Foster death still raises unanswered questions

BY AIAN W. BOCK
Orange County Register

The fact that the House Banking Committee chose not to consider any of 
the circumstances surrounding the apparent suicide of former White House 
counsel Vincent Foster was disappointing because the report from special 
prosecutor Robert Fiske raised more questions than it answered.

The Senate committee looking into Whitewater-related matters has 
announced that at least some of the circumstances surrounding Foster's 
death will be on the agenda. let's hope that's helpful.

Foster's death attracted scrutiny when U.S. Park Police and FBI personnel 
initially were kept from Foster's office by then White House Counsel 
Bernard Nussbaum. The law-enforcement officials were allowed to enter 
the office only two days after Foster's death, and then only while escorted 
by Nussbaum and a Foster family lawyer. Nussbaum didn't disclose at the 
time that he and other White House personnel already had entered the 
office and removed some documents.

Foster was working on Whitewater-related material for the Clintons just 
before his death, so that's why the death is potentially of interest to those 
investigating the entire Whitewater investment scheme.

On Dec. 6 of last year, it was reported that Foster received two phone calls 
on the morning of his death.

One call was from Denver lawyer James Lyons, who had written a report 
during the 1992 campaign, after the New York Times ran a story on the 
Clintons' Whitewater real-estate venture, claiming that the Clintons had lost 
almost $70,000 on the deal. The second call was from Brantley Buck, a 
lawyer at the Rose law firm in Arkansas (where Foster and Hilllary 
Rodham Clinton used to work) who was investigating the billing practices 
of Webster Hubbell, another former Rose associate. Hubbell later resigned 
from the Justice l)department to handle charges that he had overbilled the 
firm while working there.

Fiske's report, which concluded that Foster committed suicide at Marcy 
Park, a secluded place across the Potomac from Washington, just as the 
authorities originally had concluded, didn't speculate on whether these calls 
might have had anything to do with Foster's death. It did bring out 
evidence that Foster was deeply depressed and had been for a long time.

But Fiske's report didn't grapple with a May 9, 1994, FBI memo appended 
to his report that raises the circumstantial possibility that Foster's body had 
been moved to the place where it was found.

Remember that the body was found on a slope, with the head on the up 
side and the feet down.

The Fiske report explained the fact that less blood was found at the scene 
than might have been expected from a self-inflicted gunshot in the mouth 
by saying that the blood had drained down to the feet.

Drain tracks

But the FBI memo noted a couple of blood drain tracks on Foster's face. 
One extended from the right corner of the mouth back toward the right ear. 
The other extended from the right nostril over the right cheek, toward the 
temple, and above the right ear.

The memo says: "The victim's body is depicted at the scene in a supine 
position with his face looking generally straight up, and the head not turned 
to either side. While the actual positioning of the victim's head relative to 
the ground and the contour of the ground itself are not known, the draining 
tracks suggest his head was tipped back slightly when the draining of the 
blood occurred."

There's a strong suggestion that sometime after Foster sustained the 
wound, his head was tilted back or was lower than the rest of his body.
It's quite unlikely that the tracks the FBI memo discusses could have 
happened with the body lying feet down on a slope.

And a contact stain

The memo also states that there was a "contact blood stain" on Foster's 
nght cheek and jaw perhaps caused by his face coming into contact with 
the right shoulder of his shirt, which was soaked in blood.
But the Polaroid photos taken at the scene didn't show the head in contact 
with the shirt. The FBI concluded that "the head moved or was moved 
after being in contact with the shoulder."


The FBI also found semen on Foster's shorts, and multicolored carpet 
fibers on his jacket, tie, shirt, shorts, pants, belt, socks and shoes. Blonde 
human hea~ hairs were found on his T-shirt, pants, belt, socks and shoes.
Fiske's report doesn't indicate that any effort was made to discover the 
source of the hair and fibers. You'd think they might help to determine 
where Foster was in the hours before his death, which is still unknown.
Now all this doesn't establish for sure that Foster's body was moved before 
authorities found it. There might be a perfectly logical explanation for the 
direction of the bloodstains.

But Fiske's report doesn't attempt to explain the apparent anomalies though 
it does offer the apparentiy plausible conclusion that if the body had been 
moved there would }have been more blood and bruises on it.
There's also the matter of the documents removed from Foster's office. It 
was only in December that the White House revealed that the documents 
had been removed.

Promising full disclosure, it turned them over to the Justice Department.

Disclosure prevented

But President Clinton's attorney arranged for them to be subpoenaed, 
which kept them from being disclosed to the public.

Fiske's report said his office had examined all those documents, but added 
that "Rule 6(e) of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure precludes us 
from disclosing the contents of these documents since they were obtained 
by grand jury subpoena." So the American public doesn't know what is in 
them.

Nobody wants Foster's family to suffer ~ny more than they have already. 
But there are stiil enough anomalies surrounding his death -- anomalies that 
haven't been cleared up by Fiske's report--to arouse justifiable curiosity.

Perhaps the Senate will begin the process of getting to the bottom of the 
matter.

Alan W. Boch is senior columnist for the Orange County Register