Chris Ruddy: Good morning.
Jim Quinn: You have an article today in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. What I want to do here is, I want you to give us a thumbnail of what this is about, and what I'm going to do then is take a commercial break and we're going to call you back and get a better line here because there's a lot of static on it.
Chris Ruddy: Oh, really?
Jim Quinn: Yeah, so go ahead. This morning on the front page below the fold in the Trib is an article about Vince Foster and, let me read you the -- here's the headline. Under the heading of "Grave Secrets - Wecht advised second autopsy in Foster case," by Christopher Ruddy. What is this about?
Chris Ruddy: Well, this is the second article I've done about Dr. Cyril Wecht's book, "Grave Secrets", which talks about some of the recent cases that he has had involvement in. One of them being the O.J. case and the other being something of interest to us which is the Vince Foster case. He had some limited dealings with that case. Dr. Wecht advised the Senate Banking Committee -- Republicans working for the Senate Banking Committee. He told D'Amato's staff that most definitely a second autopsy needed to be conducted on Foster's body. That advice was never heeded, it was never included in any report, and I think it was pretty serious. I know Dr. Wecht is a very controversial figure, I think he would admit that. But, nevertheless, they hired him, they worked with him, they used his offices and he came up with that conclusion and I think it's very significant.
Jim Quinn: Yeah, I would think so since we've never heard anything about it except from you.
Chris Ruddy: Well, you know what's even more startling is that it's not even in his own book.
Jim Quinn: You're kidding! In "Grave Secrets?"
Chris Ruddy: I point this out in the article. The most startling revelation in the case, that he advised the second autopsy, isn't even in the book. I had been told by someone on the committee that he recommended it, and when I spoke to him I said, "I understand that you recommended it." And he said, "Yes, it is true." He said, "I'd love to see a second autopsy. There are so many questions. The X-rays are missing. There were carpet fibers all over his clothing. There were blond hairs found on his body that didn't belong there. The police didn't conduct a real investigation. The whole thing was bungled." He says, "You need a second autopsy, it's pretty clear."
Jim Quinn: But he never mentions any of this in his book.
Chris Ruddy: No. Well, what was sort of interesting, he's a very pleasant man, I called him up and --"
Jim Quinn: Well, hold it right there. Let me do a commercial break. We're going to call you back and get a cleaner line, and find out what your conversation was like with Dr. Wecht. Okay?
Chris Ruddy: Sure.
Jim Quinn: Okay, Chris Ruddy from the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. We're going to take a break here, get a cleaner line, and we'll be right back....
Jim Quinn: Ladies and gentlemen, back to Chris Ruddy, 97 WRRK, the Quinn in the Morning Show. You know what? Your phone still sounds bad... are you on a portable phone?
Chris Ruddy: No, I'm on a regular phone.
Jim Quinn: And yet we've still got all that noise in there.
Chris Ruddy: Oh, really?
Jim Quinn: Yeah, I don't get it.
Chris Ruddy: It's probably the NSA. You sound clear as a whistle.
Jim Quinn: Do I really? Well, it's probably the government. I don't know why they don't just get a radio. Anyway, so go ahead. You had a phone conversation with Cyril Wecht, so what happened?
Chris Ruddy: I said to Cyril Wecht, "In this book you say that Vince Foster committed suicide in Fort Marcy Park." And he said, "Well, I really don't say that." So I said, "Let me read you the quote which says, 'he committed suicide in the park,'" and he said, "Well-l-l..." and he sort of backed away from the quote in his own book, which I thought was rather intriguing. And I said, "How can you make that conclusion?" He never interviewed the autopsy doctor, Dr. Beyer. He never visited Fort Marcy. He never reviewed the autopsy photos, seen the Polaroids. So he admitted he really couldn't draw any definitive conclusion.
Jim Quinn: So, why did he?
Chris Ruddy: Well, that's a good question. And I don't know why. I guess he was writing a book on many, many subjects. He admitted that the book was a restatement of the official findings, which is fair enough. He doesn't necessarily have to do all of those things. But, he's a very prominent pathologist. When he makes a definitive conclusion like that, it's sort of awkward if he has not done all that. In any event, fair enough, he said that it was not a definitive conclusion, that it was somewhat of an error in the book. But he did say that there were enough questions on the record that there needed to be a second autopsy. That, of course, is earth shaking. I think that eventually there will be a second autopsy partly because of two revelations now from Dr. Wecht.
One was last week, we reported in the Tribune-Review, or was it two weeks ago now, that Wecht is reporting that Dr. Henry Lee has now found soil and grass stains on Foster's shoes. He's -- Lee -- is working for Ken Starr and issued a report saying it's a suicide in the park. The shoes, which the FBI could not find a speck of soil on, Dr. Lee, who had such ability to find all sorts of things in the O.J. case to help O.J. walk, is now finding soil on Foster's shoes.
