by WorldTribune Staff, August 23, 2016
Documents relating to the 1993 death of White House aide and Hillary Clinton friend Vince Foster are missing from the National Archives, according to a report.
“FBI agents’ reports of interviews documenting that Hillary Clinton’s stinging humiliation of her friend and mentor Vince Foster in front of White House aides triggered his suicide a week later are missing,” Ronald Kessler wrote for the Daily Mail Online.
Kessler wrote that “on two separate occasions” he went to the National Archives and Records Service in College Park, Md., to review FBI reports of the investigation into Foster’s death. Foster was a deputy White House counsel for President Bill Clinton.
The reports included “interviews with the medical examiner, U.S. Park Police officers, and White House aides about the contents of Foster’s office – the reports on Hillary Clinton’s role in his death were absent,” wrote Kessler, a former Washington Post and Wall Street Journal investigative reporter.
Kessler would then file a Freedom of Information request with the National Archives, which responded that “the records that would be responsive to your request” could not be found.
“This is not the first time documents related to the Clintons have apparently vanished from the National Archive,” Kessler wrote.
“In March 2009, the archives found that an external hard drive from the Bill Clinton White House containing confidential documents was missing. When it could not be located, the inspector general’s office announced that it had opened a criminal investigation.
“Offering a reward of up to $50,000 for information leading to recovery of the hard drive, the archives asked that tips be reported to the Secret Service. At the time, the archives said it had a backup drive.”
Kessler, the New York Times bestselling author of “The First Family Detail: Secret Service Agents Reveal the Hidden Lives of the Presidents and The Secrets of the FBI”, continued: “The FBI investigation into Foster’s death was conducted for independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr’s probe of the Clintons’ investments in the Whitewater real estate development.
For unknown reasons, Starr elected to conceal the FBI’s findings in his final report.”
In interviews for this book, Kessler noted that “FBI agents revealed the truth about Foster’s death on July 20, 1993 when he shot himself at Fort Marcy Park along the Potomac River.
“In interviewing Clinton White House aides and Foster’s friends and family, the FBI found that a week before Foster’s death, Hillary held a meeting at the White House with Foster and other top aides to discuss her proposed health care legislation.
“Hillary angrily disagreed with a legal objection Foster raised at the meeting and ridiculed him in front of his peers, former FBI agent Coy Copeland and former FBI supervisory agent Jim Clemente told me. Copeland was Starr’s senior investigator and read the reports of other agents working for Starr.
“During the White House meeting, Hillary continued to humiliate Foster mercilessly, according to both former FBI agents, who spoke about the investigation for the first time,” Kessler wrote.
“Hillary put him down really, really bad in a pretty good-size meeting,” Copeland says. “She told him 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.”
Hillary “went so far as to blame Foster for all the Clintons’ problems and to accuse him of failing them,” according to Clemente, who Kessler said was also assigned by the FBI to the Starr investigation and who probed the circumstances surrounding Foster’s suicide.
“Foster was profoundly depressed, but Hillary lambasting him was the final straw because she publicly embarrassed him in front of others,” said Clemente.
“Hillary blamed him for failed nominations, claimed he had not vetted them properly, and said in front of his White House colleagues, ‘You’re not protecting us’ and ‘You have failed us,’ ” Clemente says. “That was the final blow.”
“On Tuesday, July 13, 1993, while having dinner with his wife Lisa, Foster broke down and began to cry. He said he was considering resigning,” Kessler wrote.
“That weekend, Foster and his wife drove to the Eastern Shore of Maryland, where they saw their friends, Michael Cardoza and Webster Hubbell, and their wives.”
Copeland told Kissler that ‘”they played tennis, they swam, and they said he sat in a lawn chair, just kind of sat there in the lawn chair. They said that just was not Vince. He loved to play tennis, and he was always sociable, but he just sat over in the corner by himself and stared off into space, reading a book.”
Kessler continued: “Two days later, Foster left the White House parking lot at 1:10 p.m. The precise time when he shot himself could not be pinpointed. After Park Police found his body, they notified the U.S. Secret Service at 8:30 p.m.”
Based on what “dozens” of others who had contact with Foster after that meeting told the agents, while Foster was already depressed, “the put-down that she gave him in that big meeting just pushed him over the edge,” Copeland says. “It was the final straw that broke the camel’s back.”
Kessler wrote that Copeland and Clemente both said “the FBI investigation concluded that it was Hillary’s vilification of Foster in front of other White House aides, coming on top of his depression, that triggered his suicide about a week later.”
In his 38,000-word report, Starr “never mentioned the meeting with Hillary, leaving out the fact that his own investigation had found that Hillary’s rage had led to her friend’s suicide,” Kessler wrote.
“Why Starr chose not to reveal the critical meeting and his own investigators’ findings remains a mystery. Asked why he excluded what led to Foster’s suicide from his report, Starr did not respond. A spokesman for Hillary Clinton had no comment.
“Starr’s report recounted how the FBI ran down even the most bizarre theories about Foster’s death and conducted extensive ballistics tests that refuted assertions that Foster had not committed suicide.”
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