Was Vince Foster’s Murder PizzaGate-Related?

Very nearly the first questions that people ask when you present them with the very strong evidence that Bill Clinton’s deputy White House counsel Vincent W. Foster, Jr., did not commit suicide is, “Who killed him and why was he killed?” The question gets the cart ahead of the horse. It is not necessary to know who murdered a person, say, found gunned down in the street or what the murderer’s motive might have been to determine that the person was, indeed, murdered. Anyone who has examined the Foster case with any care and with even a slightly open mind will realize that that’s essentially what we have in the case of the Foster death.

While the evidence is very strong that Foster was murdered, the evidence as to why he was killed, to my mind, is much weaker at this point. For the most part we have been left with informed conjecture. I put that conjecture in the form of a poem in 1995:

Murder Mystery

How crude, audacious, and reckless,

Right under the president’s seal!

What was a living Vincent Foster

Such a threat to reveal?

From all the people they’ve had to suborn

And investigations to rig,

It must have been something truly ugly

And something terribly big.

Foster’s Criminal Connections?

Shortly afterward, I took a stab at a possible motive in my “America’s Dreyfus Affair: The Case of the Death of Vincent Foster.” Here I am speaking of Robert Fiske, the man that Clinton’s attorney general, Janet Reno, chose to do an “independent investigation” of Foster’s death:

It can't be said that Fiske was a well-known public figure with great moral authority. It is perhaps the greatest indictment of the United States as it approaches the 21st century that it is very difficult, indeed, to think of anyone who might fit that description. But, at least, the press was able to make much of the fact that Fiske was a member of the principal opposition party to the president. Little noted was the fact that he had also been a defense counsel for former Democratic Secretary of Defense, Clark Clifford, in the case involving the fraudulent takeover of First American Bank in Washington, DC, by the Pakistan-based Bank of Commerce and Credit International (BCCI). BCCI was the much under-publicized largest criminal conspiracy in history involving the theft of billions of dollars of depositors' money around the world and massive laundering of illegal drug money, among other things. According to the definitive book on BCCI, False Profits, by Peter Truell and Larry Gurwin, the man most responsible for getting BCCI involved in the United States was Jackson Stephens of the brokerage firm of Jackson Stephens Associates of Little Rock, Arkansas. To close the circle, according to a Wall Street Journal report in the wake of Foster's death, Stephens was the largest single client of Little Rock's Rose Law Firm, and the man who had been in charge of the Stephens account before he left for his government job was none other than the Rose firm's top attorney, Vincent W. Foster, Jr.

So with BCCI and Foster’s connection to it, we are talking about major criminal activity on a very big scale. In Part 2 of “America’s Dreyfus Affair,” I speculated about Foster and Bill Clinton’s involvement in the illegal drug trade and faulted reporter Christopher Ruddy for making practically nothing of it in his book, The Strange Death of Vincent Foster, an Investigation.

The following quote is from the introduction to the 1994 paperback edition of the 1992 book Evil Money: The Inside Story of Money Laundering & Corruption in Government, Banks & Business by the widely respected non-partisan Dr. Rachel Ehrenfeld:

Evil Money was first published in the summer of 1992. My objective was to call attention to the threat illegal money, especially drug money, presents to the democratic institutions and free markets. Since Bill Clinton was inaugurated as President in 1993, the threat to the United States seems to have worsened. It is worse because the new president's financial, political, and personal ethics, as well as his associations, reflect all of the alarming trends described in Evil Money. It appears that in the group around the president willful blindness was common, and evil money bought political power.

Ruddy's narrative touches on drugs only once when he notes that the "presidential assistant in charge of certain security matters," Patsy Thomasson, was among those who went through Foster's office on the fateful night. "Before coming to Washington," says Ruddy, "Thomasson had been the chief operating officer of a Little Rock bond house while its owner, Dan Lasater, was serving jail time for cocaine distribution. Thomasson's name had even turned up in one Drug Enforcement Administration document detailing a passenger manifest of persons flying with Lasater from Latin America."

