The Clintons' War on Women (26 page)

In the wake of Foster’s suicide, phone records depicted a harried Clinton. The First Lady was engaged in a flurry of phone calls with Margaret Williams, Susan Thomases, and Bernard Nussbaum, the White House counsel.

“I know very well what we were talking about,” Hillary told Barbara Walters. “We were grieving, we were supporting each other, I was asking questions about how other people who were close friends and colleagues of Vince were doing, how his family was doing, and some of those phone conversations consisted of us sobbing on the phone.”
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Years earlier, Nussbaum was senior counsel on the House panel that drew up impeachment charges against President Nixon and supervised the work of a staff member, Hillary Rodham Clinton. In the aftermath of Foster’s death, Nussbaum was working for Clinton.

“What about the First Lady? Undoubtedly she was involved in the early decision-making. There is no one else who could have volunteered the services of Margaret Williams,” Michael Kellet, author of
The Murder of Vince Foster,
wrote.
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“Given the nature of many of their dealings in Whitewater and other ventures back in Arkansas, her name was probably more exposed on the documentation in Foster’s office than the former governor, and it is understandable that she would have been motivated to initiate and direct the raid. The 1995 Senate Hearings revealed that her close friend, Susan Thomases, made seventeen calls to Nussbaum and Williams over the two days following, during which the raid and search of Foster’s office were being conducted. It was also revealed that Nussbaum discussed his plans and procedures for the removal of documents with Thomases, and it was revealed that it was Hillary who told Williams about Foster’s death.”
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Williams was directed by Hillary to pick Foster’s office clean of any documents relating to the Clintons. Cliff Sloan, an aide of Bernie Nussbaum,
wrote a note that said “Get Maggie—go thru office—get HRC [Hillary] and WJC [Clinton] stuff.”
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If Foster’s office was not, according to Clinton, “considered a crime scene,” why was it of such concern in the early hours following the death of the deputy white house counsel?

There are numerous pieces of evidence, aside from the many Clinton phone calls, that indicate Foster had indeed killed himself in his office and his body was later moved. This ensured a clean sweep of Foster’s office in the aftermath of his death.

Journalist and author Marinka Peschmann discovered in her lengthy interviews with Linda Tripp that Foster was carrying his briefcase with him when he left his office in the early afternoon of July 20, 1993. This is critically important because after Foster’s body was found dead, his briefcase was discovered in his office.

At the time of Foster’s suicide, Tripp was working in the White House Counsel’s office, seated outside of Nussbaum’s office.

Had Foster left early in the afternoon with his briefcase only to return later? Upon discovery of the body, had the First Lady ordered the removal and the cleanup?

“In every investigation we were told exactly what happened and what to say, and suddenly that became the so-called truth,” Tripp told Peschmann.
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White House intern Tom Castleton also remembered Foster carrying his briefcase when he left for lunch, a fact he related to both Tripp and to the Office of Independent Counsel.

Patsy Thomasson, former director of administration for the White House said “she saw Foster’s briefcase by the desk in his office on the night of July 20” after the body had been found.
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When we confronted Thomasson with the theory that Foster killed himself in his office and the body was expeditiously removed by the administration, she warily replied “Where did you ever get that nutty idea?” Shortly thereafter, as Thomasson hung up the phone, it rattled unsettlingly into the cradle.

A
likely scenario is that Foster left the White House just after 1 p.m. and he left with his suitcase, which is a very critical point. For the rest of the afternoon the other lawyers in the Counsel’s office did not know where Foster was, and it is standard procedure to know exactly where important officials of the White House are at all times.

Foster likely returned to the White House in the late afternoon after most of the support staff had left for the day. It is reasonable to assume that Foster put his .38 caliber pistol, which he had stored in his car in an oven mitt, into his suitcase before returning to his office. He likely committed suicide in the time period of 4:30 to 5 p.m. Eastern Standard Time.

