The Clintons' War on Women (28 page)

Detective Rolla of the Park Police said in both his FBI statement and a deposition for the Senate Banking Committee that he did not find Vince Foster’s identification in his car at Fort Marcy Park until about 8:30p.m.
394
Detective Rolla’s statement does not appear to be accurate. There are handwritten notes by Rolla that show that he called
the Secret Service at the White House at 7 p.m. or earlier to get Vince Foster’s Washington address.
395

The statements to the FBI of the paramedics who found Vince Foster indicate they knew who he was before they left Fort Marcy Park at 6:40 p.m. Fairfax Lieutenant William Bianchi said that by 7 p.m. he heard paramedics stating that the deceased had worked at the White House. Another man, Lieutenant James Iacone, confirmed Bianchi’s statement.
396

Ruddy pointed out that David Watkins was paged by the White House military communications office after 7 p.m. Ruddy also pointed out that Craig Livingstone was contacted by the Park Police around eight that night, and that Deputy Chief of Staff Bill Burton was aware of Foster’s death at that time.
397

Following the investigation, all of the crime scene photos vanished. “All of the 35 mm photos were underexposed and most of the Polaroids had disappeared. All that remained were a few close-up shot shots.”
398
Somebody in the government leaked just a few Polaroids to
ABC News
in an effort to discredit Ruddy who had claimed, accurately, that “crucial” crime scene photos were missing. One of the few Polaroids leaked to the media showed a gun in Vince Foster’s right hand.

In October of 1997, Ken Starr issued a report on the death of Foster. This report, drafted by Brett Kavanaugh, agreed with the Fiske report, which came to the ridiculous conclusion that Foster killed himself at Fort Marcy Park. CNN had reported earlier in the year that “The [Starr] report refutes claims by conservative political organizations that Foster was the victim of a murder plot and cover-up,” but “despite those findings, right-wing political groups have continued to allege that there was more to the death and that the president and first lady tried to cover it up.”
399

“It would not take a village to alter the outcome of Foster’s death, just a handful of people. And remarkably, both sides of the political aisle—were
half
right,” journalist Marinka Peschmann concluded.

“Foster’s death
triggered a massive cover-up by the Clinton administration. This is why Hillary should not be in the White House. She should be in jail,” continued Peschmann. “The Senate Whitewater Committee called [the Vince Foster investigation] a ‘sham.’ The Committee found that [Hillary’s] counsel’s office, government lawyers, ‘who were supposed to protect public interest in a proper investigation and faithful execution of the laws, instead interfered and obstructed various federal investigations. Unquestionably, the Department of Justice and Park Police were authorized to conduct this investigation, and White House officials owed them a duty to cooperate. Instead, law enforcement officials were confronted at every turn with concerted efforts to deny them access to evidence in Mr. Foster’s office.”

Hillary’s tactics and her “special treatment” of the media allowed her to dodge indictments.

Peschmann deftly illustrated her tactics concerning the media elite:

“Even though the Senate Whitewater Committee investigation’s conclusion revealed that there was ‘a concerted effort by senior White House officials to block career law enforcement investigators from conducting a thorough investigation’ into Foster’s death, and recommended that steps be taken to insure that such misuse of the White House counsel’s office does not recur in this, or any future, administration, meaningful and honest reporting was still attacked,” Peschmann wrote. “Journalists or investigators who dared to speak truth to power by asking legitimate and common-sense questions were sidelined, mocked, dismissed as right-wing hacks, or scolded by Hillary for inflicting ‘great emotional and monetary damage on innocent people.’”

CHAPTER 15

LOOSE ENDS

S
ome accounts of the Clintons’ involvement in harassment and cover-up are enough to make your skin crawl.

One afternoon, when journalist Ambrose Evans-Pritchard was reading FBI interviews on the Foster case, he came across the report of a witness who was in Fort Marcy Park between 4:15 and 4:30 p.m. on the afternoon of Foster’s death. Knowlton at the time was a little over forty years old and a registered Democrat. He still had a Clinton-Gore bumper sticker on his car.

Patrick Knowlton told Evans-Pritchard that he was stuck in traffic on the George Washington Parkway and, like Dale Kyle, needed a place to urinate. He pulled into the park to either find a restroom or a private spot in the woods.

