Hillary Clinton and Vincent Foster were friends and business associates at the Rose Law Firm in Arkansas, and Foster followed the Clintons to the White House soon after Bill Clinton’s election as president.
GOP presidential frontrunner Donald Trump thrust the name of Vince Foster back into the spotlight Tuesday more than two decades after his case was ruled a suicide, saying the Clinton aide’s death in 1993 was “fishy” and deserved to be taken “very seriously.”
And that’s a sore spot in the campaign of rival Democratic Party front-runner Hillary Clinton. So sore, in fact, that in February when WND emailed questions to the Clinton campaign about an investigative piece it was preparing on Foster’s death, the campaign refused to respond.
A look at Foster’s final day shows Hillary Clinton was desperately trying to reach him before his body was discovered by Park Police. She asked her chief of staff three times to contact Foster and have him call her. But she has never been asked why she was so eager to talk to him on the day his body turned up dead in Fort Marcy Park outside of Washington, D.C., on July 20, 1993.
But now Trump has raised the issue and placed the long forgotten ghost of Vince Foster under the bright lights of the 2016 presidential campaign.
Trump said Foster “had intimate knowledge of what was going on. He knew everything that was going on, and then all of a sudden he committed suicide.”
Foster served as deputy White House counsel for the first few months of the Bill Clinton administration and was part of the core group that followed the Clintons from Little Rock, Arkansas, to Washington. He’d known Hillary for years, working with her at the Rose Law Firm in Little Rock.
His death was ruled a suicide by two independent counsels, Robert Fiske and Kenneth Starr, along with the U.S. Park Police. Congress also looked into the death. But critics say these four independent investigations all had one common denominator – the involvement of the FBI – and, therefore, were not really so independent after all.
There have been suggestions that Foster and Clinton had been involved in an affair, while others say Foster may have been involved in shady dealings, but nothing has ever been proven.
One thing that is certain, however, is that Hillary Clinton’s name pops up often in official documents of the Starr Report released by the National Archives, many of them obtained by WND but never reported on by the media.
James “Skip” Rutherford had lunch with Hillary at her mother’s home in Little Rock the morning after Foster’s death, and he said Mrs. Clinton “was in complete shock and disbelief at the thought of Foster committing suicide.”
More than two weeks later, she remained incredulous about the suicide ruling.
“Of a thousand people who might commit suicide, I would never pick Vince,” Hillary Clinton told the New Yorker in an Aug. 9, 1993, article titled “The Suicide” by Sidney Blumenthal.
Hillary and Vince Foster
Since Hillary seemed not to believe Foster’s death was a suicide, it would be reasonable to ask: What changed her mind? Why would she trust the word of Kenneth Starr, the supposed enemy of the Clintons, when there was ample evidence to suggest her friend was murdered?
Marsha Scott, deputy assistant to the president, had a long closed-door meeting with Foster on Monday, the day before his death. She reportedly asked him about “the weekend.” Scott was also one of the White House core group who came from Arkansas with the Clintons along with Webster Hubbell and Foster. In her deposition, she told investigators she couldn’t remember what they talked about for over an hour, other than her asking Foster how the weekend went. She said she had dealt with the tragedy by blocking it from her memory.
The meeting has always been a mystery.
Curiosity about ‘the weekend’
Scott’s FBI report states, “Scott explained that she stopped by because she wanted to ask him how he enjoyed the weekend. She knew he had had a good weekend from having talked to somebody else, but she couldn’t recall who and wanted to ask him if he had had as much fun as others said that they had had.”
Strangely, Webster Hubbell also stopped by Foster’s office Monday, the day before his death, to ask how his weekend went.
According to Page 24 of the Fiske Report, Foster told Hubbell “the weekend had been good for him.”
It is curious that Hubbell wanted to know about the weekend because Hubbell had been with Foster for the weekend at the Maryland Eastern Shore estate of Nathan Landow, a real-estate developer and major Democratic fundraiser for the Clintons and Al Gore. According to a 1978 Washington Post story, Landow also had alleged ties to organized crime families and casino gambling.
“What was Foster doing with him? That’s a fair question,” says Hugh Turley, co-author of “Failure of the Public Trust” with Patrick Knowlton and John Clarke. “And Hubbell is there also at the Landow estate.”
Foster and his wife, Lisa, had stayed at the Tidewater Inn Friday and Saturday night and returned home to their Georgetown townhouse on Sunday. But they also spent a considerable amount of time during that weekend getaway at the Landow estate, eating crabs and sharing social time with Landow and his son-in-law, Michael Cardozo, who had served in the Clinton Justice Department.
“The weekend is something that’s been sort of ignored by everybody, but that was, I think, maybe Foster’s exit interview,” says Turley.