The people who are likely candidates to have found the corpse are Nussbaum, Foster’s old Rose Law Firm partner William Kennedy, or Nussbaum’s secretary Betsy Pond.

We can suspect that Bernie Nussbaum called the First Lady around 5 p.m. and told her about the suicide. Hillary then took action.

A cadaver in the official residence and principal workplace of the president, especially in an office with numerous sensitive and potentially incriminating documents, was poison to the administration. Hillary would have to order the body expeditiously transported off White House premises. She then likely ordered the cleanup of bodily fluids and pieces and the removal of sensitive, or incriminating, documents in Foster’s office.

Kellet pointed out that two things were found all over Vince Foster’s body: carpet fibers and mica, which are tiny rock particles. The carpet fibers could have come from the body rolled up in carpet, a classic means of body transportation, or it could have been fibers from the trunk of the car used during the body transfer.
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The carpet theory makes the most sense. The White House was in a perpetual state of interior redesign. A rolled-up carpet would raise no suspicion.

A top national Democratic operative who worked for President Clinton told Roger Stone that Clinton White House Director of Security Craig Livingstone transported Vince Foster’s corpse. Though
not proven, we think it’s possible that Livingstone and possibly his cohort Tony Marcea transported Vince Foster’s body between 5:15 and 6 p.m.

The body was discovered by Dale Kyle shortly past 6 p.m. in Fort Marcy Park, a public park in nearby McLean, Virginia. Kyle was looking for a place to urinate in the woods that offered privacy.
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Kyle heard no gunshot. In fact, no one heard a gunshot … no one in the park that day…. no one in the five homes within 570 feet of where the body was found, the closest of which was three hundred feet away.
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Foster’s body had not been there long.

One of the first responders, Sergeant Rolla, “noticed blood coming from the right nostril and the right corner of his mouth down the side of his face. It appeared to still be wet, but drying. Flies were buzzing around his face, starting to—no eggs were laid yet. I think they were just making their way to do that.” Rolla mentioned that Foster’s blood was just beginning to gel “So it led me to believe that he hadn’t been there more than a couple of hours. Again, the flies I just—he hadn’t been there that long because they are fast workers.”
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Michael Kellett called the American Entomological Association and was referred to a specialist on insects, Professor Carl Jones of the College of Veterinary Medicine. “After questioning me on the date, the temperature that day, and the approximate time of day, he stated in no more than one and a half hours, flies would have laid eggs,” said Kellet.
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Kellet points out that the first responders were viewing the body at about 6:40 p.m. Eastern. “The egg laying-activity, or lack of it, would place the time that the body was in the park at 5:10 [p.m.] at the earliest.” Vince Foster’s body at Fort Marcy Park was a “fresh” corpse.
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Foster’s body was found as soon as it was dumped in the park.

Upon spotting the body, Dale Kyle immediately noticed two very important things. First, there was no gun in Vince Foster’s hand. Also, there were footprints around his body.

The
gun was not in Foster’s hand because Kyle had interrupted individuals staging the body. They had not had the time to place the gun into Foster’s hand. After Kyle went for help, a gun was later discovered in Foster’s right hand. The FBI later badgered Kyle under questioning.

“CW (Confidential Witness) stated that the agents asked him ‘25 times’ if he was sure that he didn’t see a gun, and he repeatedly confirmed that he did not. Finally, they took a response from CW, a response to a hypothetical question, for which CW gave a hypothetical answer,” wrote Kellet.
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As
Human Events
described it: “An agent asked, ‘What if the trigger guard was around the thumb and the thumb was obscured by foliage and the rest of the gun was obscured by the foliage and Mr. Foster’s hand?’ That was all Mr. Fiske needed to suggest. CW had acknowledged that he may not have seen the gun because it was obscured by foliage. But CW did not change his story.”
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The footprints around the body were left by the same unskilled individuals that clumsily arranged Foster’s body. Kyle told Representative Dan Burton that the trampled area looked “like somebody had been walking or messing around that area.”
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The FBI report later established that “[Kyle] stated that he stood directly over the body, looking down, for several seconds, specifically recalling that he looked at both hands. He stated that the hands were palms up. He stated that while he was not looking for a gun, he has no recollection of there being a gun in either hand…. He stated that as best he recalls from his vantage point on the top of the berm, the foliage and brush as the bottom of the berm or slope (approximately 15 feet below the body) was trampled down as if the individual might have been walking or pacing in that area.”
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After Kyle found the body, he drove to the Turkey Run Maintenance Yard and told Park Service employees that there was a dead body in the park. Kyle had spent approximately ten minutes total in the park.

