ON AUGUST 16, A HEARING WAS HELD IN THE DISTRICT COURT IN WASHINGTON ON AIM's charge that the Office of Independent Counsel (OIC) had engaged in illegal activities and obstruction of justice in its investigation of the death of Vincent Foster. This was tied to our Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) suit against the OIC. A good crowd showed up for the hearing, and it got good reports on the Internet, generating more requests from talk shows for interviews about the Foster case in a week than we had received all year. Most of these were arranged by NewsMax.com's publicist, Sandy Frazier. The establishment media showed no interest. They have all bought the official story that Foster drove his car to Ft. Marcy Park, sat down on a dirt path going down a berm and shot himself in the mouth with an old .38 caliber revolver, a piece of junk that he didn't own that had magical powers, if the official investigators are to be believed.
THEY WOULD HAVE US BELIEVE THAT HE INSERTED THE MUZZLE OF THE GUN INTO HIS mouth with his right thumb on the trigger. Aiming at the back of his throat, he pulled the trigger with his thumb, and withdrew the gun instantly before any blood or tissue could adhere to or get sucked into the barrel. He then fell back with his face straight up and his arms at his sides. With the gun stuck on his thumb, the muzzle burrowed under his right thigh. Instead of creating a gaping hole in the back of Foster's neck, the high velocity .38 bullet went straight up 4-1/2 inches into his cranium, took a sharp turn and exited through the back of the skull, three inches below the top of his head. This is what the autopsy report by Dr. Beyer would have us believe. A .38 high velocity bullet should have blown a lot of bone, brain and blood out of a hole in the back of Foster's head. No bone or brain was found nearby, and there was no blood on the vegetation around the body. Of five people who saw the back of Foster's head, Dr. Beyer is the only one who claimed to have found an exit wound in his skull. It is hard to see all the others could have missed a hole the size of a half dollar, especially Sgt. John Rolla. He felt Foster's head with his fingers, but all he found was a soft spot. Beyer probably poked a rod through the soft spot, creating a spurious exit wound, which was accepted without question by the OIC despite the disappearance of the x-rays and the proven falsity of Beyer's explanation for their absence.
BEYER'S DESCRIPTION OF THE TRAJECTORY OF THE BULLET TROUBLED OTHER PATHOLOGISTS. Several of them, including his boss, met with Beyer and decided to modify his story by changing the entrance wound to the soft palate instead of the back of Foster's throat, where Dr. Beyer's autopsy report had located it. The autopsy report mentioned only a "defect" in the soft palate, meaning a wound but not the entrance wound. The revision became the official version in special prosecutor Robert Fiske's report, but Starr's pathologist, Dr. Brian Blackbourne, an old friend of Dr. Beyer, adopted a compromise. He located the entrance wound in both the soft palate and the back of the throat. The willingness of the official investigators to accept so much nonsense shows how far they were willing to go to keep from having to rule Vincent Foster's death a homicide.
THE TESTIMONY OF THREE GOOD EYEWITNESSES WHO SAID FOSTER'S CAR WAS NOT IN the Ft. Marcy parking lot as late as 5:30 p.m. was ignored by Fiske and Starr because they could not refute it. There were about a dozen people known to have been in the Ft. Marcy parking lot in the two hours after 4:00 p.m., the latest estimate Dr. Beyer made of the time of Foster's death. Three of them have said that no car fitting the description of Foster's light gray 1989 Honda Accord was there. Only one reported seeing a light gray car in the parking lot, and that was within minutes of six o'clock. The brown, mid-eighties Honda Accord with Arkansas tags that had been parked in the same spot for at least 90 minutes was obviously a stand-in for Foster's car. It was a different color and model, but it served its purpose, which was to provide evidence that Foster had driven his car to Fort Marcy. The evidence that it was not Foster's car fell into the laps of the investigators, but they rejected it without giving any reason. I feel safe in saying that the stand-in was the driverless brown car with its engine running seen by rescue workers Todd Hall and Jennifer Wacha when they arrived in the parking lot at 6:10 p.m. Its departure had been delayed, and its driver and his partner were nowhere to be seen, but it was gone when the rescue workers returned to the parking lot from their search for Foster's body.
