Foster, Vince

TROLLING?

December 31, 2025

Apart from being French, Brigitte Macron embodies everything a Washington Free Beacon Man of the Year should be. She flouted prudish norms by seducing a much younger student at the Jesuit high school where she was a teacher. The student, Emmanuel Macron, 24 years her junior, is now her husband and the president of France. But when push comes to shove, Brigitte is quick to remind the little twerp who wears the pants.

If that's even her real name. Macron has boldly challenged the conventional expectations governing how a first lady should present herself physically, completely redrawing the line between feminine and masculine. Indeed, Michelle Obama walked so she could run.

To be honest, we're not entirely sure what's going on. Donald Trump loves to kiss Brigitte in front of her husband, whom he's teased for having "naughty" secrets. He once called her "beautiful," a claim that even the most partisan fact-checkers—Daniel Dale and Glenn Kessler (RIP) come to mind—would struggle to authenticate. And yet, in almost every respect, Trump is by far our gayest president. Say what you will about Bill Clinton, he was far too busy chasing tail to redecorate the Oval Office or build an entire ballroom to entertain guests by blasting the theme from Cats.

In any event, Brigitte has clearly taken inspiration from Clinton's nominal wife, Hillary Rodham, when it comes to utilizing the levers of state to harass or even silence one's enemies. Hillary might have a higher body count—Vince Foster, Jeffrey Epstein, Malaysian Airlines Flight 370, and so on—or maybe Brigitte is just better at covering her tracks.

Assembling a multinational assassination squad to go after Candace Owens—who was threatening to reveal dark secrets about her past—was a sensible move on Macron's part. We might question the wisdom of including only one Jew, but we'll wait to see how things play out before passing judgment. In the meantime, we hope she appreciates the distinction of being a Washington Free Beacon Man of the Year.

Brava, madame. Or shall we say, Bravo.

Published under: Bill Clinton , Candace Owens , Donald Trump , Emmanuel Macron , Hillary Clinton , Michelle Obama

mma 922 matt g

The highbrow elements of the right-wing media complex like to tell a self-flattering story in which the modern American right is controlled by sophisticates such as themselves. The Republican Party’s extremists, in this version of reality, are mere rabble who provide the movement with manpower and votes but have little influence over the course of political events.

The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board offered up such a tale in its Saturday piece eulogizing former independent counsel Kenneth Starr. The board complained that “Starr’s critics” ignore his role in “putting to rest the conspiracy theories on the right about Vincent Foster,” a senior aide in President Bill Clinton’s White House who took his own life in 1993. “The Qanons of the era argued that the Clintons probably had something nefarious to do with it,” the board wrote. “Starr helped debunk that theory with an investigation concluding that Foster had killed himself.”

By tying together the Foster conspiracy theorists of the past with the QAnon fanatics of the present, the editorial board seeks to minimize the influence of both within the right. But in both cases, the conspiracy theory infested every element of the movement over which the Journal pretends to play a leading role.

Foster was the Seth Rich of the Clinton administration, someone whose tragic death was opportunistically seized by right-wing conspiracy theorists seeking partisan gain. And as with Rich, those conspiracy theories bubbled up to the heights of the right-wing press.

Indeed, the Journal editorial board itself stoked the Foster conspiracy theories at the time.After Foster took his own life in Virginia’s Fort Marcy Park – leaving behind a note stating that “the WSJ editors lie without consequence,” a reference to several Journal editorials attacking him – the board called for an independent counsel to investigate Foster’s death. “If he was driven to take his life by purely personal despair, a serious investigation should share this conclusion so that he can be appropriately mourned,” the board concluded in its July 22, 1993, piece.

That sort of winking paranoia was par for the course for the Journal during the Clinton administration, as the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Glenn Greenwald noted in a 2007 Salon.com review of the editorial board’s “profound hate-mongering and truly deranged accusations.”

“This is the Editorial Page that, throughout the 1990s, did more to infect and degrade our public discourse than anyone this side of Rush Limbaugh and Matt Drudge,” Greenwald, now a regular guest on Fox News host Tucker Carlson’s show, wrote. “But the WSJ Editors were actually far worse than Limbaugh and Drudge, because they put a stamp of establishment journalistic credibility on those rancid dirt-mongers, elevating them to the realm of the credible and influential.”

Several investigations, undertaken as Foster conspiracy theories metasticized through the right, ultimately concluded the White House aide had died by suicide. After special prosecutor Robert B. Fiske Jr. released his findings in 1994, the Journal editorial board stated: “Barring some unimaginable new disclosure, we find no reason to doubt that the former White House counsel committed suicide in Fort Marcy Park.”

