton died of cancer at age 66
on April 21, 2021.
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