CHRIS RUDDY GIVES HIS OPINION OF "BLOOD SPORT," THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA, AND "FOSTER'S" "SUICIDE" NOTE
March 22, 1996

[The interview with Chris Harder has just begun. Ruddy is explaining why, in his opinion, James Stewart was approached by the White House to write a book on the Clinton scandals].

RUDDY: The White House was besieged with stories that Vince Foster was murdered. And that they needed someone to exonerate the Clintons on that. My stories in the New York Post questioning the death - I didn't say he was murdered - were hitting their peak. It's clear to me that the genesis of this book was Vince Foster's death and my stories. And the book, while it hits the Clintons - particularly Mrs. Clinton - on some things relating to this Whitewater land deal, it exonerates them on the death and the cover-up - and the White House and the administration from any wrongdoing. I think that essentially Mr. Stewart fulfills the mission that Mrs. Thomases comes to him with. At the end of the day he says we had a parting of company and I went on to really give it to the Clintons. The story has to read that way - imagine if he said that I exonerated them [because] they asked me to do the job.

HARDER: [laughs] I've done my job and I'm gonna make a lot of money at it. We'll be right back - stay with us.

[Break for commercials]

HARDER: Okay, back with Chris Ruddy. Now Chris, the thing about this entire matter is that, outside of The Wall Street Journal, the mainstream press has really been behind Bill and Hillary and has given them great cover. Would you say?

RUDDY: I agree with that - yeah.

HARDER: Why?

RUDDY: Well, that's another book. You know it's interesting. Despite all the other media you mention, thousands of media outlets in this country, they really follow in a herd fashion. And they take the lead usually of the New York Times, The Washington Post, and maybe the L.A. Times...

HARDER: And the AP.

RUDDY: Bernard Golberg wrote an article about bias at CBS - you saw that recently in The Wall Street Journal.

HARDER: Um-hmm.

RUDDY: And he pointed out that the television networks steal all their stories from the New York Times and The Washington Post. No one else breaks news. You have your local papers in Florida - when is the last time they broke a story about something happening in Washington? They just don't do it. The papers in Washington and New York - the New York Times and the Post - set the agenda and they have decided early on that they are not going to hold the Clintons accountable. And they definitely wanted to elect him. It shows now that they want to keep him, and that, I think, is the holdup on this thing. The reason why Watergate broke was that, of course, the Post wanted to make a name for itself, and Katherine Graham had an axe to grind with Richard Nixon.

HARDER: She didn't like him.

RUDDY: Yes, it's pretty clear that there was a lot of ill will between those two people. My boss at the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review happens to be a Republican, but does not involve himself at all editorially in the newspaper - but somehow this is a reason why I should be dismissed. Well nobody was dismissing Woodward and Bernstein. Two plus two still equals four, whether it's coming from a Republican or a Democrat.

HARDER: What you're saying is that Woodward and Bernstein were [taken off] the leash, and left to go where they wanted, as attack dogs. But you're saying that the Post knew the direction they were going, so go get 'em.

RUDDY: Well sure. I saw their editor, Ben Bradlee on a program, and he admitted that he would not allow them to do that story now. He allowed them to that story without ever finding out who their sources were, including the "deep throat" source. Why would an editor allow them to go after the President of the United States without bothering to know who their sources were? Editors generally want to know who the sources are before printing anything - before they'd write anything scurrilous about a city councilman based on an unnamed source, the editor would want to know, for all sorts of legal reasons, who the source is. The idea that these two reporters just got carte blanche because of a good news story, rather than a political reason, I think is farfetched. I think there were political overtones to their reporting.

HARDER: Okay, so you're saying then that - the term we use is "carrying water" - and what that means, my friends, is when we say the media is carrying water for the Clintons, it means that they are doing everything they can to support [them] - they will do no harm to them. Is that about right?

RUDDY: Well, they do, and it doesn't really do them harm. Certainly everybody seems to be saddling up attacks on Mrs. Clinton now. It moves the focus away from the president. The Stewart book - again, some people say that it is classic disinformation. He doesn't say, "These people are squeaky-clean." He says they've done some things wrong - irregularities, etc. But the bottom line is, when you finish the book, there is no criminal wrongdoing. When we know - I always tell people the title of Mrs. Clinton's next book should be "It Takes a Village to Rob a Bank." Here James Stewart spends 400 pages [writing] about a land partnership deal, saying that maybe the Clintons inflated their assets on their bank application. What is that compared to the $60 million looted from Madison Guaranty Bank, that the taxpayers paid when Mrs. Clinton was the attorney of record for the bank?