But Fiske’s report did not silence the right’s conspiracy theorists. Nor did the conclusions of the Department of Justice, FBI, and Park Police in 1993; the top Republican on the House’s government oversight committee in 1994; a Senate committee in 1995; or the results of Starr’s investigation in 1997. The Journal did little to establish guardrails against the insanity; responding to Starr’s report, editorial writer Micah Morrison tellingly refused to condemn Christopher Ruddy, the primary champion of the conspiracy theory, writing instead that Ruddy had simply been asking the “obvious questions” that the “mainstream press” refused to ask.

And so Starr did not ultimately “put to rest the conspiracy theories on the right,” as the Journal claimed this weekend. Instead, the most powerful forces on the American right continued to stoke the same lies about Foster’s suicide as they sought to damage Hillary Clinton’s political standing.

Limbaugh regularly insinuated during the 2008 presidential primary that the Clintons may have murdered Fosterand that their political opponents might end up in “Fort Marcy Park” or taking “Fort Marcy Airlines.” He received the Medal of Freedom from then-President Donald Trump and was celebrated upon his passing by the Journal editorial board as someone who “represented traditional American values that the dominant culture too often demeans.”

Sean Hannity, the longtime Fox host described as a shadow chief of staff in the Trump White House, was still talking about “the strange death of Vince Foster” among the “chapters remaining open” for Hillary Clinton long after Starr’s report. “Did a close friend of Hillary Clinton commit suicide, or was it a massive cover-up?” he asked during one 2007 Fox segment. He told his audience of Foster, “depending on which version of the story you believe, he took his own life,” and also claimed that “in the minds of some,” questions regarding the contents of Foster's files following his suicide “may have provided a motive for foul play.” Hannity later became the most prominent purveyor of Seth Rich conspiracy theories.

Trump, who rode a reputation as the nation’s most prominent birther to the Republican presidential nomination, himself pushed Foster conspiracy theories in the leadup to the 2016 general election. “I don’t bring [Foster’s death] up because I don’t know enough to really discuss it,” he told The Washington Post in a May 2016 interview. “I will say there are people who continue to bring it up because they think it was absolutely a murder. I don’t do that because I don’t think it’s fair.”

Trump loves conspiracy theories, and in recent days, he has started to lean hard into the QAnon movement.[twt qanon rally]

he is far from alone. That lunatic movement, once consigned to the fringes of the right, has become increasingly prominent. Its adherents and fellow travelers include members of Congress and Republican nominees for posts to oversee state elections. Major right-wing outlets such as Fox either cozy up to its extremism or pretend it doesn’t exist. They are all following the dictates of the right-wing base, which wants illiberalism and antidemocracy.

The Journal editorial board pretends otherwise, but the movement it supports is riddled with conspiracy theorists and extremists from top to bottom. And the inability or unwillingness of elite Republican organs like itself to hold the line against those elements is part of the reason why.

omg

https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/i-knew-brett-kavanaugh-during-his-years-republican-operative-don-ncna907391

no lnx

I knew Brett Kavanaugh during his years as a Republican operative. Don't let him sit on the Supreme Court.

We were part of a close circle of cynical hard-right operatives being groomed for much bigger things.

Sept. 7, 2018,

By David Brock

I used to know Brett Kavanaugh pretty well. And, when I think of Brett now, in the midst of his hearings for a lifetime appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court, all I can think of is the old "Aesop's Fables" adage: "A man is known by the company he keeps."

And that's why I want to tell any senator who cares about our democracy: Vote no.

Twenty years ago, when I was a conservative movement stalwart, I got to know Brett Kavanaugh both professionally and personally.

Brett Kavanaugh proves the Supreme Court swing vote is dead

SEPT. 4, 2018]

Brett actually makes a cameo appearance in my memoir of my time in the GOP, "Blinded By The Right." I describe him at a party full of zealous young conservatives gathered to watch President Bill Clinton's 1998 State of the Union address — just weeks after the story of his affair with a White House intern had broken. When the TV camera panned to Hillary Clinton, I saw Brett — at the time a key lieutenant of Ken Starr, the independent counsel investigating various Clinton scandals — mouth the word "bitch."

But there's a lot more to know about Kavanaugh than just his Pavlovian response to Hillary's image. Brett and I were part of a close circle of cold, cynical and ambitious hard-right operatives being groomed by GOP elders for much bigger roles in politics, government and media. And it’s those controversial associations that should give members of the Senate and the American public serious pause.

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Call it Kavanaugh's cabal: There was his colleague on the Starr investigation, Alex Azar, now the Secretary of Health and Human Services. Mark Paoletta is now chief counsel to Vice President Mike Pence; House anti-Clinton gumshoeBarbara Comstockis now a Republican member of Congress. Future Fox News personalities Laura Ingraham and Tucker Carlson were there with Ann Coulter, now a best-selling author, and internet provocateur Matt Drudge.

At one time or another, each of them partied at my Georgetown townhouse amid much booze and a thick air of cigar smoke.

