“All the party has to do is call. Her bag is packed,” writes Michael Goodwin in “Democrats’ hunt for Trump slayer may lead to Hillary Clinton comeback,” and her platform writes itself. “She didn’t really lose the 2016 election. Trump colluded with the Russians to deprive her of her civil right to be president. Anything else is just a Republican talking point and part of the vast right-wing conspiracy.”
The Democrats are down to increasingly addled Joe Biden and Rip Van Winkle communist Bernie Sanders. In these conditions, “Clinton would have to be dead not to dream of a miracle, one that would give her the victory fate has twice denied her.” As this unfolds, Hulu comes out with the documentary series “Hillary,” prompting husband Bill to speak out.
His sexual affair with Monica Lewinsky, Bill Clinton explains, was a way to “manage my anxieties.” That plays into the “Me Too” narrative and the notion that Hillary is a victim of sexism. Fox News revisited the Lewinsky liaison in a “Scandalous” documentary and so did Kenneth Starr’s 2018 Contempt: A Memoir of the Clinton Investigation. In reality, there were two Clinton investigations, and they break down like the movies in Pauline Kael’s Kiss Kiss Bang Bang.
The Lewinsky affair is like the “kiss kiss” story, but Ken Starr also investigated the death of Clinton’s deputy White House counsel Vincent Foster. This “bang bang” tale is the one to recall with Hillary still a possibility in November.
On July 20, 1993, as Starr explained in Contempt, “Vince Foster had taken his own life in Fort Marcy park while seated on the Civil War berm where his body was found.” Starr notes that his investigators never found the bullet, and that the Clinton White House prevented the police from searching Foster’s office. On the other hand, Starr ignores varying accounts of where the body was found, conflicting reports on the wounds, and many other irregularities noted by Starr’s own investigator Miguel Rodriguez, a U.S. Attorney with the forensic experience Starr lacked.
“Conspiracy theories began to spread,” Starr wrote, “alleging that Foster had been murdered by the Clintons’ operatives, to protect them from his testimony or prevent him from producing records damning for the Clintons.” As the time line shows, the theory that Foster committed suicide emerged before the Park Police, FBI, and the special prosecutors had completed their investigations.
Ken Starr basically echoed the conclusions of special prosecutor Robert Fiske, who proclaimed that Foster was depressed and found “no evidence” that any issues relating to the Whitewater scandal and such “played any part in his suicide.” In Contempt, Starr deploys “conspiracy theory” like a CNN anchor and trashes Rodriguez as a “rogue prosecutor” without dealing with what he uncovered and why he resigned from Starr’s investigation.
All that, and more, emerged in The Strange Death of Vincent Foster, by Christopher Ruddy. As he showed, most facts in the case stand in serious dispute, much evidence mysteriously lost or altered, and testimony was frequently contradictory and “occasionally blatantly false.”
Ruddy’s 1997 book escapes notice in Contempt, despite the approval of William Sessions, former head of the FBI. He resisted White House attempts to wrest political control over the FBI and President Clinton duly fired him on July 19, 1993. That dismissal, the first ever of an FBI director, compromised the role of the FBI in the Foster investigation.
According to Sessions, Ruddy “detailed a significant array of facts and issues involving the death of Mr. Foster. His work is serious and compelling.” Ruddy “tenaciously argued a persuasive case that the American public has not been told the complete facts of this case,” but the author “carefully avoided drawing undue inferences about the death.”
Launched under the Clintons, political deployment of the FBI surged under POTUS 44, who deployed the bureau to clear his designated successor Hillary Clinton and attack candidate and President Trump. While avoiding undue inferences about Foster, Ruddy also revealed another dynamic lingering into 2020
“Part of the problem,” he wrote, “has been the absolute refusal of the establishment media to report on this case.” In similar style, the establishment media echoed the Russia hoax while backing off on the Clinton emails. True to form, Trump’s concerns about the emails were branded a “conspiracy theory,” now a standard feature of leftist boilerplate.
Meanwhile, Joe Biden is beating Sanders in the primaries but losing his grip on reality. Hillary’s bag is fully packed and as she waits for the call, those deplorables would do well to focus on her “bang bang” back story, well worthy of a “Forensic Files” episode.
In January 1996, PBS’ “Frontline” noted, Hillary’s Rose Law Firm billing records, the target of investigative subpoenas for two years, miraculously appeared in the White House, and they did show work on Whitewater and such. The last person to possess the records was Vince Foster, and the FBI found fingerprints of Foster and Hillary Clinton, who said she had “no idea” how the billing records came to be in her book room.
Also under subpoena were the 30,000 emails Clinton deleted in 2016. Trump thinks they could be in Ukraine, so as the president says, we’ll have to see what happens.
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