Did Trump High Court Pick Whitewash 1993 White House Death?

As the U.S. Senate prepares for a Sept. 4 hearing on the controversial nomination of Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the U.S. Supreme Court, some critics are renewing a seldom-reported view that Kavanaugh played a key role in covering up evidence in the 1993 death of Clinton White House Deputy Counsel Vincent Foster.

Critics Hugh Turley and Patrick Knowlton (the latter a witness who felt harassed by Kavanaugh’s methods) have followed up years of controversy by sending a letter on Aug. 31 to all members of the Senate Judiciary Committee challenging them to explore what they call Kavanaugh’s role covering up Foster’s “murder,” as described in their letter here.

Why might leading Republican legal experts like Kavanaugh have supposedly conspired in a continuing cover-up of a tragic scandal involving a Democratic White House?

Turley declined to speculate as he spoke about the issue during his Aug. 29 lecture before the McClendon Group speaker society at the press club.

But the most likely explanation points to bipartisan knowledge of heavy narcotics trafficking from Latin America through Arkansas during the Iran-Contra Affair during the 1980s when the Republican Reagan and Bush administrations wielded federal power, as described below by some commentators.

In that view, neither political party then or now would want to explore Foster’s work as a close associate of the Clinton family during Bill Clinton’s gubernatorial years in Arkansas nor any of the potentially fatal implications for the nomination of Kavanaugh, 53, shown at left, for a lifetime appointment to the court.

Foster’s body was found in a Virginia park about 6 p.m. on July 20, 1993. Foster had last been reported seen five hours previously leaving his White House office about 1 p.m.

Kavanaugh, a hard-right attorney well-regarded in GOP circles, led the probe of Foster’s death under Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr, a Republican Reagan appointee to Washington’s federal appellate bench and Justice Department Solicitor General from 1989 to 1993 under President George H. W. Bush.

Republicans on Washington’s federal appeals court, led by Chief Judge David Sentelle, a prominent leader of the conservative Federalist Society, appointed Starr to be Independent Counsel from 1994 to 1998.

Starr and his associate counsel, Kavanaugh, in 1997 affirmed a U.S. Park Service Police report asserting that Foster, shown right, had fatally shot himself in Fort Marcy Park, located near the Potomac River that divides Virginia and the District of Columbia.

That official report and similar ones have been widely disputed. The means for dispute include the Aug. 31 letter to the Senate noted above, a 1997 special addendum to the Starr report, several books and the dinner lecture on Aug. 29 at the National Press Club by conservative commentator Hugh Turley.

One of Turley’s key points is that the park visitor, Knowlton, has repeatedly stated that Kavanaugh improperly pressured him to change his testimony disputing the official account of the death. 

American Survival Inc. President Cliff Kincaid, a conservative commentator with views similar to Turley and Knowlton’s, attended the press club dinner lecture also, as did Knowlton’s attorney Hugh Clarke. Kincaid previewed his group’s report that opposes Kavanaugh. The report announced on Sept. 1 is entitled: “The Deep State Wears Black Robes.” 

Turley, left, his colleagues Kincaid, the late Accuracy in Media founder Reed Irvine and others have researched the death for more than two decades, including evidence that Kavanaugh and Starr suppressed strong evidence disputing official police reports that ruled that Foster committed suicide in the park.

Turley asserts that Foster’s death was a “murder,” although he declined last week to speculate on who killed Foster or why.

Justice Integrity Project coverage of these allegations is part of our in-depth reporting on the Supreme Court that combines mainstream, alternative and original reporting. These materials are curated on our special sub-site SCOTUS Review, named for the “SCOTUS” initialization of the Supreme Court of the United States.

Our SCOTUS selections focus heavily during recent months on the history-making Kavanaugh nomination that President Trump made on July 9. That coverage includes political and legal analysis found in many places elsewhere — and also alternative viewpoints from diverse quarters.

These alternatives include views from the political right and investigators of Iran-Contra era narcotics trafficking that are seldom reported by the mainstream media.

One especially sensitive topic is the cocaine trafficking of Barry Seal, shown at right in a 1982 photo. Seal, a talented pilot beginning as a teenager in Louisiana, became linked with both federal agencies and the Medellín Cartel at times. Seal used a small rural airport in Mena, Arkansas as one of his main landing spots before his assassination in 1986. Seal’s life story is portrayed (with significant omissions) in the recent bio-pic American Made starring Tom Cruise as Seal.

Investigator Daniel Hopsicker, author of the book Barry and the Boys, (with “the boys” including federal operatives at times in Seal’s career according to Hopsicker’s account) estimates that Seal personally imported $5 billion of narcotics into the United States during his years as a rogue operative, making him the most important trafficker of all time. Seal, arrested by the Drug Enforcement Administration for narcotics trafficking, was assassinated in 1986 after desperately seeking help from friends, some reputedly in high places.

Kavanaugh’s role in the Foster investigation deserves far more than scrutiny than it has received so far — or is likely to receive in the rushed Senate confirmation hearings — even if some of the more extreme allegations of “murder” and knowledge of past drug-running remain in doubt because of bipartisan complicity in thwarting law enforcement and judicial proceedings.

To confirm Kavanaugh under those circumstances, we argue, creates a travesty of justice.

Yet that is the foreseeable result of the rushed confirmation hearing with an expected vote nearly along party lines. It would take at least one Republican in the current 50-49 GOP majority to call for additional time to investigate Kavanaugh’s background and the overall circumstances of his appointment.