The Failure and Corruption of Kenneth Starr
On July 15, 1997, Kenneth Starr issued a terse statement. "Based on investigation, analysis and review of the evidence by experts and experienced investigators and prosecutors, this Office concluded that Mr. Foster committed suicide by gunshot in Fort Marcy Park, VA, on July 20, 1993."
...Associate Independent Counsel Miquel Rodriguez was summoned to the Washington Office of the Independent Counsel in the fall of 1994 by Kenneth Starr, with the explicit task of reviewing the Foster death. He was not a conservative. He had no ideological investment in the matter.
...For four months Rodriguez probed the case. He called witnesses before a grand jury to answer questions for the first time under penalty of perjury, and soon discovered serious indications of a cover-up by the FBI. By the early spring of 1995 he was starting to probe a hypothesis that the crime scene at Fort Marcy Park had been staged, that the gun had most likely been planted in Foster's hand, and that a crucial photograph of Foster's neck and head had been falsified.
But Rodriguez believed that the investigation was being sabotaged by prosecutors and FBI agents in his own office. He turned to Starr for support. Nothing was done to resolve the matter. In March 1995 Rodriguez resigned.
...The job of Rodriguez was to reopen the investigation into the death of Vincent Foster. It was generally agreed that the Fiske investigation was so amateurish that the work would have to be done all over again. ....Rodriguez was astounded when Tuohey(Mark H. Tuohey III - Head of the Office of Independent Counsel), his boss, took him aside and told him that it would be ill-advised to challenge the essential findings of the Fiske Report.
This was to be a "friendly takeover." .....The mission for Miquel Rodriguez, then, was to produce a better suicide report, one that was not so self-evidently mendacious.
...At first Rodriguez pretended to be following orders. He went about his business quietly, confiding only in his closest aides at the Washington office of the Independent Counsel.
...It became obvious that the FBI agents who did the nuts and bolts work for the Fiske Report were engaged in a systematic cover-up. Now, a year and a half later, the same FBI agents were still there in the Office of the Independent Counsel, the gatekeeper who controlled access to the witnessess, the documents, the evidence. Yet Kenneth Starr had kept them on, allowing them to be the judge of their own past work.
Rodriguez kept muttering about the photograph. "Is this all there is?" he asked.
Yes, that's all there is; that's the original, replied his FBI staff. And so it might have rested if it had not been for the courage of one person in the Office of the Independent Counsel who managed to gain access to the locked files. Hidden inside was a folder of crime scene photographs that had been deliberately withheld from the prosecutor.
Among them was the original Polaroid of Foster's neck. What it showed was something very different from the "contact stain" in the fraudulent picture that had been circulating. Evidently, somebody had taken a photo of the original and then touched it up to disguise the incriminating evidence. This second-generation copy had then been used to create an enhanced "blow up."
It was blatant obstruction of justice. Indeed it was worse. Whoever had done this was now an accessory after the fact in the death of the Deputy White House Counsel, and they had made the mistake of failing to destroy the original.
Wary of entrusting anything to the FBI crime labs, Rodriguez turned to the Smithsonian Institution for enhancement of the original. The work was done by the Smithsonian's subcontractor, Asman Custom Photo Service on Pennsylvania Avenue. A set of five "blowups" of the original were made. They revealed a dime-sized wound on the right side of Foster's neck(his left side) about half way between the chin and the ear. It was marked by a black "stippled" ring---a sort of dotted effect, like an engraving---that was suggestive of a .22 caliber gunshot fired at point blank range into the flesh.
One medical examiner who looked at the photo thought that the wound might be the result of a 40,000 volt stun-gun, designed to cause temporary paralysis for about fifteen minutes. Fired at short range it can leave burn marks. But it was more likely to be a low caliber gunshot wound. Something had perforated the skin, causing blood to ooze down the side of the neck and into the collar.
The photograph, which I have examined carefully, is one of the few surviving Polaroids taken at Fort Marcy that night. The rest disappeared. This includes most of the Polaroids taken by detective John Rolla.
"I mean, I had them in the office that night, I did reports, and I don't know what happened....I put them in a jacket, I don't know."
The Secret Life of Bill Clinton - Ambrose Evans-Pritchard
