CLINTON

CONSPIRACIES

by Brandy Zadrozny & Dair Massey

MEET THE THEORISTS

ROLE: Independent Counsel

CONSPIRACY: Whitewater, Travelgate, Filegate, Monica

WHERE IS HE NOW: President of Baylor University

Ken Starr

Ken Starr, the Republican lawyer and former solicitor general, led the ever-expanding investigation—it ate up five years and over $40 million—into Whitewater, the Arkansas land deal in which the Clintons invested (and lost) a sizable chunk of money before winning the White House. Two years in, Starr broadened the investigation to include Clinton's relationship with Monica Lewinsky after Whitewater prosecutors alleged that Clinton advisor Vernon Jordan had pressed the former intern to lie in a sexual harassment lawsuit brought by Paula Jones.  The 443-page Starr Report relayed in graphic detail the affair between Clinton and Lewinsky, resulting in perjury and obstruction of justice charges that led to the president’s impeachment. Clinton critics praised Starr’s doggedness, but the president’s defenders charged him with prosecutorial misconduct for his handling of the Lewinsky affair and claimed he was hell-bent on winning a personal vendetta rather than conducting an independent inquiry.

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ROLE: Billionaire, Publisher

CONSPIRACY: Vince Foster, Whitewater, Troopergate, Body Count

WHERE IS HE NOW: Owner of The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review

Richard Mellon Scaife

Scaife, a billionaire who has offered up hundreds of millions to conservative causes and organizations over the years, bankrolled the American Spectator magazine, a hotbed of anti-Clinton hate pieces—including the widely-read Troopergate story, an exposé alleging that Arkansas state troopers had facilitated extramarital affairs for Clinton while he was governor. Scaife also funded the Arkansas Project, a mismanaged and ultimately unsuccessful crusade to dig up dirt on Bill and Hillary. In 1998, Scaife pushed the crackpot theory in newsletters and online that Bill Clinton “did away with” anyone who got in his way. “There must be 60 people on there who have died mysteriously,” Scaife told George magazine, “including eight of Clinton's former bodyguards."  Then in 2008, Scaife surprised Democrats and Republicans alike by endorsing Hillary in her presidential bid and lauding Bill’s work abroad.

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ROLE: Activist

CONSPIRACY: Drug Smuggling, Vince Foster, Body Count, Troopergate

WHERE IS HE NOW: Retired

Patrick Matrisciana

Patrick Matrisciana led multiple organizations that charged then-governor Clinton with involvement in a drug-smuggling, arms-trafficking, and money-laundering operation run out of a tiny west Arkansas airport and later accused President Clinton with the cover-up of White House counsel Vince Foster’s suicide (A special investigation on Foster’s death found that indeed he had killed himself, and noted his fear of public humiliation amid escalating scandals including Whitewater and accusations of corruption in the White House Travel Office.) Matrisciana’s Citizens for Honest Government group was found to have paid sources including state troopers, for questionable yet damning media testimony on Clinton’s extramarital affairs and Foster’s death. Matrisciana produced and directed The Clinton Chronicles, and even appeared in an infomercial for the film in silhouette, posing as an “investigative journalist” who said he feared for his life because of his involvement with the video. He later confessed that Jerry Falwell had put him up to it for dramatic effect.

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ROLE: Televangelist

CONSPIRACY: Drug Smuggling, Body Count, Troopergate

WHERE IS HE NOW: Died in 2007

Jerry Falwell

A Reagan-loving Southern Baptist preacher, Jerry Falwell was the founder of the Moral Majority, a political organization for religious conservatives. He used his platform to promote the wildest of the Clinton conspiracies—among them, that Hillary had been in an extramarital affair and Bill had ordered the murders of countless people. This one-time defender of segregation funded the thoroughly debunked documentary, The Clinton Chronicles, which featured the testimony of fired state employee and avowed Clinton hater, Larry Nichols, who claimed Clinton used his governor’s office to run drugs and bed women. Falwell defended selling the videotapes via half-hour infomercials on his "Old Time Gospel Hour" for a donation of $40 plus $3 shipping and handling, and said “the national media should have been doing [it] and has been hypocritically quiet.” Falwell died in 2007 of cardiac arrhythmia, but his spirit lives on in his son and successor, Jonathan Falwell, who continued his father’s column on right-wing websites and promotes evangelical political action. "I had a good teacher," Jonathan told the Washington Post before the 2008 election.