In a rough division of labor, Kavanaugh played the role of lawyer — one of the sharp young minds recruited by the Federalist Society to infiltrate the federal judiciary with true believers. Through that network, Kavanaugh was mentored by D.C. Appeals Court Judge Laurence Silberman, known among his colleagues for planting leaks in the press for partisan advantage.

[Related OPINION

Tom Steyer and Ron Fein: Stop Kavanaugh's confirmation until Mueller's investigation is done]

When, as I came to know, Kavanaugh took on the role of designated leaker to the press of sensitive information from Starr's operation, we all laughed that Larry had taught him well. (Of course, that sort of political opportunism by a prosecutor is at best unethical, if not illegal.)

Another compatriot was George Conway (now Kellyanne's husband), who led a secretive group of right-wing lawyers — we called them "the elves" — who worked behind the scenes directing the litigation team of Paula Jones, who had sued Clinton for sexual harassment. I knew then that information was flowing quietly from the Jones team via Conway to Starr's office — and also that Conway's go-to man was none other than Brett Kavanaugh.

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That critical flow of inside information allowed Starr, in effect, to set a perjury trap for Clinton, laying the foundation for a crazed national political crisis and an unjust impeachment over a consensual affair.

But the cabal's godfather was Ted Olson, the then-future solicitor general for George W. Bush and now a sainted figure of the GOP establishment(and of some liberals for his role in legalizing same-sex marriage). Olson had a largely hidden role as a consigliere to the "Arkansas Project" — a multi-million dollar dirt-digging operation on the Clintons, funded by the eccentric right-wing billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife and run through The American Spectator magazine, where I worked at the time.

Both Ted and Brett had what one could only be called an unhealthy obsession with the Clintons — especially Hillary. While Ted was pushing through the Arkansas Project conspiracy theories claiming that Clinton White House lawyer and Hillary friend Vincent Foster was murdered (he committed suicide), Brett was costing taxpayers millions by pedaling the same garbage at Starr's office.

A detailed analysis of Kavanaugh's own notes from the Starr Investigation reveals he was cherry-picking random bits of information from the Starr investigation — as well as the multiple previous investigations — attempting vainly to legitimize wild right-wing conspiracies. For years he chased down each one of them without regard to the emotional cost to Foster’s family and friends, or even common decency.

[Related OPINION

Brett Kavanaugh's Supreme Court nomination is the result of years of unopposed conservative organizing]

Kavanaugh was not a dispassionate finder of fact but rather an engineer of a political smear campaign. And after decades of that, he expects people to believe he's changed his stripes.

Like millions of Americans this week, I tuned into Kavanaugh's hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee with great interest. In his opening statement and subsequent testimony, Kavanaugh presented himself as a "neutral and impartial arbiter" of the law. Judges, he said, were not players but akin to umpires — objectively calling balls and strikes. Again and again, he stressed his "independence" from partisan political influences.

But I don't need to see any documents to tell you who Kavanaugh is — because I've known him for years. And I'll leave it to all the lawyers to parse Kavanaugh's views on everything from privacy rights to gun rights. But I can promise you that any pretense of simply being a fair arbiter of the constitutionality of any policy regardless of politics is simply a pretense. He made up his mind nearly a generation ago — and, if he's confirmed, he'll have nearly two generations to impose it upon the rest of us.

https://theintercept.com/2020/08/15/white-house-plants-pro-trump-conspiracy-theorists-among-reporters-briefing-room/

IN AN APPARENT effort to make his daily news conferences even more like campaign events than they already are, the White House press office has been packing the briefing room with supporters of President Donald Trump from far-right media outlets who can be relied on to toss him softball questions and initiate attacks on his political rivals.

Clearly in on the plot, Trump solicited a question each day this week from one of the guests invited by his press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, to stand at the back of the room — where representatives of One America News, The Epoch Times and Gateway Pundit compromised the health of reporters by violating social distancing and mask-wearing guidelines.

On Monday, Trump called on Chanel Rion, a far-right Republican operative and conspiracy theorist now working as a correspondent for One America News,a San Diego cable channel dedicated to spreading lies about Joe Biden and elderly protesters battered by the police.

Rion gave Trump the opportunity to unleash a familiar riff from his pre-pandemic rallies by suggesting to him that Biden might have been considering President Barack Obama’s former national security adviser, Susan Rice, as his running mate because, “she can best cover up a lot of the Obamagate surveillance crimes that have taken place during your campaign.” Trump responded by accusing Obama and Biden of “probably treason.”

The next day, Rion triggered another familiar Trump diatribe by asking for his take on the resignation of Carmen Best, the first Black woman to lead Seattle’s police force, after the city council voted to cut her department’s budget. “What does this say about our country?” Rion asked Trump. “And what does this say about the Defund Police movement?” The president replied by repeating the lie that Seattle’s Democratic mayor had let “a radical left group, Antifa and others, take over a big portion of the city.”