HARDER: Let me put it this way. I have undergone an IRS audit. If the IRS had found anything close to being criminal on yours truly, they would have really zonked me. Now, all I can say is that the Clintons have clearly, in many instances, broken the law. And they walk away.

RUDDY: Yeah, well certainly they are not held to the same standards. They weren't even filing tax returns for the past several years, even though they were basically running the partnership from 1987. And remember that was one of the things Vince Foster was working on at the time of his death - they hadn't finished the tax returns. I think the Whitewater thing has some serious irregularities, but it really doesn't compare with the serious issues we've talked about on your program. About the death of Vince Foster - there is no evidence, really, that he committed suicide. And number two, there is definite evidence that there was a coverup, that the body was moved, that they've lied about it when they learned of the death, and that key evidence is missing or has been destroyed. And this affects all of us Americans.

HARDER: Alright, hang on just a moment...

[Break for commercials].

HARDER: The death of Vince Foster is going to be featured tonight on NBC. Tell us about it.

RUDDY: Unsolved Mysteries has done a piece months ago on the forgery of the suicide note that was found in Vince Foster's office - the torn note. And as listeners of your program know, three leading experts said that note was indeed a forgery - not only that, it was an obvious forgery. One of the world's leading experts from Oxford University, Dr. Reginald Alton...

HARDER: By the way, there was a press conference held in Washington, D.C., right across the street from the press building. Everybody and their dog got an invitation, and the only people who showed up with video cameras were who?

RUDDY: The People's Radio Network. [Harder's network].

HARDER: You got it.

RUDDY: Now, they are going to have an expert who says it is authentic, although any handwriting expert will tell you that - see, they were all using photo copies of the torn note and of Foster's known writing. You can demonstrate that a note is a forgery based on photo copies, but you cannot authenticate [it]. But they have someone, strangely enough, authenticate the note as real. But I think that this is a crack in the door. I'm going to be on it, as well. They'll have me on it in the very beginning. I think it's fair. And I know that the producers believe that there is more to this - that it was probably a forgery, because they told me so. And they said that is why they were interested in doing this piece.

HARDER: Where will it go next?

RUDDY: I don't know. I think that they have their grips on the law enforcement agencies of the land so strongly now that it's going to be very difficult to break that. And I'm not here as a Nostradamus figure, saying a) I want indictments, and b) I want the Clintons, this or that. My thing just to report the facts. You mentioned my book during the commercial break, which is a compilation of all my work on the subject. William Sessions, the former FBI director has praised it, calling it serious and compelling... If there was a coverup on this death we are going down a very dangerous path in this country.

HARDER: [sighs] Who do you call?

RUDDY: You can't call 911 anymore.

HARDER: Who do you call to say something is very wrong here. It's very obvious to anybody with an elementary education that the body was moved - that he didn't die there.

RUDDY: It's more than that now. It's more than just a coverup of his death. I just got off the phone with Mrs. Beth George Burkett, the mother of Tommy Burkett. This is a case related to Vince Foster's. A young boy was murdered in Virginia. The autopsy doctor said "suicide." The family had the body exhumed. The autopsy demonstrated murder. The kid's ear was beaten, his jaw was broken, he had abrasions on his chest. None of this was noted on the autopsy report. We find out that the same autopsy doctor who did Tommy Burkett's [also] did Vince Foster's. The FBI did a 20-month investigation, told the family we're only looking into the civil rights, they meet with the family and say this is a suicide - nothing else. They never bothered speaking to the lead police investigator in the case, who did the original investigation. Of course they couldn't rule that it was a murder, because of the political implications. And Mrs. Burkett was just telling me that the FBI said to her when they started this, well you may find out some things you're not going to like about your son. And she saw that as a threat, to scare her off. Everybody doesn't want to find out that their son was a drug addict [etc.]...She said, "Whatever he did, he didn't deserve to be murdered. So I want to find out why..." And apparently this kid had a sterling reputation. He didn't have any bad record. But it's just the tactics that are now being used. They're pretty scary, and I would just hope that this is not endemic in the FBI - that these are isolated cases. But the Foster case is very significant, and if you just allow that to fade, I wonder what that represents for the future of the country.

HARDER: When do you think we'll have another update on this matter?

RUDDY: Oh, I think there may be some developments in Congress over the next couple of months. I think that there will be some things. People might want to pick up the New York Times National Edition today. There's an ad by Reed Irvine's group, Accuracy in Media, which details - he's been taking out ads on this, and he has a very powerful piece on the Op-Ed page. I have a copy of the "suicide note" and a copy of Foster's known handwriting in the back of my book, so people can decide for themselves.

HARDER: Thanks Chris.

[End of interview].

This interview was lightly edited to eliminate redundancy and enhance clarity.