ROLE: Congressman (R-Ind.)

CONSPIRACY: Vince Foster, Body Count

WHERE IS HE NOW: Retired in 2013

Dan Burton

Conspiracy-happy Congressman Dan Burton made no attempt to hide his hatred for Bill Clinton, telling the editorial board of the Indianapolis Star in 1998, "If I could prove 10 percent of what I believe happened, he'd be gone. This guy's a scumbag. That's why I'm after him." Burton invited Clinton Chronicles star Larry Nichols to meet with like-minded politicians on Capitol Hill and even tested the Vince Foster murder conspiracy in his own backyard in an experiment involving a 38 revolver and a watermelon. As Chairman of the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee, Burton issued over 1,000 subpoenas targeting officials of the Clinton Administration and the Democratic Party.

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Emmett Tyrrell Jr

ROLE: Founder and Editor of The American Spectator

CONSPIRACY: Troopergate, Vince Foster, Drug Smuggling

WHERE IS HE NOW: Still Speculating

Tyrrell may take the prize for oldest and most reliable Clinton hater. Tyrrell founded the conservative monthly review, The American Spectator, while at Indiana University in 1967. Along with overseeing the magazine during the Troopergate scoop, Tyrell fought for the publication of allegations that Clinton was involved with “drug trafficking, arms shipments, and the importation of unreported currency,” and overrode the protestations of other American Spectator editors. Among the conservative author’s offerings appear titles like Boy Clinton: the Political Biography; The Impeachment of William Jefferson Clinton (which laid out the impeachment of the president before it actually happened); and Madame Hillary: The Dark Road to the White House. Tyrrell continues to write in The American Spectator and he’s still got it out for the Clintons. He’s hopped aboard the Benghazigate bandwagon, uses a photo of Hillary’s smiling face to plead for donations, and in his most recent column, called the former first couple “the shabbiest political dynasty since the Longs of Louisiana.”

 

ROLE: Journalist

CONSPIRACY: Troopergate

WHERE IS HE NOW: Founder of Media Matters for America

David Brock

As a political reporter at the American Spectator, Brock penned the 1994 cover story, “Living with the Clintons,” unearthing the Troopergate scandal and Bill Clinton’s proclivity for extramarital affairs. Since then, Brock has done a political 180 and come clean about his gleeful obsession with destroying the Clintons (His old voicemail used to say, "I can't come to the phone right now. I'm either on another call, writing, or out taking down a President.") Since his change of heart, Brock wrote the anti-conservative tell-all Blinded by the Right and has become one of Hillary’s most vocal champions in her possible 2016 presidential bid.

Read “Living with the Clintons”

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Larry Nichols

ROLE: Fired Marketing Director

CONSPIRACY: Troopergate, Vince Foster, Drug Smuggling, Body Count, and more

WHERE IS HE NOW: Still on the Fringe

The former marketing director for the Arkansas Development Finance Authority was clearly disgruntled after Clinton fired him for using his office to make 650 unauthorized calls to Nicaraguan contras in support of their cause. Nichols’ war against the Clintons began with a 1990 lawsuit where he alleged the then-governor had used him as a scapegoat to conceal the misuse of funds funneled to Clinton’s many mistresses. Though he withdrew the lawsuit in 1992, admitting, “I set out to destroy him for what I believed happened to me," Nichols turned back around and soon ratcheted up the allegations, taking a major role in the making of The Clinton Chronicles and peddling the “Body Count” conspiracy—one that claims that many people close to the Clintons met mysterious ends. His wildest and most recent claim, offered on right-wing conspiracy radio programs, is that he was the personal hitman for Bill and Hillary.

