RFO Newsmax
Has Huge Stock Price Increase after IPO
The “IPO” abbreviation
here is the familiar one, “initial public offering,” referring to the first
sale of stock to the public by a company. “RFO” is one of our own coinage, meaning “rival fake opposition.” Newsmax made
its stock available to the public for the first time just last Friday, and it
has taken
off like a rocket.
When it comes to fake
opposition to the long-dominant liberal mainstream media, it might be something
of an exaggeration at this point to call Newsmax a rival to the big one, which
is Fox News. I know that I find Newsmax quite boring and hard to watch
compared to Fox, and the numbers at Adweek, though
a bit difficult to decipher, tell me that the general public sees Newsmax about
the same as I do. Its top program, “Rob Schmitt Tonight,” had only a
little more than 11 percent of Fox’s top program, “The Five,” in February, even
less than the viewership of CNN’s top show, “The Lead with Jake Tapper.”
Overall, its most recent prime time Nielsen
ratings were almost exactly 10 percent of Fox’s.
There should be no room
for dispute over the fact that both Newsmax and Fox are fake opposition,
though. For its part, Fox should have erased all doubt that that’s what
they’re all about when they fired Tucker Carlson, the host of the most popular news
show in American television at the height of his popularity. This can’t
be a business decision. It could only have been a political decision,
because he was letting too much truth get out, particularly with respect to
U.S. foreign policy. He invited on the severe critic of that policy,
retired Col. Douglas Macgregor, as a guest on numerous occasions.
Carlson’s firing put an end to Macgregor’s appearances on Fox.
Judge Andrew Napolitano seemed not quite as cutting edge when he was a
host on Fox, but since he left the network and began doing interviews that one
can watch on YouTube, we can see how he must have been reined in by the cable
network.
When I see that
Newsmax’s stock value gained by an incredible 735% on Monday, my initial
suspicion is that someone has to be juicing it, or
shall we spell that “Jewsing” it? And look at
how Yahoo in its “news” story appears to bolster Newsmax’s credibility as a
critic of the establishment with the shots that it takes at it:
Newsmax, which became a
cable TV network in 2014, has faced an onslaught of critiques and legal battles
for touting conspiracy theories. The company is facing an ongoing Systems
seeking related to false claims it made in its coverage of the 2020
election, which Newsmax cited among risk factors to its business in its latest 10-K filing to
the SEC.
Newsmax settled another lawsuit with another election tech company,
Smartmatic, in 2024 for similar claims and has paid $20 million of the $40 million
settlement thus far, according to the filing. The news outlet, seen as a Fox
News alternative, also drew criticism when it reported false claims and conspiracy
theories about the Jan. 6 attack on the US Capitol.
In its coverage of this
Newsmax stock story, Forbes magazine
gives us a scrubbed-up version of Newsmax CEO Christopher Ruddy, who has been
made an overnight billionaire by the incredible rise of the company’s stock:
Before starting Newsmax,
Ruddy grew up in suburban Long Island and got a
bachelor’s degree in history from St. John’s University in New York and a
master’s in public policy from the London School of Economics. He then worked
in journalism at the New York Post and as a national
correspondent for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, where he first
met Richard
Mellon Scaife (d. 2014), a billionaire heir to the Mellon banking
fortune who owned the paper.
Ruddy founded Newsmax as
a digital news site in 1998 with a $25,000 investment from Scaife, and the pair
then raised $15 million from 200 private investors. By 2009, they had bought
out those investors, and Ruddy owned 60% of the firm
at the time with Scaife holding 40% as a silent partner. Newsmax launched a
cable channel in 2014, and it’s now grown to become the fourth-largest news
channel in the U.S. with 30 million regular viewers in the last three months of
2024, according to data from Nielsen cited in Newsmax’s public filings.
When it comes to
coverage of the portly, never-married 60-year-old Ruddy, often described as a
long-term friend and confidant of his fellow New Yorker and Florida neighbor Donald Trump, the mainstream press has really been
all over the place. Consider this paragraph from my October 2019 article
entitled “NPRavda Features Double Agent Ruddy“:
If we were to flash back
a bit more than two decades, the notion that Chris Ruddy and NPR would be
cozying up to one another and that he would be giving them music to their ears
would have been absurd. The role he was playing at that time, ostensibly
funded by the putative conservative moneybags Richard
Mellon Scaife, was at the very point of the spear of what Hillary
Clinton called the “vast right-wing
conspiracy.” the one that was out to get them (although his name has
been cleansed from the Wikipedia
page for it). To me, initially, he was the only
quasi-mainstream press investigator into the pretty obvious murder of Deputy
White House Counsel Vincent W. Foster, Jr., which the authorities and the press
across the political spectrum are still calling a suicide. He even ended
up publishing a pretty decent book on the subject, The Strange Death of
Vincent Foster: An Investigation in 1997. You can read
the review I did at the time, along with a new introduction written in
2015 on my
web site. You can also read the original review on Amazon,
where to date it has received 49 “helpfuls” from
readers. That would make it far and away the top review, and it used to
be touted as such, but Amazon has since decided to hide it deeply away.
