by Roger Stone
Then the mixed-up couples left the restaurant still carrying on. “Vince and Hillary brought up the rear as Vince was really getting a handful of Hillary’s. Bill and Beth [Coulson] kissing did not bother me as much as seeing Hillary attempting to reciprocate with Vince. Vince, good looking, tall and suave obviously knew what he was doing, but Hillary looked awkward and unbalanced.”327
Brown said Hillary loved Foster and it was amazing to him that the affair had escaped media coverage. Brown said that he and Hillary would talk about their marital problems. Hillary would often talk about Vince, that they often traveled together and once even went to London. Brown described Clinton and Foster as “soulmates.”328
The same state troopers that used to procure girls for Bill took Hillary and Foster to a get-away cabin in the Arkansas woods (Heber Springs) on weekends.329 When Bill was out of town, Vince would often stop by the governor’s mansion to see Hillary, staying until the early morning hours.
Former Arkansas state trooper Larry Patterson also confirmed the affair. Once at a private birthday party for Hillary, Patterson saw Foster “put his hands on her [Hillary’s] breast, and then he walked by, grabbed her by the butt, looked over at me and gave me the old high sign and thumbs up.” Patterson was a personal witness to Foster’s frequent visits to the Arkansas governor’s mansion to visit Hillary.330
In 1982, Hillary was using Little Rock private investigator Ivan Duda to gather information on the women Bill was having affairs with who could be potential political embarrassments. Duda turned over the names of six women to Hillary that he confirmed were having an affair with Bill Clinton.
“Bill was extremely suspicious of Hillary’s relationship with Foster,” Duda admitted. “When confronted, she simply denied it was a romance and claimed they were just good friends.” Duda said that Bill hired a private investigator of his own who confirmed the affair.
“Bill confronted her with the information and they had several explosive arguments—screaming, shouting, red-faced blow-outs,” Duda recalled. “Hillary is not meek, and while she never confessed to cheating, she aggressively reminded Bill of his numerous affairs and how he not only humiliated her but nearly wrecked their own political career with his behavior.”331
In the late 1980s Hillary and Foster were also using a man named Jerry Parks to spy on Bill and collect dirt to use in the event of a divorce.
Lisa Parks, the former wife of Jerry, told reporter Ambrose Evans-Pritchard that Foster was using Parks to spy on and document Bill Clinton’s adultery. “Jerry asked him why he needed this stuff on Clinton. He said he needed it for Hillary.”332
Evans-Pritchard found out that “Jerry Parks had carried out sensitive assignments for the Clinton inner circle for almost a decade, and the person who gave him his instructions was Vince Foster.”vi
Things between Foster and Clinton began to change dramatically once she reached the national stage.
In the White House, Foster was denied access to Hillary. “It’s just not the same…. She’s so busy, Hub, that we don’t ever have time to talk,” Foster told Hubbell.333 Foster said that his affair had disintegrated into miserly commands from the First Lady, who would snap at him “Fix it, Vince!” or “Handle it, Vince!”
Shunned from Hillary’s presence, Foster began to refer to her as the Client. Foster was put to task, “handling” and “fixing” all the legal problems that Hillary was creating.
The murders in Waco, Texas, in April 1993, had traumatized Foster. He believed he was partly responsible for the carnage.
A month later, Foster’s remorse was amplified by a mass firing in the White House Travel Office. The action was instigated sub rosa by Hillary and executed on May 19, 1993. The White House Travel Office handled travel arrangements for the press corps that covered the president.
Travel Office Director Billy Dale and six other employees were canned. The business of the office was handed over to World Wide Travel, an Arkansas agency that had handled travel for the 1992 Clinton campaign and whose president, Betta Carney, was a Clinton campaign contributor.334
Dale had been the director of the office since 1982 and was immensely popular with the press corps. The firings caused a media firestorm, and the Clintons immediately claimed ignorance.
In truth, Hillary had spoken to both Foster and White House Chief of Staff Mack McLarty about expediting the firings.
Five days before the firings of the White House Travel Office, Hillary told David Watkins (Clinton crony and then White House director of administration) “We need those people out—we need our people in—we need the slots.”
Attorney and author Barbara Olson found that “William Kennedy III [a Hillary intimate] called the FBI and set them loose on the Travel Office staff like Dobermans to destroy Billy Dale’s reputation and justify the firings. As Kennedy told the FBI: It came from the ‘highest level.’”335
Watkins wrote a memo that he put into his files to explain what really happened. Watkins said that there would be “hell to pay” if they did not fire the seven members of the White House Travel Office.