What's missing here is any mention of Lasater's great closeness to Clinton, the fact that Lasater had employed Bill's half-brother, Roger Clinton, Jr., also a convicted drug felon, the fact that Lasater was a major contributor to Bill's campaigns, and that, as Ehrenfeld notes, "...even after being implicated in drug dealing at Roger Clinton's trial Lasater was awarded $664.8 million in Arkansas state bond contracts, making $1.7 million for himself." Most importantly, what's missing is the famous line, "That's Lasater's deal," reported by R. Emmett Tyrrell in his book, Boy Clinton, to have been said by Governor Bill Clinton to security aide and state trooper L.D. Brown to dismiss the importance of a shipment of cocaine that Brown told him he had discovered on one of those return flights from supplying arms to the Nicaraguan resistance. Brown, according to Tyrrell, had been urged by Clinton to join the CIA, which he had done, and it was under their employ that he made his cocaine discovery.

Now one might say that Ruddy would have been getting off the track of the Foster case had he delved into these matters, but they would have certainly provided useful perspective, at least in a footnote. And what can we say about the Jerry Parks connection, which he also leaves out? Parks was a private investigator who had handled security in Little Rock for the Clinton- Gore campaign in 1992. He was murdered gangland style on September 26, 1993. After the murder, which has not been solved, his house was ransacked and, according to his widow, Jane, there were "as many as eight federal agents in her house at one time--flashing FBI, Secret Service, IRS, and curiously, CIA credentials--not to mentions visits by Little Rock police officers. A computer was purged by an expert, files went missing and 130 tapes of telephone conversations were confiscated."

The quote is from a July 15, 1996, article by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard in the Sunday Telegraph of London entitled "Foster `hired detective to spy on Clinton'." In the article, Jane Parks alleges that Vince Foster hired her husband around 1985 for a number of sensitive assignments. One was spying on Bill Clinton at the instigation of Foster's friend and Rose Law Firm partner Hillary Clinton. Another involved a couple of mysterious trips to Mena during the 1992 campaign. Mrs. Parks said that Foster had telephoned her husband over a hundred times at their home outside Little Rock. Parks had Clinton surveillance files stolen from his home in a burglary in July 1993, about the time of Foster's death. "`That's when Jerry got paranoid,' said Mrs. Parks, `He believed that Foster had been murdered and he was afraid that he'd be next'." And he was right.

In 2002, in “The Press and the Death of Vincent Foster,” I reported on other possible connections between Foster and organized crime that the press, most notably The Washington Post, had carefully steered us away from:

Perhaps our press kept the public innocent of knowledge of Foster's not too distant connection to some very large shady activities to prevent undue speculation about the reasons for his demise. Stephens, it should be mentioned, is also a major contributor to political campaigns. A similar figure with a connection to Foster is left out of the press's story entirely. The Washington Post reported on July 30, 1993, that Foster had spent the weekend before his death visiting, along with his wife and Associate Attorney General Webster Hubbell and his wife on the Eastern Shore of Maryland at the home of Michael and Harolyn Cardozo. Actually, The Post was probably aware but did not report that the host of that gathering was Harolyn's father, wealthy developer and Democratic Party official and major political contributor, Nathan Landow. On January 26, 1978, The Post had reported on a couple of investment ventures by Landow that involved, in one case, a member of the Gambino family and in another a member of the Meyer Lansky organization. The error by omission of The Post concerning the true host of Vince Foster's last weekend, once again, kept speculation from taking place, speculation that the people at The Post apparently deemed to be unhealthy. By choosing in this way what it considers suitable for public consumption, and when the unsuitable so often turns out to be intimations of sweeping, very high-level corruption, by, in effect, ruling whole areas of inquiry out of order, the press makes itself irrelevant to the pursuit of the truth. Hardly any motivation for suicide was anywhere in evidence, and by withholding vital information the press would simply not permit any speculation on possible motivation for murder.