But to gain a full
appreciation of the essential phoniness of Christopher Ruddy, of his entire
career, and of what might be going on with this stock craziness, one must read
my 2014 article
about the man, and here it is in its entirety:
Double
Agent Ruddy Reaching for Media Pinnacle
It is hard to think of
anything more subversive of our putatively free and democratic system than the
penetration of our news media by secret, unaccountable government
agents, unless it is the penetration—the “cognitive infiltration” in
Cass Sunstein’s terminology—of groups of concerned, civic-minded individuals by
those same agents. Ladies and gentlemen, as a shining example of both, I
give you Christopher Ruddy.
BloombergBusinessweek.com
reported last week that Ruddy’s Newsmax.com will launch its own TV news network
this June to compete with Fox for the conservative audience. “How do you
have something so successful in cable that nobody else wants to imitate or cut
into their market share? It defies reason,” asks the 49-year-old Ruddy.
The
Chris Ruddy I Know
Christopher Ruddy was
only 29 when he came into my life. I had been laboring
pretty much in solitude in my inquiries into the death of President Bill
Clinton’s Deputy White House Counsel Vincent W. Foster, Jr. My
motivations were mainly two: I had a longstanding interest in the John F.
Kennedy assassination, and the press reaction to Oliver Stone’s JFK had
brought the American press’s culpability in the crime, at least as accessories
after the fact, forcefully to my attention. As a response, I had just
completed my first serious political writing, the long poem “Assassins,”
which had no immediate outlet in those days before I was online. I could
not help but note a great similarity in the eagerness of the press to accept
the official Foster suicide conclusion to their eager
endorsement of the lone crazed gunman theory in the JFK case. Second, the
fact that Foster had graduated two years behind me at Davidson College and
that, at about the same height, we had matched up in intramural basketball
competition had given me something of a personal interest. (As a lifelong Democrat,
I had voted for Bill Clinton just months before.)
It also helped that I
was working in Washington, DC, but it helped a good deal less than you might
think. The only other people I could find who shared my skepticism of the official story in the Foster case were at
the conservative media watchdog organization, Accuracy in Media (AIM).
Its director, the late Reed Irvine, was
the main person there interested in the case, but my main point of contact with
them was the late Bernard Yoh .
I almost never talked with Irvine. I had attempted to get the Liberty Lobby involved,
but they had demonstrated no interest.
Ruddy arrived upon the Foster scene some six months after the death with the first
of a series of articles on January 27, 1994, in Rupert Murdoch’s New
York Post. One can gather a little of my sense of excitement at
his discoveries by scrolling down to the section headed “Enter Christopher
Ruddy” in part 1 of my 6-part series, “America’s Dreyfus
Affair, the Case of the Death of Vincent Foster.”
I immediately got in touch with him, and we would see quite a bit of each other
in the months ahead. When he came to Washington
he would regularly call on Irvine, Washington correspondent for the
conservative Telegraph of London, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard,
Foster case researcher Hugh Turley of Hyattsville, MD, and me.
Ruddy told me that his
interest in the case originated with a call from an unnamed reporter at the
conservative Washington Times who had been stymied by his
editors in his attempt to write the truth about the story. Dan E. Moldea reported later in his book, A Washington Tragedy: How the Death
of Vincent Foster Ignited a Political Firestorm, that
Ruddy told him that people at AIM were responsible for igniting his
interest. Now I seriously doubt that either story is true.
Ordered
to Talk to Ruddy
One of the things that
most impressed me about Ruddy in the beginning was that, unlike the other
journalists who just took what was fed them by the government and passed it
along as though they were doing independent reporting, many of whom had clearly
not even bothered to go out to Fort Marcy Park, the obscure Civil War relic off
the George Washington Parkway where Foster’s body was found, he appeared to
have done some real shoe-leather journalism. He had actually
interviewed some of the people who were among the first to arrive at the
park on the evening of July 20, 1993. But here, with the wisdom of
hindsight, is a memo for the record written by Turley in 1998:
In case anyone is still
naïve enough to believe any investigative journalist in America would expose
government corruption just look at how one of these reporters “found” his
sources….
Christopher Ruddy gained
a lot of fame for “digging” up information about the death of White House
counsel Vincent Foster. How did this reporter get those interviews with
government witnesses that would not talk to anyone else?
Ruddy’s “sources” were
ORDERED to talk to him!
“I was basically ordered
to interview or ordered to speak with one of the reporters and the New York
Post again, I was told to talk to this Ruddy person, Mr. Ruddy.” -Deposition by
US Park Police Officer Kevin Fornshill for US Senate
6/12/94
“I just did it because I
was ordered to do it [talk to Chris Ruddy].” -Deposition by Fairfax County EMS
worker George Gonzalez for US Senate 7/20/94
Ruddy served as a
spokesman for the government authorities.
Every member of the
American press has gone along with the cover-up of the murder of White House
official Vincent Foster. Ruddy was a little different. He created
the illusion he was a courageous reporter on the side of truth. Ruddy’s reporting
was a farce all along and just another layer of the murder cover-up of by the
American media.