IF FOSTER'S CAR WAS NOT AT FT. MARCY UNTIL 6:00 P.M., THE CASE FOR SUICIDE COLLAPSES. The refusal of Fiske and Starr to accept or try to refute the evidence provided by the three eyewitnesses who said it was not there shows that both of these prosecutors obstructed justice by refusing to include in their reports what these witnesses told them. They kept both the press and the public in the dark. Their FBI agents misreported what eyewitness Patrick Knowlton told them, and they tried hard to get him to change his description of the car he had seen. When that failed, they used intimidating harassment to get him to change his story. He refused to change it. His harassment had been witnessed by others, including a reporter and a friend, but a suit he had filed against the FBI and the "John Does" it employed was stalled in the courts and eventually dismissed. The Justice Department attorney representing the OIC at the court hearing on August 16 brought this up, trying to give the judge the impression that Knowlton had a screw loose. Nothing could be further from the truth. I know Patrick very well. He has a keen mind, excellent powers of observation, memory and a fine character. If the FBI had accepted what he said instead of pressuring him to change it, the killers might have been caught.
THE FISKE AND STARR INVESTIGATORS ALSO OBSTRUCTED JUSTICE BY PRESSURING Foster's widow enough to get her to say that the 80-year-old black gun found in Foster's hand was the modern, silver gun she had brought to Washington only weeks before. They were desperate to get someone in the family to say that the black gun belonged to Foster, knowing that it would be difficult to sustain the suicide theory if the gun was not his. He had two modern guns in his house in Washington. Why would he use a junk gun that he didn't own to kill himself? The investigators who got Mrs. Foster to identify the gun knew that it was not a valid identification, and so did the authors of the Fiske and Starr reports. The Fiske report did not mention the color of either the black gun found in Foster's hand or the silver gun Mrs. Foster brought to Washington. That made it unlikely that readers of the report would recognize that Mrs. Foster's identification was invalid.
THE STARR REPORT ACHIEVED ESSENTIALLY THE SAME RESULT BY GIVING THE COLOR OF the silver gun in the text and relegating the color of the black gun to a footnote to this statement on page 79: "There are discrepancies in the descriptions of the color and kind of gun seen in Mr. Foster's hand. However, the descriptions provided by the first two persons to observe gun, as well as of numerous others, are consistent with the gun retrieved from the scene and depicted in the on-the-scene Polaroids." The footnote to this sentence reads: "See Gonzalez 302, 5/15/96, at 4; Gonzalez, OIC, 1/5/95 at 31 (saw black or dark revolver in hand); Hall OIC 1/5/95, at 31 (saw black gun in hand); see also Wacha OIC, 1/10/95, at 41-42." Since none of the referenced documents were available to the public. It appears that these four citations were included to make it less likely that the footnote would be read. They could have just said the gun was black. What they were doing was trying to hide the fact that Mrs. Foster had succumbed to pressure from Starr's FBI agents to say that the black gun found in Foster's hand was the silver gun she had bought to Washington.
THIS REPORT IS DEVOTED MAINLY TO DR. ALAN BERMAN AND HIS REACTION TO MY ARTICLE about be the most convincing proof that Vincent Foster did not commit suicide. Berman, who was 100 percent certain that all the evidence showed that Foster killed himself, didn't try to refute anything in the article. That shows the strength of the evidence. I have also sent copies to a few journalists to see if they could be persuaded that the media have made a serious mistake in swallowing the official line about Foster's death.
PETER SLEN, THE PRODUCER OF C-SPAN'S WASHINGTON JOURNAL, HAD REJECTED A REQUEST that he devote some time to the Foster case on or near the 8th anniversary of Foster's death. I sent him my article to see if it would change his mind. He read it, but he refused to give me his reaction to it. On Aug. 23, the topic on Washington Journal was Mt. Holyoke College professor Joseph Ellis's lies about serving in Vietnam. Brian Lamb was the host. I called to contrast C-SPAN's interest in Ellis's lies with Peter Slen's lack of interest in the lies told by or known to the OIC that have covered up Foster's murder. Brian said I would have to talk to Peter Slen about that, because it is his responsibility to make editorial judgments, "and that is a subject we have spent an enormous amount of time on over the years." That is true only by comparison with other TV channels, and it does not justify refusing to report new discoveries such as the fact that Ken Starr obtained the service records for Dr. Beyer's x-ray machine, using a grand jury subpoena. These records prove that Beyer lied when he testified that he didn't have any Foster x-rays because his machine was not working. Starr had a legal obligation to confront Beyer with the records and threaten to prosecute him if he didn't disclose what happened to the x-rays and what they showed. He failed to do that. Columnist Bob Novak recognized that this is a significant discovery. He and columnist Paul Gigot of The Wall Street Journal have my article. Gigot has yet to react to it.