High Crimes and Misdemeanors: The Case Against Bill Clinton (25 page)

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Authors: Ann Coulter

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Fostergate
 
White House Deputy Counsel
Vincent Foster, Jr., was found dead in Fort Marcy Park in northern Virginia on Tuesday, July 20, 1993, shortly after 5:30 PM. The death was reportedly a suicide, a single gunshot through the head. He was the first top executive branch official to kill himself since Secretary of Defense James Forrestal committed suicide in 1949.
For White House cover-ups, almost nothing beats the case of Vince Foster. Not of how he died—that, Independent Counsel Ken Starr established, was clearly a suicide—but of what Foster was working on in his White House office. (Points to ponder: If Starr is part of the vast right-wing conspiracy, why did he conclude Foster’s death was a suicide? If conspiracy theorists on the right are supposed to accept his conclusion that Foster’s death was a suicide, conspiracy theorists on the left ought to show a little respect for Starr’s determinations of malfeasance by the Clinton administration.)
FOSTER’S ROLE
 
Vince Foster was a longtime
Arkansas friend of Bill and Hillary Clinton, having attended kindergarten with the future president and with future Chief of Staff Mack McLarty. Foster was a partner in the Rose Law Firm with Webster Hubbell, William Kennedy III, and Hillary Clinton. As deputy White House counsel as well as the Clintons’ personal attorney, Foster knew more about the first couple and their political and legal machinations than perhaps any other individual.
In addition to being the taxpayer-supported deputy White House counsel, Foster performed personal legal work for the Clintons regarding their Whitewater and tax problems. Performing personal legal work for the first couple was an improper role for a public servant, to say the least. That, however, does not seem to be what troubled Foster. Nor, obviously, did it trouble the president. In almost any other administration, a taxpayer-supported public servant performing legal work on the president’s personal affairs would have been a scandal by itself.
It was Foster who was constantly submitting corrected tax forms to the IRS on behalf of the Clintons, such as when he discovered the Whitewater partnership—of which the Clintons were half-owners—had neglected to file corporate tax returns for three years.
1
Foster himself referred to the first couple’s tax issues as a “can of worms.” As Special Prosecutor Robert Fiske determined in his report on Foster’s death, the May 1993 sacking of Billy Dale and the rest of the Travel Office staff had troubled Foster. But White House Counsel Bernard Nussbaum dismissed Foster’s worries and disagreed with his view that the Travel Office matter merited an independent counsel.
White House efforts to cover up whatever it was Foster was working on would eventually lead to interference with an FBI investigation, resignation of a top Justice Department appointee, attacks of amnesia—so peculiar as to suggest perjury—by top White House officials before Senate and House investigative committees, and completely frivolous assertions of privilege by the White House that were thrown out by the courts. If the White House wasn’t trying to hide something in Foster’s office, it didn’t act like it.
The White House’s secretive actions could not help but create the impression that there was something worthy of being kept secret. As the Clinton-appointed deputy attorney general, Philip Heymann, said to Bernard Nussbaum when he learned that Nussbaum had refused to allow federal investigators to search Foster’s office, “Bernie, are you hiding something?”
THE TIMELINE
 