On January 5, 1996, the New York Times reported the Watkins memo in a story entitled “Memo Places Hillary Clinton at Core of Travel Office Case”:336
On Friday, while I was in Memphis, Foster told me that it was important that I speak directly with the First Lady that day. I called her that evening and she conveyed to me in clear terms her desire for swift and clear action to resolve the situation. She mentioned that Thomason had explained how the Travel Office could be run after removing the current staff–that plan included bringing in World Wide Travel to handle the basic travel functions, the actual actions taken post dismissal, and in light of that she thought immediate action was in order.
At that meeting you explained that this was on the First Lady’s radar screen. The message you conveyed to me was clear: immediate action must be taken…. We both knew that there would be hell to pay, after our failure in the Secret Service situation earlier, we failed to take swift and decisive action in conformity with the First Lady’s wishes.
At the time Hillary had said she “had no role in the decision to terminate the [Travel Office] employees.”337
Hillary perjured herself when she repeated that statement in her answers to twenty-six questions presented to her by the General Accounting Office during their investigation. An outraged Barbara Olson, who led the Travelgate investigation, wrote, “These questions were signed by Hillary Rodham Clinton on March 21, 1996, under penalty of perjury.”338
Hillary should have been prosecuted by the Independent Counsel for lying under oath, but when the final Independent Counsel report on the Travel Office firings was issued on June 23, 2000, there simply was not the political will to prosecute Hillary. The Independent Counsel Richard Ray concluded that “Mrs. Clinton’s input into the process was significant, if not the significant factor influencing the pace of events in the Travel Office firings and the ultimate decision to fire the employees.”339 The Independent Counsel also stated that Hillary had provided “factually false” testimony about the Travel Office firings to the GAO, the Independent Counsel, and Congress. The Independent Counsel, which had proven Hillary’s guilt, gave her a free pass without prosecution, but the scandal damaged both Clinton and Foster.
On June 17, the Wall Street Journal published an article titled “Who Is Vince Foster?” Foster, normally a composed, confidant lawyer, was pale, shaking, unable to speak, and probably could not even walk according to Hubbell.
Amid the stress, Foster was looking forward to having a reunion dinner with Hillary and the Hubbells the day before Father’s Day, Saturday, June 19. Hillary, Foster, Webb, and their spouses planned to gather at the Italian restaurant Matti.
The First Lady canceled at the last minute.
“We went to dinner and Hillary soon called to say she just couldn’t make it. Vince hardly said a word the rest of the evening,” recalled Hubbell. “Suzy, as much as she loved Vince, thought his behav
ior was extremely bizarre. ‘He was sulking,’ she said. ‘It was so uncharacteristic of him.’ He pulled his chair back and turned himself away from the rest of the table. He was just like a child who had been promised quality time with a parent, only to have the parent renege when business had called him away.”340
Foster’s life continued to deteriorate personally and professionally.
Hubbell had some revealing things to say about Foster’s wife, Lisa, and her thoughts on Hillary: “Lisa Foster hated that Vince would talk to Hillary, tell her things that Lisa did not know,” Hubbell wrote. Hubbell recalled an internal Rose Law Firm power struggle in the 1980s. He had told his wife Suzy about it, “but this was the first Lisa [Foster] had heard of it. She hated it. And though it had nothing to do with Hillary and everything to do with Vince, I think Lisa’s jealousy was mainly aimed at Hillary.”341 Lisa Foster was so angry at Vince that she refused to attend the inaugural ball with him that January.342
Another WSJ editorial focused on Foster’s role defending the controversial procedures of Hillary’s Health Care Task Force. The column was titled “Vincent Foster’s Victory” and it had the snarky line “We suspect that Vincent Foster and Ollie North might hit it off.”343
“He urgently asked [Hillary’s tough gal fixer and confidant] Susan Thomases to meet with him. He told her he feared Hillary would be blamed for the Travel Office firings and dragged through the mud. He also confided to Thomases that he was exhausted and that his marriage was strained. He and his wife were fighting about whether to go back to Arkansas,” wrote legendary journalist Carl Bernstein.344
“At the same time, it was increasingly hard for Foster to keep fighting tooth and nail for Hillary’s interests when their relationship had degenerated, Hubbell said…. When he had left Arkansas for Washington, he had expected the relationship with Hillary to remain as deep as ever. The last thing he had expected is that it would turn upside down. Some days he was a flunky, some days a legal counselor, other days he was a fixer, but no longer was he her intimate.”
In July 1993, Hillary had a huge disagreement with a legal objection that Foster had raised and she “humiliated Foster in front of aides.”345
“Hillary put him down really, really bad in a pretty good-sized meeting…. She told him that he didn’t get the picture, and he would always be a little hick-town lawyer who was obviously not ready for the big time,” recalled FBI agent Copeland.346 Dozens of Foster’s associates would tell Copeland and other agents that “The put-down she gave him in that big meeting just pushed him over the edge. It was the final straw that broke the camel’s back.” 347
On July 19, 1993, the Wall Street Journal ran yet another editorial slamming Vince Foster and the ethics of the Rose Law Firm lawyers who had come to Washington, DC, with the Clinton Administration. The WSJ also hit Hillary and Vince for being tied to the Travel Office firings.