Jim Quinn: Well, now the question is, is he finding soil or is he finding mica dust? Because mica dust was everywhere in Fort Marcy Park. You didn't have to walk through there to get it on you.
Chris Ruddy: No, well, the FBI already found the mica dust, which is sort of interesting because the mica dust is incredibly small, little specks, yet the FBI was able to find that with their high-powered microscopes and laboratory techniques on the shoes. They didn't find any soil. But now Dr. Lee's coming along and finding soil which should have been more obvious than the specks. There's really no way they could have missed the soil, which has raised the question, the serious possibility that the shoes while in Starr's custody were tampered with. This -- with all the other evidence, with all the people who have had their statements changed or people they have attempted to have change their statements to make it look like there was no foul play -- this is now going to leave Starr in a very difficult position. If he tries to adopt the Fiske conclusions with all of the changes in evidence, people are going to say, "You're selling us the Brooklyn Bridge. This is ridiculous!" So his only other option I believe now will be to say there are so many questions about the physical and circumstantial evidence that we're going to have to conduct a second autopsy to close the case. And that is going to be really, really bad for the government's case.
Jim Quinn: Well, I'll tell you what, I don't think there ever will be one. I think some way or another they're going to find a way not to do it. And I've got to tell you, with some of the Freedom of Information Act documents that were recently released on Vince Foster, and I know that you, Chris, are not into any conspiracy theories about why it is that Foster died, but I am, and Foster was apparently involved with the government. He had something to do with the NSA regarding encryption technology and banking codes and this leads back to his years with Systematics in Arkansas, and --
Chris Ruddy: Look, I wouldn't say that I'm not interested in these. I'm interested, but I just don't publish them or make it a point, because the minute that I start discussing them, people say I've become a conspiracy nut, and I'm on safer ground. So I prefer you to be the conspiracy nut.
Jim Quinn: Well, right, I'll be the conspiracy nut for you, and I'll tell you this, that this whole government code, banking, Systematics in Arkansas, stolen PROMIS software from the Inslaw company, this is all a case that reporter Danny Casolaro was working on when he was obviously suicided in 1991 in Martinsburg, West Virginia, and who --
Chris Ruddy: And, by the way, Dr. Lee, Henry Lee, who Starr hired, also came into that case on behalf of the government to close it and say that it was nothing but a suicide.
Jim Quinn: That's exactly the point I was going to make.
Chris Ruddy: How many times did Danny slash his wrists? Something like fifteen or twenty times, which is unheard of.
Jim Quinn: With a broken beer bottle, by the way. And his briefcase is missing. Nobody ever found his files. He was supposed to meet with some Army operative. It was the last witness he was going to meet with before he published his article called the Octopus, which had all to do with all of this money laundering, all this stuff that was going on with BCCI and the financial establishment in Arkansas long before anybody knew who Vince Foster or Bill Clinton was in 1991.
Chris Ruddy: Well, any law enforcement will tell you that when you have a death that is staged, made to look like a suicide, almost all the time in this country it's related to narcotics trafficking, that somehow the person had some knowledge or some involvement. And there's all sorts of diverse aspects to that which could be money laundering, etc.
Jim Quinn: Well, the point that you made is the point that I was going to make. Why in the world would Dr. Henry Lee in the 1991 death of Danny Casolaro be brought into Martinsburg, West Virginia all the way from, where, Connecticut? Yeah, to rule on whether or not this was a suicide. As I recall, didn't they embalm his body in the middle of the night? This guy had been drained by the time his family even knew that he was dead.
Chris Ruddy: Right. They didn't conduct a proper autopsy first.
Jim Quinn: Unbelievable! I mean, honest to God, this death in West Virginia was done by Arkansas rules, which is if the coroner shows up in the middle of the night and says suicide, you don't need an autopsy. You can embalm the body before the sun comes up, which by the way is a law that was passed by the legislature in Arkansas during the Clinton administration as governor. I've got to ask you, who does that law benefit? It benefits anybody wanting to cover up a murder. Why in God's name would anybody pass a law like that that says that if the coroner shows up at 3:00 a.m. and says, "Suicide. That's it. Go ahead and embalm the body, you don't have to worry about it." I've really got to ask you that.
Chris Ruddy: Well, Arkansas is a very strange place in a lot of ways. That's a good question considering their whole history of having all of these questionable suicides that have dogged then Governor Clinton, now President Clinton. It didn't start with Vince Foster. You know about the boys on the tracks.
Jim Quinn: Sure.
Chris Ruddy: You know about the Kathy Ferguson case. You know about, um, there was a girl that was a student of Clinton's that died of a suicide while she was carrying a pregnancy.
Jim Quinn: Yes, it was apparently attributed to Bill.
Chris Ruddy: Well, that's what the rumor mill said. I don't know if there's evidence of that, but certainly it is a death that has dogged him somewhat.