The White House was first notified
of Foster’s death at around 8:30 PM on the night of July 20, 1993, when the Secret Service contacted David Watkins, assistant to the president for management and administration. Over the next forty-eight hours, there would be a flurry of activity by the first lady and her close aides and advisers—a search of Foster’s office, scores of phone calls that none of them would later remember, moved files, and rebuffed federal investigators.
About an hour after the Secret Service telephoned Mack McLarty, he called First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton in Little Rock to tell her the news. At 9:45—five minutes after her phone call from McLarty—Mrs. Clinton called her chief of staff, Maggie Williams. After receiving Mrs. Clinton’s call, Williams headed to the White House—to Foster’s office.
Park Police Major Robert Hines called the White House sometime between 9:45 and 11:00 PM that night to ask that Foster’s office be secured. Hines said he made his request to White House aide Bill Burton. In addition, Park Police Sergeant Cheryl Braun told the Senate Whitewater committee that she spoke to David Watkins within hours of Foster’s death and asked him to make sure Foster’s office was secured, so that the Park Police could search for a suicide note or other evidence of suicidal disposition. But during those critical early evening hours of July 20, the security Sergeant Braun asked for was breached by a sort of
ad hoc
White House political search team, comprised of Nussbaum, Maggie Williams, and Patsy Thomasson.
Instead of sealing the office, Watkins asked his deputy, Patsy Thomasson, to go into Foster’s office to look for a suicide note.
2
As White House administrator, Thomasson had the combination to Foster’s office safe. Soon, Nussbaum and Williams would join Thomasson.
Nussbaum later testified that he and the others present that evening opened a drawer or two but that “no one, no one looked through Vince’s files.”
Patsy Thomasson later testified that she spent at least ten minutes searching for a suicide note in Foster’s office on the evening of July 20, 1993.
3
Thomasson, by the way, did not receive her security clearance until March 1994. During her testimony before the Senate Whitewater committee, Senator Lauch Faircloth (R-NC) wondered why the security clearance-challenged Thomasson was allowed to rifle through Foster’s papers but Justice Department and Park Police officials were not allowed to touch anything in the room that night. “If this isn’t a total contradiction,” said Faircloth, “I don’t know what it is.”
4
Thomasson’s security problems may have been related to her former boss, Little Rock investment banker Dan Lasater, a Clinton friend and campaign contributor, who was convicted of cocaine distribution in 1986. The Drug Enforcement Administration had identified him as a drug dealer as early as 1983.
Eighteen-year veteran Secret Service agent Henry O’Neill testified that he saw Maggie Williams walk out of Foster’s office that night with a stack of folders about three to five inches thick—a claim Williams would later deny.
O’Neill’s story was detailed and unshakable—despite four hours of testimony and detailed cross examination by Senate Democrats trying to raise doubts about his credibility. (O’Neill was asked, for example, “In July of ’93, was there a sofa against that wall?”)
O’Neill had arrived at the White House in uniform around 10:30 PM, he said, and began his office rounds, unlocking office doors in the West Wing for the White House cleaning crew and disposing of “burn bag” documents. When O’Neill first went by the counsel’s office he chanced upon Evelyn Lieberman, Maggie Williams’s aide, who asked him to be sure to lock up the counsel’s suite. On returning to the office a little while later, O’Neill said he saw a woman sitting at Foster’s desk reading something. He assumed the woman was Foster’s wife, so he left. In fact, he later learned, the woman was Patsy Thomasson. Returning to the office a third time to lock up, O’Neill said he saw Lieberman leave the office followed by Nussbaum, and then Maggie Williams, who was carrying a stack of documents.
Williams, according to O’Neill, put the documents in her office down the hall and then went down to the first floor. “I’m not in any doubt about it,” O’Neill testified. Lieberman identified Williams to O’Neill as “the first lady’s chief of staff.” At 11:41, O’Neill said, he locked up the counsel’s office and took the elevator down with Lieberman and Williams.
Williams, however, denied that she removed anything from Foster’s office that night. As she testified before the Senate Whitewater committee, “I took nothing from Vince’s office…. I did not look at, inspect, or remove any documents…. That evening was not about documents.” Williams explained that she had gone to the White House after the first lady called her at home, and when she saw a light on in Foster’s office, she decided to go in, propelled by the “this hope, albeit irrational, that I would walk in and find Vince Foster there.”
5
Williams was ultimately forced to plead to having a very poor memory regarding a number of events surrounding Foster’s death. In particular, Williams had no recollection of the frenzy of phone calls between Hillary and her advisers in the forty-eight hours between the discovery of Foster’s body and the White House’s decision not to allow investigators access to Foster’s documents.
“BERNIE, ARE YOU HIDING SOMETHING?”
 