That goes right to the
heart of the matter. In that first Ruddy article Gonzalez is identified
as the first emergency worker and Fornshill as the
first policeman on the scene at the park. Had we been a little better
versed in espionage tradecraft we would probably have recognized much earlier
that Ruddy was playing the classic double agent role. To be sure, he
reported some things that seemed extremely damaging to the authorities, but his
reports stayed very well contained. We were like the enemy who had
been shown some of the adversary’s secrets by a fake defector. He bought
credibility with us, while not doing all that much harm to the case of his
ultimate employers. The New York Post is a tabloid that
is noted mainly for its witty and sensational headlines, and Ruddy
later left it for a much more obscure suburban Pittsburgh newspaper owned by
one of the heirs of the Andrew Mellon fortune, Richard Mellon Scaife.
This latter paper put “Pittsburgh” in front of its Tribune-Review name
only about the time Ruddy arrived there.
But we really wanted to
believe, like Lot in the case of Sodom and Gomorrah, that there was at least
one righteous person among America’s press. There were early straws in
the wind had we been keener to recognize them. To take one example, some
of the key flaws in the government’s suicide case are to be found in the
autopsy performed by the late Dr. James Beyer. In the form that asks “X-rays taken” he had checked the box beside it that
said “yes,” but he had elsewhere written that because the X-ray machine was
broken, he had taken no X-rays. This is of great importance because he
also drew a picture of a half-dollar sized exit wound in the crown of the head
in the picture of the body on the autopsy sheet. No one who was at the
park that night detected any exit wound at all, much less the huge bloody mess
that would have been blown out on the ground or vegetation down-range from
Foster’s head. X-rays would have undoubtedly shown the bullet still in
Foster’s head.
Dr. Beyer had a bit of a
checkered past. In two notable instances in Fairfax County, VA, in which
he had performed the autopsy, the police had ruled suicide when there were
strong indications of murder. The first was that of 21-year-old Timothy Easley
in 1989. Four years after the initial ruling Easley’s girlfriend had
confessed to stabbing him to death. The second case, that of 21-year-old
college student Tommy Burkett, on
its face was far more sinister. The Burketts
had returned home on a Sunday evening to find young Tommy dead of an apparent
gunshot wound seated in a chair in an upstairs bedroom. The family’s
revolver was in his hand on his lap, but with the cylinder slightly ajar and
the bullet hole in the wall behind him was not even close to being in the
proper alignment if Tommy had shot himself as the police quickly concluded he
had done. Furthermore, there was fresh blood on the wall of the stairwell
leading up to the bedroom and Tommy showed signs of having been beaten about
the head. Again, heavily relying upon Dr. Beyer’s autopsy, though, the
police had quickly ruled suicide. Later the parents were able to get the
body exhumed and have an autopsy performed by another experienced forensic
pathologist. He discovered a broken jaw and numerous contusions that
could not have been caused by the single gunshot.
I drove Ruddy to the Burketts’ home for him to interview them. I was
present when they told him that they had discovered that Tommy had been busted
for marijuana and had had the charges dropped in exchange for working as an
informant for the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). They had found
many indications that Tommy had been beaten to death because of what he had
learned and reported in his informant role. They also told him of their
attempts to get coverage of their story in the news. They had talked to
several reporters who had shown interest, but nothing ever got printed.
Then they had their phone system screened by a professional and found that they
were being bugged. After that they called a reporter for the local free
weekly, the Chantilly Times, from a pay phone. I had
first read their amazing story there. I was primarily an observer at the
interview, but I distinctly remember that it was I and not Ruddy who broached
the subject of The Washington Post. The Burketts had not volunteered it, so I asked them “What
about The Post?”
I can’t recall the
reporter’s name, but one did come and interview them after they had found out
about their phone bug and he responded excitedly to
their story. His editor killed the story, though, and to this day The
Post, the same newspaper that has done more than any other to sell the Foster suicide line to the public, has not reported anything
about the Burkett death. Afterwards, on March 8, 1994, Ruddy
had an article in the New York Post entitled “Foster Coroner
Has Been Dead Wrong on Suicide Before.” It is about the Easley and
Burkett cases, but there’s not a peep about the DEA or the phone bugging
or The Post’s news suppression. Mainly, Dr. Beyer and
the Fairfax County police come across as incompetent in Ruddy’s account.
One gets the same impression from his Appendix IV, “Case Histories of Dr. James
Beyer” in his 1997 book, The Strange Death of Vincent Foster. The
general corruption of the government beyond the Foster case and the role of the
press as accomplices were apparently off limits.
Sometime later,
something occurred that much more obviously should have brought Ruddy’s
legitimacy into question in my eyes. A colleague, hearing me voice skepticism over the Foster “suicide” conclusion, revealed
to me that he had previously worked for the Mitre Corporation, and
that they had installed the surveillance system around the White House
compound. He said, as you might expect, that it is state of the art and
that it could tell you how closely Foster had shaved in the morning when he
came to work. As it happens, among the many gaping holes in the
government’s case is the question of the time and the manner of Foster’s
departure from the White House compound on the day of his death.