On Wednesday, Rion drew Trump’s attention to what looked like a fairly lame conservative prank — the fact that the obscure website antifa.com was suddenly redirecting traffic to Biden’s campaign site. Suggesting that this stunt might somehow indicate support for Biden from the loose network of antifascist groups Trump has falsely portrayed as a shadow army, Rion asked if the president thought Biden and his running mate, Sen. Kamala Harris, should “publicly denounce the Antifa as a domestic terrorist organization?”

[twt]

They should,” Trump replied. “I think they’re afraid to. In my book, it’s virtually a part of their campaign: Antifa.” There was nothing remotely surprising in Trump making the absurd argument that Biden, a centrist Democrat, is secretly part of an antifascist subculture, but Rion’s play-acting as a White House correspondent is not intended to elicit any new information from the president. The point of these exchanges is to shield Trump from what tough questions about his failure to lead a coordinated federal response to the Covid-19 pandemic and to give him an opportunity to repeat lines he has already rehearsed, delivered as if they were answers to questions of vital importance.

Rion, who has been attending briefings as a guest of the White House press secretary since April, previously traveled to Ukraine with the president’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, to promote false accusations about Biden spread by the pro-Russian lawmaker Andriy Derkach. An American intelligence assessment released last week concluded that Derkach was involved in a Russian plot to undermine Biden’s candidacy and the Democratic Party by “spreading claims about corruption — including through publicizing leaked phone calls” from 2016 between the former vice president and Ukraine’s president.

On Thursday, shortly after Trump praised the crackpot legal scholar who invented a racist conspiracy theory that Harris was not eligible to be vice president, even though she was born to immigrant parents in Oakland, he turned again to Rion. This time, however, she asked if he would, instead, take a question from Emel Akan of The Epoch Times, another of his press secretary’s guests from an equally rabid pro-Trump media outlet.

When Trump agreed, Akan asked him how the U.S. would respond to “the recent attack on press freedom in Hong Kong,” specifically the arrest of the publisher of the popular Apple Daily tabloid news site, Jimmy Lai, who has been an outspoken critic of the pro-Beijing leadership in the semiautonomous Chinese city. Lai could be charged with “collusion” with the United States for meeting Vice President Mike Pence and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in Washington last summer to discuss Hong Kong’s pro-democracy protest movement.

Although Trump began by saying, “Well, I think it’s a terrible thing,” he appeared to have little familiarity or interest in the subject of press freedom, or democracy in Hong Kong, pivoting quickly into his stock complaints about China’s trade policies. He even seemed to gloat a bit when he said that, as a result of the U.S. withdrawing the “tremendous financial incentives” for businesses based in Hong Kong, American companies might profit from the crackdown on the territory.

“We’ve now withdrawn all of those incentives. It’s going to be very hard for Hong Kong to compete,” Trump said. “And I will tell you that the United States… will end up making a lot more money because of it, because we lost a lot of business to Hong Kong,” he added. “We made it very convenient for people to go there, for companies to go there. We’ve withdrawn all of that and the United States will be a big beneficiary from an economic standpoint.”

While Trump’s answer was not the kind of stirring endorsement of press freedom Akan might have expected from an American president, inciting an attack on China’s government was probably gratifying to the owners of The Epoch Times. The paper is owned by members of the dissident Chinese Falun Gong spiritual movement who have spent heavily to promote Trump as a useful battering ram against their ultimate enemy: the Chinese Communist Party that considers the banned sect a cult. An Epoch Times echoes Trump’s rhetoric that China is to blame for the global pandemic, but urges people to call it not “the China Virus,” as Trump does, but the “CCP Virus.”

The White House press secretary’s invitation to the Epoch Times writer to participate in the briefing alongside reporters and photographers from some of America’s leading news organizations is remarkably brazen given that last year, when The Epoch Times was outside of the president’s own campaign, the site spent heavily to promote the baseless conspiracy theory that Biden had abused his power as vice president in 2016 to protect his son’s business interests in Ukraine.

Since then, the site has been banned from advertising on Facebook, after NBC reported that the newspaper had secretly placed Facebook ads promoting President Trump.Last week, Facebook also removed 303 fake accounts linked to The Epoch Times for spreading misinformation about Covid-19 and pro-Trump conspiracy theories about supposedly shadowy figures behind the ongoing racial justice protests in the wake of George Floyd’s murder.

On Friday, after Trump twice refused to answer a question from The Associated Press about whether he believes the QAnon conspiracy theory in which he is a central figure,he from Alicia Powe, who writes for the far-right Gateway Pundit blog.

Powe, who has claimed that the Clinton Foundation controls the FBI and is stifling investigations of child sex-trafficking rings and the murder of Seth Rich, asked Trump to comment on the accusation that Biden had claimed credit for the normalization of relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates.

[vid]

powe’s question was based on a blog post by the founder of Gateway Pundit, Jim Hoft, which amplified an attack on Biden from the Kremlin-owned site Russia Today. Hoft’s post also quotes the analysis of Heshmat Alavi, a supporter of a militant Iranian cult called the Mojahedin-e-Khalq, who, as my colleague Murtaza Hussain revealed last year, is a fictional character.