Kyle
had discovered Foster’s body lying straight, with hands hanging down his sides. He did not see much blood and he saw “no gun, no sign of a weapon. It looked like [Foster] had been placed there.” And that is because Kyle “saw the leaves trampled down below” and a lot of “foot traffic at the bottom of the hill.”
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Despite all the impressions made from footwear scattered around the body, Foster’s shoes had absolutely no dirt on the bottom, even though his body was found more than two hundred yards away from the parking lot and down a trail.

After Chris Ruddy of the
New York Post
started investigating the Foster case, he published an article that included interviews with the first responders.

“The EMTs told Ruddy that there was a suspicious lack of blood around Foster’s body and that the body had looked laid out on the sloping embankment, as though placed there, ‘as if it was ready for the coffin,’ stated historian Matthew MacAdam. One of the responders hadn’t seen an exit wound in Foster’s head even though he had lifted him into a body bag. Based on these descriptions, homicide investigators Ruddy spoke to speculated that Foster may have been killed elsewhere, and the body moved.”
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There were more clues that the body had been moved. Michael Kellet later pointed out the FBI report’s clear statement that “the pattern of the blood on Foster’s face and on Foster’s shoulder is consistent with Foster’s face having come into contact with the shoulder of his shirt at some point.”
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The stain made the purported suicide in the park nearly impossible due to the position of the body. “The chin was pushed against the right shoulder which caused the contact stain,” wrote Kellet.
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The grossly misplaced theory of the Fiske report was that someone had knocked Foster’s head so that his cheek fell down on his bloody shoulder causing the contact stain. Kyle said he had not touched the body. The first responders, Sergeant Gonzalez, Todd Hall, and Officer Fornshill all “swore under oath that they did not touch the head [of Vince Foster] which they all described as ‘looking up’ and
slightly tilted to the right as did those who arrived afterward.”
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Kellett made a key point about Foster’s blood-soaked shirt: “The only way the upper back could be soaked is if there were an enormous pool of blood found under the exit wound, not a ‘fairly large’ amount. It is the distribution of the blood that suggests the body was moved.”
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There was another inconsistency between the blood found on Foster’s body in relation to its position. The FBI laboratory report on Foster noted “two clearly visible blood drain tracks on Foster’s face, extending from the nose and mouth, to the ear and temple.”
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In other words blood flowed out of the deceased Foster in an upside-down fashion from mouth to temple, yet Foster’s body was not found upside down. Foster’s body was placed on a berm in Fort Marcy Park, and it was leaned with the feet at the bottom and the head at a higher elevation on the incline of the berm. “The draining tracks suggest his head was tipped back slightly when the draining of the blood occurred,” observed media watchdog Reed Irvine. “In other words, after Foster was shot, his head was tilted back or was lower than the rest of the body while the blood was draining from his mouth and nostril. He could not have been lying feet down, on a 45-degree slope. As he moved into that position following his suicide, the drainage of the blood toward the temple area occurred.”
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Following the arrival and subsequent departure of the first responders, a crew arrived to transport the body to the morgue. EMT Corey Ashford lifted the body, with the head of the corpse on his white uniform, and placed it in a body bag. Ashford got no blood on his clean uniform and saw no blood on the ground beneath the body. Roger Harrison of Fairfax County Fire and Rescue, who helped Ashford fit the corpse into the bag, saw no blood either.
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