The Electronic Telegraph   Sunday 30 January 1994   World News

Sshh - everybody's talking about you-know-what
By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard

IT IS like taking part in a surrealist film. The Washington establishment pretends that everything is normal. On television talk shows the pundits discuss welfare reform or comment on the recent improvement in the President's poll rating. The grand newspapers refrain from any mention of Fornigate or Fostergate, restricting themselves to veiled remarks about faulty record-keeping in Arkansas.

But in reality, Washington is in the grip of a major political scandal. Nobody wants to talk about anything else. At dinner parties, Democrats shake their heads wondering why on earth the late Vince Foster failed to put the Clinton stock portfolio in a blind trust according to routine procedure, and how it was that the Clintons had $100,000 invested in a fund that was making money hand over fist "shorting" pharmaceutical stocks at a time when the First Lady was sending the sector into a nose-dive with talk of price controls. Just forgetfulness?

As for Republicans, they would like to know why Mr Foster was continuing to manage the Clintons' private business matters while on the government payroll as White House Deputy Counsel?

Wasn't the Republican candidate for Governor of Missouri sentenced to two years in prison for using the Xerox machine in his office to copy some campaign documents? Isn't a Republican senator for Texas facing criminal indictment for getting her secretary to pick up the laundry? And why was the file on the property speculations of the Clintons - the Whitewater file - secretly removed from the office of Mr Foster within hours of his death? And who killed Vince Foster anyway? The White House insists it was suicide, but the autopsy report has never been released, nor the police report.

On Friday the New York Post ran an explosive story quoting the paramedic who first found the body in Fort Marcy Park. He said that the corpse was stretched out neatly on the ground "as if ready for a coffin".

There was hardly any blood visible. Foster's arms were by his sides and the .38 calibre revolver was still in his hand. In a suicide, the recoil would usually throw the gun 20 or 30 feet away.

The death was investigated last summer by the park police. The poor fellows were so brow-beaten, so far out of their depth, that they stood sheepishly outside Mr Foster's office as White House aides ransacked the place. According to the New York Post, the park police even forgot to do a ballistics check on the revolver. No wonder they don't want to release the report.

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