Jim Quinn: I'll tell you what. Let me take a break here, Chris, because I'm running late here. And we'll come back to you....
Jim Quinn: Live from the Warroom, the Quinn in the Morning Show, banished in the University of Pittsburgh dorms to the cold, dank recesses of the Ladies' Room, where strong conservative college women listen while huddling amidst the Lysol and the porcelain so as not to offend their liberal roommates for whom the truth has become harassment. Very Orwellian, you know. It's 8:30. The Quinn in the Morning Show. Christopher Ruddy from the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review is on the air with us this morning. Chris, I want to ask you, since we've covered the latest in the Vince Foster thing, I want to ask you about Janet Reno. Now Janet Reno was joking yesterday in a press conference about all these unnamed sources who are out there say that she wants to leave, and of course she has said, no, I don't want to leave. Now, the positioning in the media, or at least the story that we're supposed to be buying here is that Janet Reno isn't liked very well by the Clinton administration because Janet's had the guts to appoint special prosecutors when the Clintons wished that she hadn't. Ah, is that B.S.?
Chris Ruddy: Yeah.
Jim Quinn: Thank you.
Chris Ruddy: I really take a different view on this. I think the press is writing a story that doesn't have any foundation here. There's no indication that the Clintons are unhappy with Janet Reno. She has been their lap dog for four years. All of these special counsels she has appointed -- remember, the first special counsel she appointed was not under the new independent counsel law. His name was Robert Fiske, someone they were very, very happy with.
Jim Quinn: Yes, Robert Fiske was ready to bury it all, wasn't he?
Chris Ruddy: She could have appointed a very tough prosecutor against them in the beginning, which would have been the end. She didn't do that. The independent counsels she's appointed really have not been hard decisions to make. Under the new law she really has to appoint -- I think there's a set number of congressmen, if a set number of congressmen -- let's say it's twenty -- request that a special independent counsel be appointed on a topic is a triggering mechanism that is very difficult for her to stop. And that's how these people get appointed. So it's not her deciding, oh, we need someone to go after the Clintons so I can show I'm tough.
Jim Quinn: Common Cause tried to get an independent prosecutor appointed last week on these campaign donations and she put a stop to that immediately.
Chris Ruddy: Yeah, I mean there is a perfect example. I'll give you another example. When Donald Smaltz, who's the prosecutor investigating Don Tyson, the Espy case --
Jim Quinn: By the way, he got another big one today.
Chris Ruddy: Well, he is a tough prosecutor. No one owns him. He's the guy we should have looking into Foster. He wanted to expand his investigation into certain aspects relating to Tyson and other things, and Reno fought him tooth and nail. He had to go to court and finally the three judge panel told him no, the Attorney General's wrong. So this is certainly at the behest of the White House. The White House wanted Reno to give Starr jurisdiction over the Travel Office and the Filegate issue. So that was the White House doing that. They wanted to do it for a couple of reasons. One is the liberal Democrats in Starr's office run the Washington side of his investigation. There have been no indictments, so they trust Starr on these issues. And number two, they've put it off until after the election by giving it to Starr. So people say, oh, Reno's so tough. She even gave Starr jurisdiction over Filegate and the Travel Office. Balony! It's ridiculous. I'm told months ago by a very senior former FBI official that Reno was probably going to go, not because she's disliked, but because her Parkinson's is considered a real hindrance to the work she's doing, and she's getting more and more advanced into it. The person was telling me that, in fact, she was supposed to go to a terrorist summit I think they held in the Sinai with the President and she couldn't go because of the Parkinson's. So they thought that --
Jim Quinn: So the President was meeting with all his friends. Well, apparently! I mean, this guy's had more terrorists in the White House. The only people he apparently sees as real terrorists in his own mind are the American people. I'm sorry, I side-tracked you. Go on.
Chris Ruddy: So, I think that Reno -- you know, frequently somebody in the press picks up a story and when there is no story, everybody just sort of goes with it. There are probably a few people who have said, oh, yeah, we'd like to get rid of Reno, or whatever, but I don't think that that is the general consensus among high White House officials. And there's so much of an overturn right now, I think it would probably not be in Clinton's interest to have Reno leaving as well.
Jim Quinn: Well, and now he's taken off to the Pacific Rim on a thank-you tour, and he's heading over to China even as we speak.
Chris Ruddy: Well, he wants to go and buy some new underwear at the new Wal-Mart in Jakarta, Indonesia.
Jim Quinn: Right. At Lippo Village.
Chris Ruddy: Right, because he just took off his old underwear this year as a tax deduction. Now that they're presidential underwear, he can take them off as a $25, he was told, deduction for each pair.
Jim Quinn: You're not s--you're kidding!
Chris Ruddy: Well, you knew as governor he took off $5 a pair for his old boxers.