McEnany did not respond to a question about whether she or someone else in her office invited Powe to the briefing on Friday, but Powe is a former blogger for WorldNetDaily, the far-right website that helped create the racist “birther” conspiracy theory to undermine President Barack Obama. Alyssa Farah, the White House director of strategic communications, is :{the daughter of:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}::{ Joseph Farah:(style="background-color:#ff9900;"):}:, who founded WorldNetDaily. In the 1990s, Joseph Farah was a leading proponent of the conspiracy theory that deputy White House counsel Vince Foster might have been murdered.

The presence of Rion, Akan and Powe also infuriated the White House Correspondents Association, whose members have agreed to send only 14 reporters a day during the pandemic, to maintain safe social distance.

The WHCA, which normally decides which accredited journalists are allowed in to the briefing room on a given day, also wants the aisles at the sides and the back of the room to be open for photographers and video crews to operate safely. “It is outrageous that the White House continues to invite ‘guests’ to press briefings, putting the health and safety of everyone in that workspace at greater risk,” the WHCA president, Zeke Miller, said in an email. “The WHCA’s social distancing guidelines were crafted in consultation with the White House based on the recommendations of the CDC and the nation’s leading public health professionals. Trampling on those guidelines endangers the critical work of reporters who have maintained independent press coverage of the presidency throughout the pandemic.”

Until April, OAN was a member of the correspondents’ association but the cable channel was expelled after Rion kept showing up at briefings when it was not her turn. Since then, she has attended press events as a guest of the White House press secretary.

Unlike the original, freewheeling coronavirus task force briefings — which came to a sudden halt in April when Trump mused that doctors should “check” to see if injecting patients suffering from Covid-19 with bleach or isopropyl alcohol, or exposing them to ultraviolet light, might cure them — the president’s current news conferences are much shorter and seem designed mainly to get his lengthy, written opening statements on the air and get him out of the briefing room after taking just a handful of questions.

Trump’s opening statements at the latest briefings are often nakedly political in nature, featuring crude, jarring attacks on Biden and other Democrats. “Today, we saw Joe Biden continue to politicize a pandemic and to show his appalling lack of respect for the American people. That’s what it is,” Trump said at the start of Thursday’s briefing. “At every turn, Biden has been wrong about the virus, ignoring the scientific evidence and putting left-wing politics before facts and evidence.”

After then blatantly lying about Biden’s suggested response to the pandemic in the most idiotic terms — “Sleepy Joe rejects the scientific approach in favor of locking all Americans in their basements for months on end” — Trump concluded, with a stunning lack of self-awareness: “To Joe, I would say: Stop playing politics with a virus. Too serious. Partisan politics has no place here. It’s a shameful situation for anybody to try and score political points while we’re working to save lives and defeat the pandemic.”

Trump’s prepared remarks at these briefings almost always feature highly misleading health and economic statistics intended to convey the false impression that the federal government’s pandemic response is the envy of the world.

At Tuesday’s briefing, for example, Trump said in his opening statement: “Since the end of July, the seven-day average for cases in the United States has fallen by nearly 20 percent, but the virus continues to increase in nations across the globe. Last week, France and Germany both recorded their highest daily number of new cases in three months — not that I want to bring that up, but might as well explain it to the media.” While those statistical measures of the increase by percentage of new cases in Europe and decrease by percentage in the U.S. were accurate, what they hid was the fact that, in raw numbers, the pandemic is obviously far less under control here than there.[shillenberger pat m cherrypick]

The day Trump made those remarks, 53,315 new Covid-19 infections were confirmed by testing in the U.S. Germany’s highest number of daily infections in three months, recorded this week, was 1,445. Cases are down more in the U.S. but from a very high level to a slightly less high level. In much of Europe, cases are rising but from very low baseline. Adjusted for population, the U.S. recorded 154 new cases per million on Friday, while France had 41 and Germany 17.[graf]

While the pandemic is resurgent in many parts of the world, Trump has been unable so far to brow-beat the public into accepting his obviously false claims that things are better in the United States than in Europe or Asia. A new poll released by Monmouth University on Thursday showed that 52 percent of Americans “think the United States’ handling of the pandemic is worse than other countries,” while just 15 percent feel the U.S. is doing a better job than others and 29 percent say it is doing about the same.

Having complained on Wednesday about what he called “a wiseguy question” from a reporter who noted that two top Federal Reserve officials “said that the economy hasn’t recovered strong enough because the country hasn’t contained the virus,” Trump devoted part of his opening remarks at Thursday’s briefing to falsely complaining that Biden, who, “never takes questions.”

“I take questions; he never takes questions,” Trump continued. “And you sort of wonder what’s going on, because they’re not that difficult. Some can be nasty, but they’re not that difficult.”