The next day Foster took an old .38 caliber pistol, held it with both hands, and shot himself in the head in his White House office.
Ronald Kessler reported that the FBI agents’ reports of their interviews with the Clintons in relation to Foster’s suicide are mysteriously missing from the proper files where they should be at the National Archives.348
“That night, sometime between eight and nine o’clock, Mack McLarty called me at my mother’s house and told me he had terrible news: Vince Foster was dead; it looked like a suicide, Hillary later wrote.”349
Hillary told the Office of Independent Counsel while under oath that the last time she spoke to Vince Foster was before Father’s Day, June 20, 1993. However, Tom Castleton was an aide to Vince Foster, and he “saw Hillary Clinton in Foster’s office approximately four times during the five weeks he was employed.” Castleton started working for Vince Foster after June 20, 1993.350
The FBI interviewed Marsha Scott, a longtime mistress of Bill Clinton and a friend and confidante of Foster who worked in the White House. The FBI report on the death of Vince Foster stated: “Scott is of the opinion that Foster committed suicide for personal reasons but commented that he didn’t separate work from personal matters. He had talked about ‘wanting out.’ He talked about ‘wanting to rest.’”351
vi Parks was found dead in September 1993. ‘“I believe my father was assassinated because he was the one link that could actually close everything and completely shut Clinton down,”’ said Parks’s son, Gary. ‘“I feel that Bill Clinton had my father killed to save his political career.”
CHAPTER 14
THE BODY
“Vincent Foster could not have killed himself by putting a gun in his mouth and pulling the trigger as reported in the media.”
—Chris Ruddy, journalist and Newsmax Media CEO352
In her chronicle of life in the White House, Living History, Hillary Clinton admitted to some guilt over the death of Vince Foster, but a majority of the blame was shifted to the columnists who investigated crookedness in the administration.
“I would wake up in the middle of the night worrying that the actions and reactions concerning the travel office helped drive Vince Foster to take his own life,” Hillary wrote. “Vince Foster was stung by the travel office affair…. Apparently the final blow came in a series of spiteful editorials published in the Wall Street Journal, which attacked the integrity and competence of all the Arkansas lawyers in the Clinton Administration. On June 17, 1993, an editorial titled ‘Who Is Vince Foster?’ proclaimed that the most ‘disturbing’ thing about the Administration was ‘its carelessness about following the law.’ For the next month, the Journal continued its editorial campaign to paint the Clinton White House and my colleagues from the Rose Firm as some sort of corrupt cabal.”353
Conservative activist Reed Irvine ridiculed the theory as “Death by Editorial.”
In truth, there was some crookedness transpiring in Foster’s office on the night of his suicide, with several aides very close to Hillary securing important items. These people were White House Counsel Nussbaum (who knew Hillary since they worked on the House Watergate Committee investigating Nixon), Maggie Williams (the chief of staff for Hillary Clinton), and Patsy Thomasson.
Secret Service Agent Henry O’Neill spotted Thomasson in the office sometime after 10:42 p.m. “I saw Maggie Williams walk out of the suite and turn to the right in the direction I was standing,” O’Neill subsequently said under oath, “She was carrying what I would describe in her arms and hands, as folders.”354
Williams had a very different story to tell in her testimony. “I disturbed nothing while I was there [in Foster’s office],” she declared.355 Williams said she did not remove any documents from Foster’s office; that she merely sat on the sofa.
In a 1994 press conference, Hillary denied sending her chief of staff into the office of her deceased lover. She repeated this lie to Barbara Walters on 20/20 in 1996. “I want to be very clear about this,” a stern Clinton told Walters. “There were no documents taken out of Vince Foster’s office on the night he died and I did not direct anyone to interfere in any investigation.”356 Foster had billing records in his office that pertained to Whitewater, a scandal that threatened the administration. At the heart of Whitewater was Madison Guaranty, a bankrupt savings and loan company that financed shady real estate transactions. The collapse of Madison Guaranty cost taxpayers $60 million. The bankrupt company was partnered with Whitewater Development Corporation, the subject of the Whitewater probe and owned, in part, by the Clintons.
Clinton later admitted to a sweep of the office.
“Since Vince’s office was never a crime scene, these actions were understandable, legal and justifiable,” Hillary wrote in Living History, offering a defense of the removal of Whitewater documents.
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.”357
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.358 “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.”359
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.”360
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.