Jim Quinn: Well, I know as governor he took off his underwear everytime he could, especially in front of Paula Jones. But what you're saying is that he wrote it off on his income tax.
Chris Ruddy: Yeah.
Jim Quinn: I knew that. What, $2 a pair?
Chris Ruddy: No, I think it was $5 for the governor's underwear?
Jim Quinn: Yeah?
Chris Ruddy: I think they were clean, though, when he gave them --
Jim Quinn: Now you're telling me that he's going to write off as a deduction -- you're serious about this?
Chris Ruddy: Well, that's why he's going to Wal-Mart in Jakarta, to get a better deal.
Jim Quinn: Well, I wouldn't be surprised if Margaret Milner Richardson, from the IRS, had already determined that his underwear was worth $25 a pop since she was a guest of the Democratic Party at the convention in Chicago, which by the way is unheard of! She should step down for this.
Chris Ruddy: Well, the IRS is being used politically. It's very clear. The Western Journalism Center, which has promoted my work, has been under IRS investigation after MY name, by the way, appeared in the Journalism Center. It's in the White House memo of enemies they had to deal with.
Jim Quinn: Right.
Chris Ruddy: And Joe Farah of the Journalism Center wrote an article in the Wall Street Journal where they point out, they say that everything's fine with his books, it's just that they said it's a political investigation. They told him outright!
Jim Quinn: Yeah, the guy said, "This is political and it'll be decided way at the top."
Chris Ruddy: They're investigating the Christian Coallition, the National Rifle Association -- this is the IRS -- the Heritage Foundation. Now, I don't agree with all those groups and their agenda, but you don't have to. The point is, if you allow the IRS to be used as a political tool, we're going down a very dangerous path.
Jim Quinn: Oh, it's a terribly dangerous path. I mean, already the IRS was used against Billy Dale and his family. The IRS was used against Ultra Air in Smyrna, Tennessee, which was the charter airline they wanted out of there so that Harry Thomason could his in. I mean, he has politicized the Justice Department. He's politicized the FBI, the IRS. I mean, if you politicize the IRS, Chris, free speech is over!
Chris Ruddy: Well, it's a very, very powerful tool for the President to use. But it's really funny, the media made such a big stink over the use of the IRS by the Nixon administration. Here they're very blatant about it, and no one says anything.
Jim Quinn: Yeah.
Chris Ruddy: The real danger in this country is that we're probably like a half a centimeter away from losing any possibility of having a free press in this country because they're not operating as they should. And that, again, poses a significant danger to all our civil liberties.
Jim Quinn: Well, I'm beginning to believe some of the conspiracy theorists here that the big money people who want Bill Clinton in office could also cut CBS's revenues in half with a phone call if CBS tells the wrong story on the evening news.
Chris Ruddy: Well, as somebody pointed out to me, can you remember in the past four years or longer the TV networks doing one major expose on the Clintons? One major negative story about some negative involvement?
Jim Quinn: No. No, I can't.
Chris Ruddy: And, in fact, the Clintons, who people say, oh, we've heard about all these scandals. Not really. I mean, we hear about them because we listen to alternative media. But it has not made television which has set the agenda in this country. And that's why the Clintons have been batting a thousand because they've kept all these stories off of TV. When the Aldrich book came out, the first thing they did was dispatch George Stephanopoulos to all the networks telling them, you're not putting on Aldrich. And it worked! Larry King cut him off. All these TV shows that were going to do stories on his book, they stopped dead in their tracks. Now, I don't know what threats were made --
Jim Quinn: Well, I can guess what threats were made to them. You're going to lose a lot of business on your network if you put this guy on, and we'll see to it that you do. Because that's what talks. The money talks.
Chris Ruddy: Well, they have the power of the FCC.
Jim Quinn: Well yeah, that, too. And by the way, there's another agency of the federal government that is increasingly becoming an activist agency and increasingly one that's being politicized by the Clinton administration. And broadcasters in this country have got their heads up their ass about it and better get to work here before they find out that they're totally compromised.
Chris Ruddy: Well the commission is headed by Al Gore's appointee, Reed Hunt. You know, if Al "Bore" is picking someone, you can be sure he's someone who's a real activist on this sort of stuff.
Jim Quinn: Well, it's very troubling. I want to thank you for joining us this morning and thanks for filling us in.
Chris Ruddy: Thank you, Jim. Say hello to Rose.
Jim Quinn: I sure will... Chris Ruddy has written an article today. It appears on the front page right below the fold in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, by the way, the only newspaper in Pittsburgh with ascending circulation figures. It's an excellent article. It's about Cyril Wecht and some of the strange ways that he has, um... well, let's just say some questions regarding Cyril Wecht and his views on the Foster "suicide." Chris, thank you, buddy. Take care.
Chris Ruddy: Thank you, Jim.