Media Matters / By Eric Boehlert

How Fox News Dresses Up Extreme Right-Wing Conspiracy Theories as News

May 8, 2014 |

The Benghazi blueprint matches up right down to the fact that there's no there there, in terms of a criminal White House cover up. It "doesn't add up to much of a scandal," wrote [2] Michael Hirsh at Politico this week, reviewing the facts of Benghazi to date. "But it's already too late for the truth. Benghazi has taken on a cultural life of its own on the right." He added, "Benghazi has become to the 2010s what Vince Foster" was in the 1990s.

Foster was the then-deputy White House counsel who committed suicide [3] in Northern Virginia's Fort Marcy Park on July 20, 1993, not far from Washington, D.C. His suicide, which sparked controversy when the so-called Clinton Crazies [4] accused the president and his wife of being part of a plot to murder their friend (he knew too much!), quickly become shorthand for the type of despicable claims [5] that were so casually lobbed in the 1990s.

Looking ahead to Hillary Clinton's possible 2016 presidential run, Hirsh wrote that the "Benghazi-Industrial Complex is going to be as toxic as anything Hillary has faced since ...Vince Foster."

The analogy is a strong and a factual one. But in trying to understand what's happening today with the ceaseless, two-year Benghazi propaganda campaign, a blitz that's utterly lacking in factual support [6], it's important to understand how the media game has changed between the Vince Foster era and today. Specifically, it's important to understand what's different and more dangerous about the elaborate and irresponsible gotcha games that Republicans now play in concert with the right-wing media. (Hint: The games today get way more coverage.)

Here's what's key: Twenty years ago the far-right Foster tale was told mostly from the fringes. Word was spread via emerging online bulletin boards [7], snail mail pamphlets, faxed newsletters [8], self-published exposes [9], and VCR tapes, like "The Clinton Chronicles [10]," which portrayed the president as a one-man crime syndicate [11] involved in drug-running, prostitution, murder, adultery, money laundering, and obstruction of justice, just to name a few.

At the top of the Foster-feeding pyramid stood theNew York Post, Rush Limbaugh's radio show [12] ("Vince Foster was murdered in an apartment owned by Hillary Clinton"), and Robert Bartley's team of writers at theWall Street Journal editorial page,who spent eight years lost in a dense, Clinton-thick fog [13].

Notice the hole in that ‘90s media menu? Television. Specifically, 24-hour television.

Now, fast-forward to the never-ending Benghazi feast of outrage. Today, that far-right tale is amplified via every single conservative media outlet in existence, and is powered by the most-watched 24-hour cable news channel in America. A news channel that long ago threw away any semblance of accountability.

So yes, Fox News is what's changed between 1994 and 2014, and Fox News is what has elevated Benghazi from a fringe-type "scandal" into the pressing issue [12] adopted by the Republican Party today. ("Benghazi" has been mentioned approximately 1,000 times on Fox since May 1, according to TVeyes.com)

Remember, Rupert Murdoch's all-news channel didn't debut in America until October 1996 when it launched [14] with just 17 million subscribers. (Today it boasts 90 millions subs.) And for the first few years it generally delivered a conservative slant on the news. It didn't function as a hothouse of fabrications the way it does today.

Now, Fox acts as a crucial bridge between the radical and the everyday. Fox gives a voice and a national platform to the same type of deranged, hard-core haters who hounded the new, young Democratic president in the early 1990s. Fox embraces and helps legitimize the kind of conspiratorial talk that flourished back then but mostly on the sidelines. The Murdoch channel has moved derangement into the mainstream of Republican politics.

By making the Foster comparison, I'm not downplaying how Republicans and the president's dedicated detractors irresponsibly flogged the Foster story for years. It stood as one of the most rancid examples of the politics of personal destruction that defined the Clinton era. (The Foster family begged [15], to no avail, for an end to the use of "outrageous innuendo and speculation for political ends.")

But given how vast the right-wing noise machine apparatus has expanded since the 1990s, I'm suggesting that if that same type of event unfolded under the current Democratic president and if Fox News decided to hype the story, regardless of facts, for ten, twenty, or thirty months, the scandal wouldn't be treated as a fleeting affair. In other words, if Vince Foster truly were the '90s equivalent of Benghazi, it would have received mountains of more media attention, from all corners.

Fact: During Clinton's eight years in office, the New York Times published less than 30 news articles and columns that mentioned Foster at least three times, according to Nexis. By comparison, since the terror attack in Libya 20 months ago, the Times has published more than 250 hundred articles and columns that mentioned "Benghazi" three or more times.

That's what happens when you add the mighty medium of television into the all-scandal mix. That kind of drumbeat of televised phony outrage forces and/or encourages Republican politicians to respond, as well as the mainstream media.