Those forty-eight hours
comprise the crucial time period during which Bernard Nussbaum first agreed to give the FBI access to Foster’s office and then reneged.
The day after Foster’s death, July 21, 1993, Nussbaum and Deputy Attorney General Philip Heymann discussed how to proceed with the investigation of Foster’s office. According to Heymann, at 5:00 PM that day Nussbaum agreed to allow senior Justice Department officials and FBI agents to examine Foster’s office the next day at 10:00 AM.
But when the FBI agents showed up the next morning, Nussbaum said he had changed his mind: the investigators would be permitted only to watch Nussbaum perform his own search. (It was when Heymann later found out about this that he asked Nussbaum if he was “hiding something.”) Nussbaum assistant Steve Neuwirth testified that he understood Nussbaum to say the policy reversal was made at the request of Susan Thomases, Hillary Clinton’s close friend and Whitewater adviser, to accommodate Mrs. Clinton’s concerns about investigators having “unfettered access” to Foster’s office. This was denied by the first lady, Thomases, Nussbaum, and Williams.
6
But Nussbaum admitted he had spoken with Thomases—contradicting Thomases.
7
When first asked about her telephone conversations with Hillary Clinton and Susan Thomases in the period leading up to when Nussbaum rebuffed the federal investigators, Williams said she had talked with the first lady about three times and Thomases, once.
But then the phone records, which were subpoenaed by a Senate committee, suggested that Maggie Williams had a very bad memory indeed. Thomases phoned or paged Williams nine times during that period, including five times on July 22 alone—just up to the time the Justice Department officials were turned away from Foster’s office.
8
Even if—as Williams noted—that doesn’t prove Thomases actually spoke with Williams on each of those occasions, Williams’s recollection of a single conversation with Thomases during that period strains plausibility.
Williams’s ear wasn’t the only one Thomases wanted. She paged Nussbaum once and talked to him at least once, and she called Mack McLarty three times. In all, phone records showed that Thomases had made seventeen telephone calls to the White House in a forty-three-hour period following Foster’s death.
In the early morning hours before Nussbaum reneged on his deal with Justice, a flurry of phone calls established a daisy chain from the first lady to Nussbaum. First, at 7:44 AM, Maggie Williams called Mrs. Clinton at her mother’s home in Arkansas. Presumably, Williams would have known of Nussbaum’s agreement with the Department of Justice from the night before. Williams and Clinton spoke for seven minutes. One minute after that phone call ended, the first lady placed a three-minute phone call to Susan Thomases, who had come to Washington. One minute after that call, Thomases was on the horn to Nussbaum.
And a couple of hours later, of course, Nussbaum was rebuffing Justice Department investigators. Just minutes after the investigators left, Nussbaum and Williams were back in Foster’s office themselves, conducting their own search.
9
Susan Thomases—mad phone-caller in the forty-eight hours after Foster’s death—had also handled the Clintons’ rapid response work on Whitewater during the 1992 campaign. As
New York Times
reporter Jeff Gerth was hot on the trail of the Clintons’ Whitewater and tax problems, Thomases flew to Little Rock, at the first lady’s request, and performed her own investigation in order to defend the Clintons from Gerth’s persistent questions. And Vince Foster had taken over both issues from Thomases.
Nussbaum did allow FBI agents and Park Police investigators into Foster’s office—but only to observe him search the office. Nussbaum refused to let them examine the files and leapt up at investigators when they tried to approach documents on their own. Instead, he let them watch from a distance as he separated the documents into three piles: personal, government, and the Clintons. It can no longer be determined exactly which files went where. Only Nussbaum knows—possibly Maggie Williams too, and possibly the Clintons.
Deputy Attorney General Heymann criticized Nussbaum’s performance art investigation as failing to constitute an “acceptably trustworthy and reliable process.” Heymann, who resigned about six months later, explained, “A player with significant stakes in the matter cannot also be referee.”
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