Officially, the last person to see him alive was the secret service agent on
duty at the door at the west end of the White House. There is no official
record that we know of of his ever having left the
fenced White House compound. He could have simply been going to the Old
Executive Office Building next door when he left the White House proper.
But when did Foster leave the compound? Was he with anyone? Was he
in a car or on foot? Was it his own car or someone else’s? The
surveillance camera should have provided a definite record.
I put the question to
Ruddy. A few days later he got back to me with the explanation that he
had received from his “contact in the White House.” Would you believe,
those surveillance cameras had cramped President Clinton’s carousing, tom-catting
style and he had had them removed, he said? I passed that response on to
my colleague, and he merely rolled his eyes in disbelief. Had the
surveillance camera issue ever been raised publicly, which Ruddy could have
done, this obvious fallback position would never have survived public scrutiny.
Other, subtler,
indications that Ruddy was not what he appeared to be also began to
emerge. The mainstream press gave him publicity, but as something of a
whipping boy. It was similar to their treatment
of the obviously phony outfit, Citizens United.
Two instances stand out. On March 7, 1994, the day before his article on
Dr. Beyer, Ruddy had a New York Post article headlined “Cops
Made Photo Blunder at Foster Death Site” that began this way: “The U.S. Park
Police never took a crucial crime-scene photo of Vincent Foster’s body before
it was moved during the investigation into the death of the White House deputy
counsel, FBI sources told The Post.” Not long after that, ABC Evening
News came out with a report that showed a black revolver in the dead Foster’s
hand, which they said they had obtained from the Park Police. Ruddy was
left with egg on his face.
Worse than that, Ruddy had later collaborated with the Strategic Investment
newsletter on a video on the Foster case in which the confident claim was made
that the gun-in-hand photo was phony because it showed the gun in the right
hand when, in fact, Foster was left-handed. That set him up to be on
CBS’s 60 Minutes as the very symbol of the lunacy of the
Foster-case skeptics. Mike Wallace got
Ruddy to admit before a national audience that there was no good evidence that
Foster was, in fact, left-handed, but at that point he stressed that the video
was not his, but was a Strategic Investment
production. “But you edited the tape, didn’t you?” Wallace shot back, and
Ruddy could only sheepishly confirm that he had.
Again, with the wisdom
of hindsight, it is abundantly clear that both public relations disasters were
planned by those orchestrating the cover-up, and Ruddy’s intentional “blunders”
and his anonymous FBI “sources” were all a part of it.
Ruddy was also
publicized by the Clinton White House itself as being right at the epicenter of Hillary Clinton’s “vast right-wing
conspiracy.” They produced a volume in 1995 awkwardly titled “The
Communications Stream of Conspiracy Commerce,” and it was provided to
the media in January of 1997. The main villain in the story is Ruddy’s
employer Richard Mellon Scaife, who ostensibly financed many right-wing,
anti-Clinton publications and organizations, but Ruddy
himself is also a major figure.
The beginning of my
final estrangement from Ruddy began on a positive note. We had gone to
some Foster-related function together and I was carrying with me the book I was
reading during my bus and subway commute at the time, Barbara Tuchman’s The
Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World before the War, 1890-1914. It
had a long section on the Dreyfus Affair in France. I had been struck by
one passage for its similarity to the Foster case and I showed it to Ruddy. Boiling down the position of General Auguste
Mercier and his case against Captain Alfred Dreyfus, Tuchman had written, “All
the strength, except truth, was on his side.”
“You should write
something up showing the parallels between the two cases,” suggested
Ruddy. So I did, and “America’s Dreyfus
Affair, the Case of the Death of Vincent Foster” is
the result. One of the main “strengths” that Mercier had was a generally
compliant press, and I stress that point heavily throughout what became a
six-part series. Ruddy’s reaction after reading what is now Part 1 was
not at all what I thought it would be. I had made him something of a
heroic figure, likening him to the young Dreyfus defender, Bernard Lazare.
Ruddy seemed thoroughly
displeased with what I had written, but he only seized upon one item to object
to. “You said that I wrote that the Park Police didn’t take any crime
scene photographs, and that’s not what I said. I was talking about the
photo of the overall scene that would have made it clear where the body was in
the park, not crime scene photos generally.”
If that was the information he meant to convey by his article he certainly
did a very poor job of communicating because no objective reader could come to
any other conclusion than that no crime scene photographs at all had been
taken. But Ruddy had his excuse to reject my
work, and he was sticking to it.
In
reality, I believe, Ruddy had a big problem
with my pointing out the press complicity in the cover-up. * Perhaps an
even bigger problem than that was that he had been chosen to lead the parade of
the skeptics, and with my “Dreyfus” paper, I had
moved up pretty close to the front.
Enter
Knowlton and Clarke
The others who moved up
toward the head of the skeptic parade managed to sink
Ruddy’s credibility completely. They are the witness, Patrick Knowlton,
who had happened by the Fort Marcy Park parking lot to relieve himself, his
lawyer John Clarke, and the aforementioned Turley, who assisted them. What
transpired after that is well laid out in Sam Smith’s Progressive
Review here.