In 1998 in “The Post’s Sloppy Cover-up” I had noted other dimensions to the likely organized-crime connection to Foster’s death that the The Washington Post was pointedly keeping away from the public:

Notice, too, that there is no mention of Foster's meeting with Deputy Attorney General Webb Hubbell and Nathan Landow at Landow's Eastern Shore estate just two days before Foster died. There is also no mention of the curious one to two hour closed-door meeting with Clinton political fixer Marsha Scott the day before he died. Scott claims not to remember what they talked about. Landow was never interviewed by anyone, either in the government or the press.

Stolen Software, Spying?

Others have speculated about other massive and intricate nefarious activity in which Foster was engaged that might have resulted in his murder. It involved not just drug smuggling and money laundering, but also the government theft of the PROMIS software of the Inslaw corporation that was further developed to allow spying on banks around the world. It also involved more general espionage. The main connection to the Clintons in Arkansas was through a company called Systematics in Little Rock that came to control the PROMIS software, whose primary owner was the aforementioned Jackson Stephens. The late J. Orlin Grabbe wrote about it extensively in the 1990s. (Grabbe also posted my “America’s Dreyfus Affair” on his web site, the first installment of which went up even before I was online with my own computer.) Another key chronicler of these supposed dirty dealings has been James Norman, who was a senior editor for Forbes magazine when he says he first got wind of some of these goings on. His findings are encapsulated in an interview he gave to Jim Quinn of radio station WRRK of Pittsburgh on December 7, 1995. By that time Norman had lost his job at Forbes and was writing for the now defunct Media Bypass magazine. While there may be a great deal of truth in what Grabbe and Norman have reported, there are two great weaknesses in their revelations, as I see it. Much of the information comes from undercover, anonymous sources that cannot be checked out and none of it explains why Foster was killed.

On the second point, one could say the same thing about the speculations we have made relating to Foster’s connections to drug smuggling, the CIA, and organized crime. The difference is that we have not made the flat-out claims for where our evidence leads that Norman has made. One really has to wonder how Norman could possibly know all the things he would have us believe that he knows. The following exchange goes to the heart of the difference between us:

QUINN: Well, this Foster suicide thing is so sloppy. It leads me to believe that on Tuesday they thought he would take the money and shut up, and he didn't take it so they had to do something real quick.

NORMAN: Well, that could be it or that even if he wanted to shut up maybe they were afraid he would crack under interrogation or something. You know, it is just somebody wanted him real dead, and there is a bunch of people who had ample reason for it. This was not suicide. It was not over depression. This was a political assassination carried out on U.S. soil by a foreign government.

The Israelis were involved in this. There was apparently a three person Mossad-contracted team that went into the apartment that Foster had gone to that afternoon where he was apparently lured by a female person from the White House staff who I think still works in the White House.

The presumed would-be interrogators would have to have been U.S. counter-intelligence agents who suspected Foster of engaging in espionage for Israel and that female White House person would have to have been an Israeli agent as well. Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton, who, as Norman states, was actually the lawyer of record at one time for Systematics and at least as suspect of the same activities as Foster goes on to become the obvious fair-haired girl of the U.S. intelligence community in her pursuit of the highest office in the land.

Yes, there is some hard evidence involved in the form of two NSA documents that Foster’s secretary Deborah Gorham says she saw him put in his safe that seem to have disappeared. Nobody really knows what that means, though. We may be wrong, but it appears to us that Norman is either just guessing or he is intentionally leading us off in the wrong direction.

The Curious FBI Profiler

Surprising as it may seem, and as unthinkable as it was to me in the years that I have been examining the Foster death, what the right direction might well be has only recently been illuminated by the Wikileaks revelations of a possible pedophile ring with close connections to the Clintons.