Meanwhile, how do we know Fox would've gone all in on the dark Foster story?Because in the mid-'90s Fox chief Roger Ailes, then programming CNBC, told Don Imus [16] that Foster's death could have been a murder. At the time, Ailes didn't have the influence or the independence to unleash NBC-owned financial news channel on a reckless Vince Foster witch-hunt. But he certainly would have if he'd been running today's hyper-partisan, hyper-irresponsible version of Fox News.

Also, even years after the ugly Foster smear campaign faded, Fox talkers like Sean Hannity push the lies:

In 2007, Fox News host Sean Hannity hosted [20] a special episode on the "mysterious death" of Foster, hinting that the Clintons might have pulled off "a massive cover-up." [watergate mirror]

So yes, I'm pretty sure today's Fox News would have eagerly endorsed the sordid Foster affair, relentlessly demanding that "unanswered questions" be addressed and that sweeping investigations be launched. That in turn, would have forced Republicans into action, which would have sparked endless mainstream news coverage.

That's what happens when televised propaganda is added to the media scandal mix; the megaphone's much bigger, much louder, and in many ways much more dangerous.

Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Deputy White House counsel Vince Foster was found dead in Fort Marcy Park off the George Washington Parkway in Virginia, outside Washington, D.C., on July 20, 1993. His death was ruled a suicide by multiple official investigations, but remains a subject of conspiracy theories.

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State of mind

A suicide note of sorts, actually a draft of a resignation letter, was found torn into 27 pieces in Foster's briefcase after his death. The note is clearly shown to be missing a piece, therefore it was 27 of 28 pieces. The note was not initially found upon the original search of the briefcase in which it was cleared of its effects. It was found on July 26, 1993 and held by the White House for some 30 hours before it was turned over to USPP investigators. The full text of Foster's note was as follows:

I made mistakes from ignorance, inexperience and overwork

I did not knowingly violate any law or standard of conduct

No one in The White House, to my knowledge, violated any law or standard of conduct, including any action in the travel office. There was no intent to benefit any individual or specific group

The FBI lied in their report to the AG

The press is covering up the illegal benefits they received from the travel staff

The GOP has lied and misrepresented its knowledge and role and covered up a prior investigation

The Ushers Office plotted to have excessive costs incurred, taking advantage of Kaki and HRC

The public will never believe the innocence of the Clintons and their loyal staff

The WSJ editors lie without consequence

I was not meant for the job or the spotlight of public life in Washington. Here ruining people is considered sport.

^[1]

Official findings

Foster's death was concluded to have been a suicide by inquiries/investigations conducted by the United States Park Police, the Department of Justice, the FBI, the United States Congress, Independent Counsel Robert B. Fiske, and Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr.^[2]

After a three-year investigation, Starr concluded that Foster's death was a suicide. CNN stated on February 28, 1997, "The Starr report refutes claims by conservative political organizations that Foster was the victim of a murder plot and coverup," but "despite those findings, right-wing political groups have continued to allege that there was more to the death and that the president and first lady [Bill and Hillary Clinton] tried to cover it up."^[3]

Unofficial findings

The Arkansas Project

On May 2, 1999, the Washington Post published new details on the pursuit of a Vincent Foster conspiracy in an article by David Brock, a key figure in the Troopergate and Whitewater scandals whose disillusionment with the political corruption motivating what would come to be known as the Arkansas Project ended his lifelong commitment to the Conservative movement and facilitated public dissemination of insider details on G.O.P. machinations. The article explains how Brock was "summoned" to a meeting with Rex Armistead in Miami, Florida at an airport hotel. Brock claims that Armistead laid out for him an elaborate "Vince Foster murder scenario," – a scenario that he found implausible."^[4]

In an interview for Salon.com in 2000, Brock also revealed that he and Armistead received funding throughout Clinton's two terms in office from Richard Scaife for the initiative known as the Arkansas Project.^[5] The Project aimed to discredit the sitting President and First Lady through investigations into a range of issues that could potentially prove problematic for the couple, from rehashed drug smuggling allegations to their long-standing relationship with Foster and other professionals/officials in Arkansas.

Another prominent reporter to have received funds from Scaife was Christopher W. Ruddy^[6]--a former writer for the Scaife-owned Pittsburgh Tribune-Review (and later founder of NewsMax). Eventually, Scaife became the third-largest stockholder of Ruddy's Newsmax;^[7] and both NewsMax and the WorldNetDaily continued to publish materials that showed the Clintons in a negative light."^[8]

Ruddy also enjoyed the backing of Joseph Farah and Farah's organization, the Western Journalism Center. This group supplied him with "additional expense money, funding for Freedom of Information Act requests, legal support and publicity around his book deal & the requisite research into a conspiracy surrounding Foster's death.^[9] He published his findings in 1997 under the title The Strange Death of Vincent Foster (pub.Simon & Schuster).^[10] Inside, he discusses mistakes & transgressions that occurred in the original investigations--in particular, alleged obstruction of justice by White House Counsel Bernard Nussbaum--but stops short of positing an original theory on the circumstances surrounding Foster's death. Interviews revealed his personal belief that some sort of cover-up took place, involving Foster's body being moved to the park where it was discovered from the (unknown) site of his death.