(That is now a dead link. See my review of
Richard Poe’s book, Hillary’s Secret War: The Clinton Conspiracy to
Muzzle Internet Journalists for a good summary taken from Poe’s
book.) My complete undressing of Ruddy can be found in Part 2 of “Dreyfus.”
There I reveal that Ruddy first tried to undermine them with a whispering
campaign against Clarke and in the end left out the story of Knowlton’s lawsuit
against several FBI agents from his 1997 book, all the while ignoring the most
salient fact that Knowlton had revealed, which was that Foster’s car was not at
the park when his body was.
When Clarke was able to
get his devastating
letter appended to Kenneth Starr’s official report on Foster’s death
by the three-judge panel that appointed him, and over Starr’s strenuous
objections, and that fact was blacked out by the entire American press, Ruddy
participated in the blackout at the time. ** For all practical purposes, he was
completely out of the closet—though in virtually the reverse way as CNN’s Anderson Cooper.
When Newsmax started up
in 1998 with Ruddy as its head, we longtime Ruddy watchers never thought of it
as anything more than a propaganda operation. Ruddy was being rewarded
for a job well done in misdirecting the public and helping keep the lid on the
Foster case, similar to the way in which members of
Starr’s cover-up team, Brett Kavanaugh and John Bates were rewarded with
federal judgeships.
Newsmax
As the head of Newsmax, Ruddy has further embellished the impression that he was
only a right-wing extremist out to get the Clintons. For the most part it
has turned out standard Fox News, Weekly Standard-type war-hawkish
establishment conservative fare. At the same time
he began a slow and steady retreat from all the good work that pointed so
clearly to the fact that Vince Foster was murdered. I described the Ruddy
technique in a short article in 1999, “More Ruddy Trickery”:
Christopher
Ruddy, investigative reporter for Richard Mellon Scaife’s Pittsburgh
Tribune Review, editor of the online service Newsmax, and
author of the book The Strange Death of Vincent Foster, is
portrayed by the mainstream media as the leading critic of the government in
the Foster case. The fact that he is singled out for publicity by that
disreputable crowd should be sufficient evidence of his phoniness. The numerous
self-discrediting things he has done such as claiming that the Park Police took
no crime-scene photographs and that Foster was
left-handed when the gun was found in his right hand also give him away. Lest
we tend to forget about his deceitfulness and treachery he keeps reminding us
with little gems on his web site such as promoting Foster cover-up books by the
likes of Ann
Coulter and Howard Kurtz.
He contributes to the Foster murder cover-up most recently almost in passing in an
article comparing the thwarted investigation of Chinagate
with obstructions of the Senate “investigation” of tangential occurrences
around the Foster death (as though the Senate were
serious about either investigation). Here is the telling passage:
Thus, one of the great
mysteries of Whitewater slipped between the cracks: Did Foster know about the
Hale office search? If the answer is yes, then he knew that Whitewater was
about to explode, which no doubt caused him great distress.
Just hours after the
Hale office search warrant was issued, Foster’s body
was found in a remote Virginia Park; his gunshot death ruled a suicide.”
(Friday, June 11, 3:37 am, ‘The Aborted Chinagate
Search: Deja Foster?’)
Get that, dear reader? Sure sounds as though Foster killed himself because he was
distressed over Whitewater, doesn’t it? Thus does the great Clinton critic,
Ruddy, cover for Clinton and the whole sorry crowd responsible for Foster’s
murder and the cover-up that continues by reinforcing the absurd line that
Foster killed himself because he was somehow “disturbed.” We ought to all be
more than a little disturbed over the machinations of people like Christopher
Ruddy.
Ruddy’s completely
folded tent for truth about the Foster death became completely obvious with the
appointment of arch-Foster-cover-up writer, Ronald Kessler as
Newsmax’s chief Washington correspondent in 2006. In his book
on the White House Kessler devotes 11 pages to the Foster death, and it’s all
pure cover-up, the apparent complete antithesis of Ruddy’s book on the
subject. You can read about it in my article “Kessler, Ruddy, and the
Parade of Lies.”
Watching this sorry
performance by Ruddy, one can’t help but feel for the 23 out
of 32 customer reviewers on Amazon.com of his book on the
Foster death and all the people they represent, who gave the book five out of
five stars and wrote glowing, trusting reviews. They could see that he
was onto something. Now he seemed to be giving them a big “never
mind.” But when it comes to betrayal by the putative Irish Catholic
Ruddy, they hadn’t seen anything yet.
While Ruddy’s image as
the Foster-death truth-seeker steadily ebbed, his image as a garden variety
Clinton hater flowed. It probably reached its high-water mark in 2002 in
a book he wrote with Carl Limbacher, Jr., Catastrophe: Clinton’s Role in
America’s Worst Disaster that can be summed
up by the picture on the cover. Bill Clinton is in the foreground and a
disintegrating twin tower is in the background. The book parrots the
official 19-Arab-hijacker line but blames the Clinton administration for
carelessly letting it happen with its presumed softness on terrorism.