In
the parking lot, Knowlton noticed two cars. One was a brown Honda with Arkansas license plates and the other a blue Japanese car with a man sitting in it. When the man, who looked Middle Eastern or Hispanic, saw Knowlton he started glowering at him in a threatening manner.
400
The man got out of the car and stared at Knowlton. Knowlton, however, still needed to heed the call of nature.

“Patrick walked up toward the park,” said Evans-Pritchard. “Instead of going into Fort Marcy proper, he took the logging trail to the left where the nearest trees were. That was a fortunate decision. Patrick dreads to think what would have happened if he had walked into the main body of the park [where Vince Foster’s corpse was discovered].”

Knowlton told Evans-Pritchard that, “When I came back I looked at him and I thought, ‘Something is going to happen to me unless I get the hell out of here.’”
401

Knowlton left the park and went to a mountain cabin where he was staying with his girlfriend. Later that evening he heard that a high-ranking White House official had been found dead in Fort Marcy Park. Knowlton contacted the Park Police and was interviewed over the telephone by Detective Rolla about what he had seen that afternoon. Rolla did not think Knowlton’s story was important, and there were no follow-up interviews.

Nine months later, the FBI contacted Knowlton and brought him in for questioning at the Office of the Independent Counsel. The FBI then tried to warp his testimony. They repeatedly showed Knowlton (approximately twenty times) a picture of a
blue
car that had Foster’s license plate number (RCN-504). The FBI was trying to manufacture testimony, attempting to get Knowlton to identify Foster’s car.

“I was adamant about it,” Knowlton recalled. “I walked right next to the goddamn car, and it was
brown
. I saw what I saw, and I was not going to change my story…. I think they were just trying to screw me around. It pisses me off.”
402
Foster’s car was a gray 1989 Honda Accord. It was not blue and it certainly was not the brown car that Knowlton saw.

There
were three other witnesses who saw “an old brown Honda” as opposed to Foster’s gray-colored Honda, which was four years older: Josie, Duncan, and a “woman in the blue Mercedes” who Evans-Pritchard interviewed. Additionally, Sergeant George Gonzalez in his EMS report described a “brown Honda” with “AR tags.” Even the medical examiner, Dr. Donald Haut, said he saw “an orange compact, a beat-up old thing. I was surprised anybody at the White House would be driving a car like that.”
403

The treatment of Knowlton shows that both the FBI and the Office of the Independent Counsel were in the tank. They were unwilling to hear a different point of view or to make logical conclusions based on the evidence presented.

Knowlton insists the FBI fabricated his interview with them (known as a 302 report). He told them he thought the car was an older 1983 or 1984 model and his FBI interview says it was a 1988 or 1990 model. Knowlton was called in for a second interview on May 11, 1994, designed to clear up the discrepancy between what Knowlton saw (a brown Honda) and what the FBI wanted him to have seen (Vince Foster’s car).

Knowlton came under a vicious round of witness tampering, highly reminiscent of other Clinton campaigns, in October 1995, and it looks like this may have started as early as May 10, 1994.

In his lawsuit against the government, Knowlton said that Scott Jeffrey Bickett, a man with suspicious connections, had smashed the lights on Knowlton’s car. Evans-Pritchard did some more investigating and discovered that Bickett had a Defense Contractor II clearance level, had been briefed at FBI headquarters, and had a very high Sensitive Compartmented Information (SCI) security clearance. “So the man who smashed the Peugeot 504 [Knowlton’s car] on the night before Patrick’s second FBI interview was on the roster of FBI-HQ.”
404

Knowlton also told the FBI in his original interview that he felt sure that he could identify the menacing man who was staring at him in the parking lot. The FBI wrote down that Patrick would not be
able to identify the man again. “I can close my eyes and visualize this guy like it was yesterday,” Knowlton said.
405

In the fall of 1995, after Ambrose Evans-Pritchard had written about the Knowlton case in the
Sunday Telegraph,
Special Prosecutor Ken Starr issued a subpoena for Knowlton to appear before the Whitewater grand jury. Evans-Pritchard and the
Sunday Telegraph
had embarrassed both Starr and the FBI into dealing with a critical witness that they wanted nothing to do with.

