WASHINGTON – It’s been 23 years since Deputy White House Counsel Vincent Foster was found dead in a Virginia park, setting off one of the biggest controversies of the Clinton administration.
Foster, a close friend and former law partner of Hillary Clinton’s, was discovered on July 20, 1993, lying in Fort Marcy Park with a fatal gunshot wound.
Two investigations, the first led by Robert Fiske and the second by Kenneth Starr, concluded Foster suffered a single, self-inflicted wound. A simple suicide. Case closed.
But newly discovered evidence unearthed from boxes stored deep in the National Archives lend credence to theories about foul play and cover-up that have been hinted at by at least three books and countless articles.
The newest piece to the puzzle was uncovered by two citizen researchers, one of whom was a witness involved in the case from the beginning.
What had only been suspicions about missing death-scene photographs are now listed as facts in public documents.
The smoking-gun information comes from two documents: a two-page letter of resignation and a 31-page memo both written by Starr’s lead prosecutor, Miguel Rodriguez.
Rodriguez refers in his letter to photographs showing a wound on Foster’s neck – a wound that did not exist according to accounts in Starr’s official government report.
The obvious questions: How could a suicide victim be found with two wounds – a .38-caliber gunshot into the mouth that exited through his head and another wound on the right side of his neck that one of the paramedics described as a small-caliber bullet hole? And why would the government investigators go to great lengths to cover it up?
Another question some will be asking is about Hillary Clinton’s embattled presidential run. Can it survive renewed scrutiny into one of the darkest clouds that hovered over her husband’s administration – especially considering her close friendship with Foster and the fact that her aides were seen rifling through files in Foster’s White House office just hours after his body was found?
The newly discovered evidence has actually been sitting, unnoticed or ignored by the media, in the National Archives and Records Administration for years. In 2009, two documents created by Rodriguez were discovered in the archives by researchers Hugh Turley and Patrick Knowlton.
But Knowlton was not just any amateur researcher. He was a grand-jury witness who happened to be in Fort Marcy Park the day Foster died and noticed discrepancies that were never addressed by Starr’s report.
Allan Favish, a Los Angeles attorney who took a Freedom of Information Act case all the way to the Supreme Court seeking access to photographs of Foster’s body as it lay in the park, said he started looking into the case shortly after Foster’s death in 1993.
It was Favish who brought the National Archive discoveries by Turley and Knowlton to the attention of WND.
“It all started in the mid-1990s, not too long after Foster’s death, and I saw on the Internet, which was very unsophisticated at the time, some people posting things about the death,” Favish told WND. “Hugh Turley was involved very early on along with Knowlton.”
A rush to judgment
Rodriguez’s resignation letter to Starr dated Jan. 17, 1995, says he was quitting because evidence was being overlooked in a rush to judgment in favor of suicide and closing the grand-jury investigation..
Rodriguez mentioned the existence of original photographs showing a wound to Foster’s neck – the same photographic evidence Favish had been seeking in legal battles that stretched from 1997 through 2004. Favish’s request for the missing photos, filed under the Freedom of Information Act, was ultimately denied in 2004 by a unanimous decision of the U.S. Supreme Court.
The Rodriguez letter blows holes in the government’s conclusion that Foster’s body had a single self-inflicted gunshot wound.
“At meetings and via memoranda, I specifically indicated my disagreement that there existed ‘overwhelming evidence’ that Foster committed suicide where he was found at Ft. Marcy Park,” Rodriguez wrote to Starr in his resignation letter.
‘New photographic evidence’ cited
Rodriguez went on to cite 12 ways the investigation was compromised.
Witness statements had not been accurately reflected in official FBI reports, he told Starr.
Even more troubling was the treatment of death-scene photographs.
Four paramedics recalled seeing Foster’s neck wound when they had their memories “refreshed” by “new photographic evidence,” Rodriguez told Starr. Rodriguez indicates the FBI had originally shown these witnesses “blurred and obscured blowups of copies of (Polaroid and 35mm) photographs.”
What the FBI had apparently done was to use a Polaroid camera to take pictures of the original Polaroid pictures, essentially producing blurry “copies of copies.”
The FBI claimed some of the original photos taken by Park Police had been under-exposed and were basically useless. But when Rodriguez found the original images buried in a file, he took them to an independent photo lab used by the Smithsonian Institute and had them enhanced. He was astounded at what they showed. What had once been a blurred spot on the neck, possibly a blood stain as claimed by the FBI, was now clearly something much more.
One of the paramedics, Richard Arthur, described it as a bullet hole about the size of a .22-caliber round.
In January 2001 Favish filed a motion requesting permission to take a deposition from Rodriguez so he could question him about the photos. His motion was denied by a U.S. District Court judge in Los Angeles and ignored by the appeals court in D.C.