The first serious awakening to this possibility came by chance in January of 2015 when Foster researcher Hugh Turley happened to be watching Russian Television (RT) and saw retired FBI agent James Clemente interviewed in connection with the Jeffrey Epstein child-sex-slave case. He was surprised to see Clemente identified as an “FBI profiler” who was supposedly an expert in matters such as this. Turley remembered him as one of the FBI agents who had worked on the Vince Foster case.

In a telephone interview, Foster-case witness Patrick Knowlton said that Clemente came on the scene about the time of the appointment of Kenneth Starr and that he had met with Clemente “on at least seven occasions.” Clemente had expressed sympathy for Knowlton over the street harassment that Knowlton had described to him and, on one occasion, they even experienced it together. To my suggestion that Clemente might have been playing the “good cop” role with him Knowlton responded in the affirmative.

On September 1, 1995, in the company of another FBI agent and a Washington, DC, police detective, Clemente drove Knowlton out to Fort Marcy Park, ostensibly to walk through his experience on the afternoon of July 20, 1993. Knowlton had stopped off to relieve himself behind a tree when he had seen an empty Honda Accord in the parking lot there with Arkansas license plates and another car backed in beside it whose driver had eyed him suspiciously and menacingly, he thought. Foster’s body was found a couple of hours later in the back of the park. The authorities and the press had claimed—and do to this day—that the empty car Knowlton saw was Foster’s car, but Knowlton is adamant that the car he saw was of a distinctly different color and older model. That had led to considerable friction between Knowlton and the FBI agents who had interviewed Knowlton previously and falsified his statement, and Clemente and his associate seemed to be trying to smooth things over.

Knowlton soon realized that Clemente had other motives with the park visit. While there they met a frequenter of the park who did not recognize Knowlton as another regular visitor. They then drove to a gas station less than a mile away on Chain Bridge Road where the employees, all of whom had positioned themselves to get a good look at him, also apparently failed to recognize him. Correctly or not, the FBI apparently suspected that Fort Marcy Park is a rendezvous site for homosexuals. Knowlton now believes that Clemente was checking to see if Knowlton’s story that he was just a casual passerby to the park was accurate, or if he might have been some sort of sexual deviant with a possible motive for misleading the investigators of the case. At any rate, nothing Knowlton told Clemente turned up directly in Kenneth Starr’s report. What Knowlton witnessed was forced upon Starr by the federal judges who appointed him in the form of the 20-page letter by Knowlton’s attorney John Clarke that is appended to the report and has been blacked out by the mainstream media. (A curious footnote to that Fort Marcy Park visit is that they were closely followed by a van with a passenger in the front seat. The van parked near them at the park and then followed them to the gas station, parking at the gas pump while they parked near the tire inflation pump. Clemente seemed unnerved by the presence of that van and even suggested to Knowlton that Knowlton might be responsible for it, which Knowlton vigorously denied.)

At no time did Clemente give any inkling to Knowlton that he was a psychological profiler specializing in such things as pedophilia. Rather, on one occasion, as Clemente expressed sympathy over any fearfulness Knowlton might have over his street harassment, he said he had experienced the same sort of fear when he was working undercover pretending to be a member of the mob. Knowlton thought at the time that Clemente seemed awfully young to have had such an experience and now wonders, in light of what he has learned about Clemente’s specialty, if Clemente was leveling with him.

“Child Abduction” and the Foster Investigation

What made the discovery of Clemente’s specialty particularly poignant at the time to Turley was the mysterious cover sheet that he and Knowlton had discovered in the National Archives in 2007 during one of their many visits there to continue researching the Foster case. “CHILD ABDUCTION AND SERIAL KILLER UNIT,” it said at the top. Below that, under the FBI seal it read:

QUESTIONS FOR A SUICIDE EXPERT

VINCENT FOSTER DEATH INVESTIGATION

It bore the date of March 11, 1996, and says “PREPARED BY: FBI SUPERVISORY AGENT” and below that the name is redacted. There is nothing fake about this document. At the top you can see the stamp or “slug,” as it is called of the National Archives, and the date of 3/13/07, when Turley and Knowlton copied it and took their copy home.