Though clearly a very poor excuse for a book, the Ruddy handlers at Newsmax
must have been pleased by how well it achieved its polarizing objective.
As of this date, 15 of the 39 customer reviewers had given it five stars and 22
had given it only one star.
The
Born-Again Ruddy
Now, in the most cynical
move yet, as if to show how contemptuous the opinion molders
are of the American public—at least those who think of themselves as
conservative—Ruddy has been permitted to cash in his Clinton-hater card.
Worse than that, he has even done it by seeming to take back all the good
apparent truth-seeking work he did when he first came upon the national
journalistic scene.
“He has become friends
with Bill and Hillary Clinton and won’t rule out supporting Hillary for
president in 2016,” wrote Businessweek. Further on, they say this:
In a
recent Newsmax editorial lambasting Rand Paul for dredging up the
Monica Lewinsky affair, he wrote, “As one of the participants in those battles
back then who was a critic of President Clinton, I can say with some degree of
certainty we made a mistake.” About the only area in which he remains a staunch
party-line conservative is foreign policy.
Take that, all you folks
who went to the trouble of reading The Strange Death of Vincent Foster and
especially the ones who wrote good reviews about it online. He’s a
changed man. He also told Joe Scarborough on MSNBC that he was
wrong. He cares no more about the truth now than do his newfound friends,
as if he ever did. And lest you think he’s just talking about the
Lewinsky business, which I can’t recall his ever having written anything about,
look who has kind words to say about the “reformed” Ruddy:
Ruddy’s own
conservatism, despite a fervent anti-Obama streak, is far from Tea Party
obstructionism. “People mellow or change or get perspective as they age,” says
liberal journalist Joe Conason,
often Ruddy’s foil during the Clinton battles, who now counts him as a friend.
“Or most people do. He’s not this right-wing kid that he was.”
See, it was only because
he was a right-winger that Ruddy cared about the Foster case. In truth,
Joe Conason is to Chris Ruddy as David Corn is to Joe
Goulden. Conason is the co-author with the infamous Gene
Lyons of The Hunting of the President: The
Ten-Year Campaign to Destroy the Clintons. To get
some flavor of that book, all one needs to do is to
check out my article with the subtitle, “Gene Lyons, Paid Liar,
Murder Enabler.” In that article I meticulously document the statement,
“Lyons’ lies are important because they are so enormous and outrageous, they
are easily proven to be lies, and they go right to the heart of the Foster
murder and its cover-up.”
As for the Conason-Lyons
book, one can get some idea of its quality from their very first mention of
Foster’s death at the beginning of chapter 6: “[Foster’s] body was
discovered at 5:45 P.M. by officers from the U.S. Park Service police, who
treated the incident from the very first as a routine investigation, made
politically sensitive only later by the identity of the victim.”
There is not a single
word of truth in that statement, even according to the officially approved
story. It’s abundantly evident from this one sentence that neither of
these shills has ever even set foot in Fort Marcy Park or they would know how
extremely unlikely it is that any patrolling policeman would have stumbled
across Foster’s body where it was found in a back corner of the little-visited
park. The official story is that a passing motorist who had gone there to
urinate spotted him, though there are some serious questions about that story
as well. And had the Park Police treated the matter routinely,
they would have followed the police manual and treated this violent death by
gunshot as a murder until they had accumulated sufficient evidence to disprove
it. They did not do that. And an absolutely
amazing number of things went on in the park that night that were very
far from routine. Clarke, Knowlton, and Turley heavily document those
things in their court submission/book Failure of the Public Trust. Furthermore,
the Fairfax County emergency workers who were at the scene that evening
recorded the death as the result of a “likely homicide.”
Conason and Lyons,
according to their index, mention Ruddy on 10 pages and Evans-Pritchard on 11
pages, and almost every time it’s in terms of the blackest villainy. They
weren’t just political opponents of the president and his wife, after all, they
were part of a “campaign to destroy Bill and Hillary Clinton.”
However, also according to the index, two very important names connected
to these two vilified journalists are completely missing from the book.
They are Miguel Rodriguez and Patrick Knowlton. Rodriguez was initially
Starr’s lead investigator who apparently really tried to get at the truth, but he
resigned in disgust. In my review of Ruddy’s book I
say that his Chapter 9 about that episode alone would make a very good
movie. For his part, by far the most important thing Evans-Pritchard did related to the Foster case was to ferret out Knowlton and
interview him. Only then did Knowlton know that his FBI interrogators had
falsified what he had told them in their official reports.
The only index listing
concerning Foster’s death directly in the Conason-Lyons book is tellingly
entitled “suicide, rumors concerning,” drawing from
#3 of the “Seventeen
Techniques for Truth Suppression.” The subject comes up
on 26 pages in the book, but somehow they can’t find
the occasion to mention either Rodriquez *** or Knowlton.
Christopher Ruddy is now
telling us in so many words that we should believe what they have written about
the Foster death, not what he has written. Just
think about that when you watch anything from his upcoming network news
production.
Whose Operation?