Evans-Pritchard was not ready to indict every FBI agent with malfeasance in the Foster investigation. However, “it appears at least one agent was systematically altering statements, sometimes with little tweaks here and there, sometimes with outright falsehoods, as in the case of Patrick Knowlton and the Confidential Witness [Dale Kyle] … But once you are alert to this legerdemain by the FBI, everything comes into focus. The old tannish-brown Honda parked at Fort Marcy between 4:30 and 6:37 pm when the first team of paramedics left the scene—could not have been Vincent Foster’s vehicle.”
406

The destabilization campaign aimed at Patrick Knowlton and the terror campaign unleashed on Kathleen Willey in 1997 and 1998 were both egregious examples of witness tampering. The crime of witness tampering is located at 18 US Code § 1512—
Tampering with a witness, victim, or an informant.
407
The federal code mentions the use of physical force and also the “threat of physical force” as crimes for which the federal penalty can be up to thirty years in jail. Intimidation and threats to a witness can get the perpetrator twenty years in jail.

As Ruddy discovered, a surveillance net of perhaps thirty people was cast on Knowlton in an attempt harass, intimidate, terrify, unnerve, and destabilize him before his testimony to the Whitewater grand jury.

The perpetrators used a variety of tactics on Knowlton. In one instance, a strange man would follow Knowlton, stop, and stare menacingly at him. “The next man was of similar vintage, with a
navy blue jacket,” said Evans-Pritchard. “His stare lasted about fifteen seconds. It was the same distinctive stare—one designed to provoke fear, confusion, and paranoia. And then it happened again, and again: men cutting in front of them, following them, glowering into Patrick’s eyes, fixing him with the look of death wherever he turned.”
408

Then after seven or eight intimidation attempts, these agents began bumping into Knowlton and were “circling like hyenas” in the words of Evans-Pritchard. The scribe then called fellow reporter Ruddy to experience firsthand what Knowlton was going through. Ruddy said there must have been thirty people attempting to unnerve and terrify Knowlton.

It was street fascism and the terrorists did not care that reporters were witnessing the thuggery firsthand. The two reporters notified Deputy Independent Counsel John Bates (now a statist federal judge) of what was happening to Knowlton. Bates issued no response.

“Sometime after midnight, Patrick telephoned me at my home in Bethesda,” recalled Evans-Pritchard. “By now he was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Somebody had gotten inside his apartment building and was banging on the door. When he answered, there was nobody. Outside his window was a man in a green trench coat, staring up at him. The telephone kept ringing. Hang-up calls. ‘I can’t take it anymore. I want out of this,’ [Knowlton] said.

“’Stay calm, don’t let these criminals get to you,’ I said. ‘I’m going to come down and get you out of there. You’re going to stay at my house until this nonsense is over.’”
409

A few days later, the FBI told Knowlton that it was Ruddy and Evans-Pritchard behind the harassment campaign.

Knowlton showed up for his grand jury testimony prepared to testify to exactly what he saw (or did not see) in the parking lot. Starr’s prosecutor Brett Kavanaugh (who, like Bates, is now a federal judge) questioned Knowlton before the grand jury. Kavanaugh adopted a hostile demeanor, intent on “hazing” or roughing up, disrespecting, and discrediting Knowlton. Kavanaugh asked a series of
leading questions in which he attempted to paint Knowlton as a homosexual who was in Fort Marcy Park that day for a hook up. Knowlton erupted in rage at Kavanaugh as the jury laughed at the Starr prosecutors.

“Prior to going to the grand jury I was harassed and intimidated on the streets of Washington,” Knowlton said. “And during that time, a three-day period, my attorney John Clarke repeatedly called the FBI and the OIC’s office. They never responded to give me any protection or any help. It wasn’t until the following Monday that Russell Bransford showed up at my door and he interviewed me regarding the harassment. All the time I was telling him the story, of what took place, he sat there and smiled at me. And when I asked him at one point if I could trust him? He leaned over into my face and said, ‘Mr. Knowlton that is a good question, I don’t know.’