The blacked out name is more than likely that of Clemente, but the more important question is why in the world would such a specialist as this be engaged in investigating the Foster death. Turley and Knowlton didn’t know what to make of it, and if Turley hadn’t seen Clemente on RT it might have continued to gather dust in Turley’s files, at least until the Wikileaks revelations of the numerous apparent references in the emails of Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman John Podesta to pedophilia along with the revelations of Podesta’s attendance at a seemingly Satanic “spirit cooking” performance by artist Marina Abromovic.

Add to that Podesta’s odd taste in art and his brother Tony’s very creepy art displays at his home that seem to have pedophiliac and morbid themes and John’s connection to the equally weird pizza impresario James Alefantis and a lot more, and it all adds up to PizzaGate.

Now we might have finally arrived at a very compelling reason why Foster was killed. There’s no particular reason to believe that the generally circumspect and private Foster was a likely person to spill the beans on the high level shady activities that we or even Orlin Grabbe or Jim Norman have speculated about. But let us suppose that upon coming to Washington he had become privy to information about this unspeakably evil activity going on around him. Perhaps, in his revulsion, he made a small, timid move to attempt to expose it like, say, talking to someone at The Washington Post (on July 9, 1993, at the Hay Adams hotel restaurant at 12:15 pm) whom he thought he could trust.

Michael Levine, of the Drug Enforcement Agency, in The Big White Lie: The Deep Cover Operation that Exposed the CIA Sabotage of the Drug War talks of a letter he wrote from Buenos Aires, where he was working, to a couple of reporters for Newsweek, then a subsidiary of the Washington Post Corporation, exposing some of the dirty operations of the CIA in his area of responsibility. He never heard anything from the reporters, but not long after he sent the letter his world began to turn upside down in ways that could only have been a result of what he had revealed in the letter. We also know that Pat Tillman had attempted to blow the whistle to Noam Chomsky about some foul goings on in Afghanistan, mistaking Chomsky for a genuine critic of the powers-that-be in the United States. The move might have been fatal for Tillman.

As we have documented repeatedly, the entire mainstream press has been vigorously engaged in covering up the facts surrounding Foster’s death, and The Washington Post has been in the forefront of the cover-up. Now, just as they did in the Foster death, rather than critically examining evidence they are busily tarring citizen investigators of PizzaGate with the same brush with which they tarred critics of the government in the Foster case. We have seen heavy use of the Seventeen Techniques for Truth Suppression, which the Foster case inspired me to assemble, particularly numbers two, three, and five.

One of the most egregious attackers of the critics of the authorities in the Foster case was none other than journalist David Brock, the former boyfriend of James Alefantis, the owner of Comet Ping Pong, the pizza parlor at the center of the PizzaGate imbroglio. In his book, Blinded by the Right: The Conscience of an Ex-Conservative, Brock called Knowlton a “self-discrediting” witness, characterizing him that way on account of what Knowlton had to say about his harassment on the streets of Washington, DC. (You can watch Knowlton talking about his harassment in this video and decide for yourself how “self-discrediting” Knowlton is.)

And reminiscent of Robert Fiske defending BCCI figure Clark Clifford, Kenneth Starr was on the legal team that was able to persuade a judge to give the billionaire crony of Bill Clinton, convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, a piddling sentence for his sexual enslavement of numerous underage girls. This is another story that has been greatly underreported by the mainstream press, in contrast, say, to the Jerry Sandusky case at Penn State. Starr had less success with the letter that he wrote to the judge, urging leniency for his neighbor in McLean,Virginia, schoolteacher Christopher Kloman. Kloman, without Epstein’s connections and clout, was convicted of sexually molesting a number of girls in 12-14 year old range, and was sentenced to 43 years in prison.

David Martin

December 13, 2016

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