If Newsmax is an
operation, whose operation is it? Businessweek tells us
that the first investor in Newsmax was former CIA director William Casey’s
daughter Bernadette. That looks like a good lead, but in
all likelihood what it means is that we can rule the CIA out.
Looking back at Ruddy’s
work on the Foster case, the most likely candidate by far would seem to be the
FBI. Throughout his writings he referred constantly to one anonymous FBI
source or another. He obviously had connections there. He also
covered up for them. He concealed their active involvement in the
investigation from beginning to end. According to Ruddy, anything that
was ever done wrong was the work of the bungling Park Police or that insidious
Clinton crowd at the White House. It was never the FBI. Maybe
they’re too obvious as well.
Maybe the answer is to
be found in an important bit of information that is left out of the Businessweek article.
They tell us that Ruddy studied abroad at the London School of Economics, which
is unusual enough for this 12th child of a policeman and a
homemaker, but they fail to tell us where else he has studied abroad, at Hebrew
University in Jerusalem. Imagine that. Businessweek says
that Ruddy comes from a Catholic family that didn’t
regularly go to church. Did the mother, perhaps, take them to the synagogue,
instead?
It’s not just because of
Ruddy’s studies in Jerusalem and the conventional pro-Israel neocon politics of
the Newsmax web site that I raise the question. Once I happened to make
some rather routine critical comment about Israel, and Ruddy’s sharp rejoinder
in disagreement really surprised me. He seemed to take what I was saying
about Israel personally. I recently ran across an observation by
Professor Kevin MacDonald that reminded me very much of how Ruddy reacted at
that time: “I have encountered many liberal,
politically correct Jews who react vociferously (almost violently) to the most
innocuous comments about any topic related to Israel or Jews.”
Take out the liberal and
politically correct part, and that was Ruddy, though I’m not sure now about the
need to remove the liberal part. There really wasn’t any real point in
taking issue with my offhand observation, it seemed to me, and he definitely wanted to stay on my good side, but it was like
he couldn’t help himself. I just marked Israel off as anything I could
make small talk about with Ruddy, and we never found anything further to
disagree about that I can think of.
There’s also the
coziness and mutual admiration between Ruddy and the duplicitous
arch-Zionist Alan Dershowitz that Businessweek does
mention and Ruddy refers to as well in his interview by Joe Scarborough.
Could it just be the fact that they’re both skunks that they have this affinity
for one another or is something else going on?
Now it’s quite possible
for a crypto-Jew, if that’s what Ruddy is, to be working for the CIA or the
FBI, but it also brings another intelligence organization into the possible
Newsmax mix, and that would be the Mossad.
Finally, Businessweek hints
that Ruddy is motivated by personal pecuniary considerations as much or more
than by any political ideals: “Ruddy earns what he describes as a modest
six-figure salary, but he’s plainly as interested in his own success as in
advancing his conservative agenda.”
Let us take a stab at
what that six-figure salary amounts to. What would the Biblical thirty
pieces of silver be worth these days?
* I had previously not
gone into detail as to what “all the strength” was that General Mercier had on
his side in the Dreyfus case. It included a very cooperative press.
As it happens, one of the reporters who covered the trial that convicted
Dreyfus on the basis of secret evidence was Theodor
Herzl, reporting for an Austrian newspaper. He was part of that compliant
press at the time because he reported that Dreyfus was probably guilty.
Later he would say that it was the abiding anti-Semitism revealed by the
railroading of Dreyfus that moved him to found the
Zionism movement.
**Ruddy later had a
catch-up article about the Knowlton-Clarke addendum. Here is Hugh
Turley’s assessment of it:
Some have posted Ruddy’s
November 4th article published almost ONE MONTH after the
October 10th event as evidence that the addendum to Ken Starr’s
Foster report was reported to the American people. The date of the Ruddy
article is never posted with the article NOT EVEN AT RUDDY’S WEBSITE because it
is embarrassingly late.
I had to shame Ruddy
into doing the story. In October Ruddy told me he would NOT report the
order from the US Circuit Court of appeals because he “was not a court
reporter”. Ruddy said, “I am an investigative journalist, you have to
get someone that covers the courts to do that story.” It was good that
Ruddy finally got it published in the small circulation Pittsburgh paper but he had many facts wrong in the article.
Here is what I wrote
about Ruddy’s article on November 10, 1997:
Ruddy is known to most
folks, including Mike Wallace of CBS, as the “leading journalist on the Foster
story.” Too bad he does not lead with the correct facts. Ruddy’s
November 4th article reporting that Patrick Knowlton’s attorney won approval of
the court to attach a 20 page letter to Ken Starr’s
report over Starr’s objections deserves criticism on several points.
It is not well known,
but the witness Knowlton and Ruddy are barely on speaking terms. It is certain
Ruddy did not fact check his story with Patrick Knowlton or his attorney John
Clarke. Chris did call me to tell me he was doing a story on Knowlton but he did not seek advice so the omissions and
errors in his story are his own.