Despite Ruddy's inconclusive assertions, the Western Journalism Center "placed some 50 ads reprinting Ruddy's [previous] Tribune-Review stories in the Washington Times in 1999; and then refashioned the Times articles into a $12 packet called simply The Ruddy Investigation."^[11] Shortly thereafter, the Center "circulated a video featuring Ruddy's claims, Unanswered-The Death of Vincent Foster, that was produced by James Davidson, chairman of the National Taxpayers Union (NTU) and co-editor of the Strategic Investment newsletter."^[11]

The Clinton Chronicles: A Political Firestorm

This reintroduction of Ruddy's ideas followed the publication of another book, penned by veteran crime reporter Dan Moldea, titled A Washington Tragedy: How the Death of Vincent Foster Ignited a Political Firestorm. Moldea was approached in 1997 by Regnery Publishing House, a famously conservative group whose leadership was nevertheless impressed by Moldea's published works, including an exhaustive critique of LAPD Detective Mark Fuhrman, another Regnery author. In researching the debacle created by and surrounding Foster's death, Moldea found that the most oft-used conspiracy scenario could be traced back to Park Police Major Robert Hines, who shared the idea with Reed Irvine of (Accuracy in Media), and Christopher Ruddy, who was then at the New York Post.^[12] Moldea concludes, and Maj. Hines publicly maintains, that Hines incorrectly told Irvine and Ruddy "...that there is no exit wound in Foster's head." Moldea profers further: "I don't think there was anything nefarious here; he was being approached by reporters and he wanted something to say."^[12] Still, the "missing" exit wound claim continued to surface, propagated mainly by Christopher Ruddy and Joseph Farah.

Moldea's research sought, among other things, to discover the origins of this line of investigation into the Clintons' credibility. In an interview for Salon.com, he suggests that "Foster had some blond hair and carpet fibers on his suit jacket, and he had semen in his underwear. So, the Jerry Falwells and the right-wing crowd get a hold of this information, and…they start making movies alleging that the Clintons were involved in this murder."^[12] In 1994, Falwell subsidized the creation of a film called The Clinton Chronicles that featured Christopher Ruddy's claims that the gun that killed Foster was placed in his hand after the fact, and that Foster's body was laid out to give the appearance of suicide, among others.^[12] Funding for the film was provided by Citizens for Honest Government, an organization to which Falwell gave $200,000 in 1994 and 1995.^[13] The CHG covertly paid individuals who had provided information to media outlets such as the Wall Street Journal editorial page and the American Spectator magazine;"^[13] and in 1995, made discretionary payments to two Arkansas state troopers who had spoken out in support of the idea of a conspiracy surrounding Foster's death.^[13] The two troopers--Roger Perry and Larry Patteson--had also previously given testimony supporting Paula Jones' claims of sexual misconduct and misuse of government resources against Bill Clinton (See: Troopergate) .^[13] Patrick Matrisciana, president of Citizens for Honest Government, produced The Clinton Chronicles video and appeared in its commercials as an "investigative reporter" where he & Rev. Falwell engaged in the following exchange:^[13]

Falwell: "Could you please tell me and the American people why you think that your life and the lives of the others on this video are in danger?"

Matrisciana: "Jerry, two weeks ago we had an interview with a man who was an insider; his plane crashed and he was killed an hour before the interview. You may say this is just a coincidence, but there was another fellow that we were also going to interview, and he was killed in a plane crash. Jerry, are these coincidences? I don't think so."

When asked about the spot, Matrisciana admitted he was not a reporter and replied "I doubt our lives were actually ever in any real danger. That was Jerry's idea to do that ... He thought that would be dramatic."^[13]

Alternative explanations

Conspiracy theorists are largely divided into two groups. Some suspect that Foster committed suicide in a location that was embarrassing to figures connected to the Clinton administration and that government agents dumped his body in the park. Others suspect that Foster died from a shot from a small-caliber pistol to the neck and his body was dumped in the park. A book by Christopher Andersen entitled Bill and Hillary: The Marriage claims that Foster and Hillary Clinton were involved in an affair that led to Foster's death.^[14]

Urban-legend-debunking website Snopes.com cites the finding of the Starr investigation as evidence that Foster was not murdered: "If Foster had been murdered or if unanswered questions about his death remained, Starr would have been the last person to want to conclude the investigation prematurely."^[15]

References

Foster, Vince

How Fox News Dresses Up Extreme Right-Wing Conspiracy Theories as News

Contents

State of mind

Official findings

Unofficial findings

The Arkansas Project

The Clinton Chronicles: A Political Firestorm

Alternative explanations

See also

References

Notes

Books

External links