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ROLE: Activist

CONSPIRACY: Body Count

WHERE IS SHE NOW: Died in 2009 from an overdose of pain medication

Linda Thompson

We have this former Indianapolis attorney to thank for the conspiracy known as the “Clinton Body Count.” In a 1993 screed “Coincidence or the Kiss of Death,” the founder of American Justice Federation—a group “dedicated to stopping the New World Order and getting the truth out to the American public” —posited that dozens of people close to Bill and Hillary Clinton had died under “mysterious circumstances.” Thompson’s list included conspiracist staple Vince Foster, but also the deaths of ATF agents “assassinated” in the bungled Waco siege, and military men killed in "accidental" helicopter crashes. Her list gained traction due to the efforts of former Republican Representative William Dannemeyer, who in 1994 circulated the list via a letter sent to Congressional leaders calling for hearings into the deaths, which he wrote, “has reached a total that can only be described as frightening.”

Read the Thompson memo

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Ambrose Evans-Pritchard

ROLE: Journalist

CONSPIRACY: Body Count, Drug Abuse, Whitewater

WHERE IS HE NOW: International Business Editor at the Telegraph

This Washington correspondent for London’s Sunday Telegraph and author of the biography The Secret Life of Bill Clinton was among the most tenacious of the anti-Clinton crowd. In addition to claiming Whitewater would “lead to criminal indictments and bring down the whole administration” (it didn’t), Evans-Pritchard powered the rumor mill in a series of stories that accused the president of affairs, cocaine-running and drug abuse, and wildly speculated over deaths of people close to Clinton, including Vince Foster, whose suicide he painted as an unsolved mystery. In his final piece from D.C.—titled “Goodbye, good riddance” —the man dubbed the "mad scribbler" by the Washington Post wrote, “I am confident that one day historians are going to view Clinton as a the last great cad of the 20th century, or worse.”

Joseph Farah

ROLE: Activist, Journalist

CONSPIRACY: Vince Foster

WHERE IS HE NOW: Editor and CEO of fringe site WorldNetDaily.com

Before he founded the ultra-conservative website WorldNetDaily—known for pushing birther conspiracies about the current President—Joseph Farah served as the director of the Western Journalism Center, a group that obsessively pushed Vince Foster murder conspiracy theories. Backed by roughly $333,000 from billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife, the outfit published full-page ads in national newspapers that asked, "Vincent Foster's Death: WAS IT A SUICIDE?" The ex-newspaper man also sent out a monthly newsletter that contained conspiracy pieces written by Clinton critics like The Telegraph’s Ambrose Evans-Pritchard and The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review’s Christopher Ruddy.

Chris Ruddy

ROLE: Journalist

CONSPIRACY: Body Count, Vince Foster

WHERE IS HE NOW: CEO of Newsmax

This former New York Post reporter moved in 1994 to the Scaife-owned Pittsburgh Tribune-Review and wrote a series of reports questioning Vince Foster’s suicide followed by a book, The Strange Death of Vincent Foster, in which he claimed there was a cover-up orchestrated by the Clintons. Ruddy partnered with anti-Clinton activist Patrick Matrisciana and his Citizens for Honest Government group to promote “The ‘60 Minutes’ Deception,” a film made in retaliation for Mike Wallace’s debunking of Ruddy’s book. In 1997, he founded the wildly popular, ultra-conservative website, Newsmax.com and currently serves as CEO of Newsmax Media. Though a 1995 Clinton file calls Ruddy a “key purveyor of conspiracy theories,” time seems to have softened Ruddy’s stance. He published a positive interview with the former president and had several meetings with Clinton, after one of which he said, “[Richard Mellon Scaife and I] consider Bill Clinton a friend and he considers us friends."

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