One of DC Dave Martin’s
13 techniques for truth suppression [now 17] is
“To come half clean.” This is the technique used by Ruddy throughout his
article. Ruddy’s article about Knowlton’s attachment appeared in the weekday
edition and lowest circulation edition of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.
Ruddy downplays Knowlton’s historic attachment by running the story with a
lengthy article about Arkansas State trooper trivia as if that was more
important. The Knowlton article begins, “Two Arkansas state troopers are
not alone in complaining…”
Ruddy can be extremely
accurate when he wants to be. I know, because I have seen him in action
typing on my own computer keyboard and he has edited and corrected press
releases for me. Therefore his obvious errors jump off
the page at me since they are supposedly from the “leading reporter on the
Foster story.”
Ruddy wrote, “Knowlton,
the first person known to have been in Fort Marcy Park on the afternoon of
Foster’s death…” This is incorrect because everyone familiar with the case
knows that another man was already at Fort Marcy Park when Knowlton arrived.
We’ve seen this man’s face too. [published in Ruddy’s first book]
Ruddy wrote, “[Knowlton]
was surprised he was not asked to review the [Starr’s] report.” This
statement is a total fabrication by Ruddy. I know Patrick Knowlton well
and I know he never expected Starr to ask him to review his report and he was
certainly not surprised that he was not asked. The statute allows that
persons mentioned in the report may submit comments and the court would decide
if those comments would be added and if so in whole or in part
Ruddy wrote that John
Clarke, “filed an appeal…supplying more that 118 exhibits and a 400 page report…” What Ruddy calls a “report” is in
fact a civil rights lawsuit against FBI agents filed last year under
seal. It was unsealed on November 12, 1996 in
U.S. Court in the District of Columbia. A press conference was held that
day announcing the lawsuit and it was attended by all of the major newspapers, television networks, Phil Weiss
was there and so was Ambrose Evan-Pritchard. Ruddy, “the leading reporter
on the Foster story” did not attend Knowlton’s press conference. Like the
entire rest of the media (with the exception of the
Washington Times which did a short, inaccurate, skeptical
inside-page bump-and-run) Ruddy did not report it. I was not surprised
that Ruddy does not call the document what it is and
instead calls it simply “a report.” Expect a ruling soon by Judge Penn on
the status of Knowlton’s civil suit.
Ruddy wrote, “The judges
voted unanimously to allow Knowlton and his attorney to review the report.”
This is completely false. Knowlton and Clarke did not see
Starr’s entire report until it was made public on October 10. Ruddy
should know this because Clarke refers to this fact in the 20-page
attachment. Clarke wrote, “Even though our review is limited by the fact
that we were provided only the passages reprinted below so the context is
unclear…”
Ruddy wrote, “Knowlton,
noting numerous discrepancies and omissions in the Starr report, filed a 20 page memorandum…” This is false again because
Knowlton did not read Starr’s report until October 10 and if he and Clarke had
the 20 pages would have packed even more dynamite. Ruddy calls Clarke’s
20-page letter a “memorandum” giving the historic letter an informal and
insignificant spin. Ruddy also refers to Clarke’s letter as a “memo”.
I could go on with
smaller errors, but as usual Ruddy failed to point out the importance of
Patrick Knowlton, and that is that Patrick Knowlton did not see Vincent
Foster’s car at Fort Marcy Park when Foster was already dead. This
important fact is misstated in Ruddy’s book and now completely ignored in
Ruddy’s catch-up Knowlton article.
Credit should be given
where credit is due and now three and one half weeks
late Ruddy does report that Knowlton did attach 20 pages to Starr’s
report. So at least Ruddy can say, “I reported that” to maintain his
leadership role as “the leading reporter on the Foster story.”
*** Ruddy, for some
reason, told everyone that Rodriguez spells his first name “Miquel” with a “q”
instead of the conventional “g”. That’s why you will find it misspelled
throughout my “America’s Dreyfus Affair,” just as it is misspelled in Ruddy’s
book, in The Failure of the Public Trust, Evans-Prichard’s The Secret Life of Bill Clinton (not
his choice of titles, he tells me), and all the writings of Reed Irvine. Only
when we found and published Rodriquez’s resignation
letter did we realize that Ruddy
had not told us the truth. Ruddy, like all of the mainstream press, has
ignored this letter that did not come to light until 2009 just as he and they
have ignored Rodriguez’s crucial memorandum that
we published in September of 2013.
---
Finally, adding to that
2014 article, we mentioned that Ruddy was only 29 when our paths first crossed
as we looked into the Vince Foster case. Another
man we mention in the article, Ken Starr’s aide, Brett Kavanaugh, was also just
29 when Starr named him to replace Miguel Rodriguez as his chief “investigator”
of Foster’s death. Kavanaugh, as we know, has since been made a Supreme
Court Justice by Ruddy’s friend, Donald Trump. Ruddy, amazingly enough,
is said to have recommended
Kavanaugh for the job.
These developments in
the careers of Ruddy and Kavanaugh raise three important questions: Who
killed Vincent W. Foster, Jr.? Why did they kill him? Who says
crime doesn’t pay?
To comment, go to Heresy
Central.
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