“In our book, you can read about Nathan Landow’s connection to organized crime. There was an expose on him in the Washington Post about his connections to the Gambino family and others. So Foster spent his last weekend at the Tidewater Inn and the Landow estate.”
Turley said he visited the Tidewater Inn. The manager confirmed Foster did stay there, but the FBI came out and seized all the records.
“I found the receipts at the Archives actually, the phone records and everything. But that weekend was mysterious,” Turley said. “Nobody knows what they talked about out there.”
Then there is Mrs. Clinton trying to reach Foster, but not directly.
“Everyone was telling him to ‘hang in there,'” Turley said. “Was he under some kind of pressure?”
Clinton told Rutherford she was in complete shock.
“I think she was. I don’t think the Clintons saw it coming,” Turley said. “Then, after a few weeks, the story changed to Foster being depressed, and everyone got on board with that. In early accounts, Hubbell in fact said it was not a suicide, don’t believe it.”
A free download of “Failure of the Public Trust” is available at the three authors’ website, FBIcoverup.com.
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Trump’s Vince Foster attack backed by new evidence
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Stick figure people tell story
In Deputy Independent Counsel Hickman Ewing’s box at the National Archives was a chronology of the Foster death in which Ewing drew stick figures to represent the primary players.
This chronology, a copy of which Turley has provided to WND, shows Hillary Clinton in a desperate lurch to contact Foster on the day he died. But rather than call him herself, she phoned her chief of staff, Maggie Williams, not once but three times, and asked Williams to contact Foster and tell him to call her.
This is the same Maggie Williams who was seen removing file folders from Foster’s office after his death, as documented in Step 9 of the stick-figure drawings.
“It’s interesting because it seems like she (Hillary) didn’t want to have a record of herself calling Vince (Foster),” Turley said. “Is that why she didn’t call Foster herself? And why did she call Maggie Williams three times? I mean if you want to talk to Vince, why not just call him yourself, and why was she trying to reach him like that? Seems like it was urgent.”
Nobody in the media has ever asked Hillary Clinton those questions. WND made an effort in February but did not get a response from her campaign.
“Hickman drew out the chronology and very accurately,” Turley said. “You have Maggie trying to call Vince’s office, and it’s all verifiable.”
Was Hillary also trying to find out about Foster’s weekend?
Why was everyone interested in Foster’s last weekend at the Landow estate?
These are questions only Hillary Clinton and Webster Hubbell might be able to answer.
Deb Gorham, Foster’s secretary, told the FBI in an interview, “People who called Foster that afternoon of July 20, 1993, were told he was “out of the office … Maggie Williams asked for him.”
In Williams’ depositions and testimony before the House Banking Committee, she does not discuss being called by Hillary in the afternoon. She only mentions the three times she spoke to Hillary the night of Foster’s death. She said Hillary called her once before her plane landed in Little Rock and then shortly after she landed to tell her Vince was dead. Williams said they spoke again later that night after Maggie returned from going to the White House.
“Until now, nothing has been available in the official records concerning Hillary’s three afternoon calls to Maggie Williams instructing Williams to contact Foster,” Turley told WND. “We know from Deb Gorham these calls were made.”
Williams said in her testimony she was interviewed by the FBI and questioned twice before the grand jury. Her FBI report is not publicly available, but the Office of Independent Counsel would have had access to it. Perhaps this is where they learned that Hillary called Maggie three times, and then Maggie called Vince’s office to tell him to “hang in there” and call Hillary.
In Ewing’s stick people chronology was also a reference to “the weekend” when Foster and Hubbell went to the Landow estate. In that picture, the Hubbell figure is also telling Foster to “hang in there.”
Hillary and Hubbell seem to both be aware that Foster is in some kind of bind.
According to her book, “Living History,” Hillary learned of Foster’s death around 8-9 p.m. in Little Rock, and she mentions only calling Maggie Williams one time, after she heard of the death.
Consistent with the stick-person cartoon, Deb Gorham, who worked in Foster’s office, testified that Williams tried to contact Foster at his office during the afternoon of July 20 after he had left.
This offers a new chronology with Hillary urgently trying to contact Foster.
The stick figure documents found in the box of Hickman Ewing at the National Archives showed the following people with a key to initials:
HRC Hillary Rodham Clinton
WK William Kennedy
WLH Webster Lee Hubbell
VF Vince Foster
BC Bill Clinton
MW Maggie Williams
BL Bruce Lindsey
DW David Watkins
PT Patsy Thomasson
BL Bruce Lindsey
DOJ Department of Justice
USPP U.S. Park Police
BN Bernie Nussbaum