The Vince Foster-Russia Collusion Hoax Connection

In a word, the connection, which would seem to be an odd one, can be found in the major publicity role played by Deep State operative Michael Isikoff in the cover-up of the murder of Bill Clinton’s deputy White House counsel, Vincent W. Foster, Jr. and in the outrageous hoax that Donald Trump was elected President in 2016 with the knowing assistance of the Russian government.  Let us start with the scandal that is currently in the news.  Mark Vargas of the Illinois Review sums up Isikoff’s initial and his continuing propagation of the collusion hoax with his opening two paragraphs in which he characterizes the man as nothing but an “FBI mouthpiece.”

The narrative that the Donald Trump campaign in 2016 was colluding with Russia will go down as one of the greatest political hoaxes in history – but the now discredited reporter behind it, who served as the FBI’s mouthpiece and deliberately pushed a fake story and whose actions cost taxpayers $35 million – is back at it again attacking senior Trump campaign officials – proving once again why Americans’ confidence in the media is at an all time low.

Former Yahoo News chief investigative reporter and Daily Beast writer Michael Isikoff is using his new column at the Daily Beast to attack Trump co-campaign manager Chris LaCivita – a Marine Corps veteran who was wounded in the Gulf War and received a Purple Heart for his service to the nation. The discredited writer is also doing the bidding of the Democratic National Committee and publishing articles attacking the Trump campaign while giving oxygen to the narrative that Trump and his supporters are dangerous, unstable people who harass and intimidate anyone in their way.

Please notice that that very prescient article was published on November 4, 2024, long before Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard released the classified documents that show exactly how members of President Barack Obama’s national security team pulled off the collusion hoax.

One can see from his big Wikipedia page that Isikoff has worn a number of important media hats and has been right at the heart of a number of scandals in his long career, but there isn’t a peep there about his importance in selling the story that Vince Foster committed suicide.  For that one must turn to the work of this writer.  “Reporter Michael Isikoff of first The Washington Post and then with the Post Corporation’s Newsweek magazine may be described as the lead mainstream reporter on the Foster case,”  I say in a comprehensive article entitled “The Press and the Death of Vincent Foster” posted on May 25, 2002.

That Isikoff has never been anything more than an FBI mouthpiece is probably best captured by this passage from Part 6 of my series, “America’s Dreyfus Affair: The Case of the Death of Vincent Foster” (also chapter 6 of The Murder of Vince Foster: America’s Would-Be Dreyfus Affair):

Up to that point, the definitive word on the matter of the Park Police and the Foster residence had come from the following passage in a major front-page article on July 30, 1993, Washington Post by Ann Devroy and Michael Isikoff:

“Police who arrived at Foster’s house the night of the death were turned away after being told Lisa Foster and family members were too distraught to talk. Investigators were not allowed to interview her until yesterday. ‘That was a matter between her lawyers and the police,’ [White House counsellor David] Gergen said, and the White House ‘had no role in it.’”

This echoed what Frank Murray had reported in The Washington Times on July 24: “Park Police investigators had many questions about Mr. Foster’s final hours but deferred to his friends and family by delaying contacts with them until after yesterday’s funeral in Little Rock.”

And to further make the point, Devroy and Isikoff say in their July 30, 1993, article that the widow, Lisa Foster, “yesterday was interviewed for the first time by police.”

Lies all. Did Devroy and Isikoff know they were reporting lies? Isikoff surely did at least by August 15 when he wrote in The Post, adding an invention of his own about Foster’s mental state and the definitive nature of documents that he, but not we, had had the privilege to see: “Foster’s attempt to seek legal help is described in more than 200 pages of Park Police and FBI reports into his death that have not yet been publicly released…those reports leave no doubt that Foster was suffering from a worsening depression….” The Park Police documents that were finally released added up to a scant 100 pages, and they included, as we have noted, the [John] Rolla report on his visit to the Foster home.  Isikoff had to have read that, but he passes up this early opportunity to correct his earlier gigantic lie that the police had been turned away. At the same time, he inadvertently tells us several months in advance that the 100 pages with its many redactions was only a small part of the written record withheld from the public. He also lets us in on something else that he probably didn’t mean to. The FBI was a participant in the investigation right from the beginning, and its initial report is still secret. It is as though another 100-plus pages have also been redacted in their entirety, blacked out, that is, as far as the public is concerned, but not as far as a journalistic player in the cover-up is concerned.

Even without these police documents in hand, it would have been a truly amazing thing if Devroy and Isikoff were in the dark about the visit by Park Police investigators John Rolla and Cheryl Braun to the Foster home on the night of the death. A very large number of people, after all, were there that night, as we later learn, and consider who they were. We can start with the man who sets the tone for the reign of the lie, himself, President Bill Clinton. In his written report Rolla curiously makes no mention of the president’s arrival at the house, but he broke the news a year later, shortly after the [David] Johnston article about the police report appeared in The New York Times. He and Braun did so in their nationally televised testimony to the Senate Banking Committee on July 29, 1994 (This time it was The Washington Post’s turn to report blandly that the testimony contained nothing new. The New York Times, for its part, neglected to report on the hearing at all.).

Did the government people simply withhold the information from the press? Anyone who could even entertain the idea has no notion of the cozy relationship that exists between the White House, especially Bill Clinton’s White House, and the national press, The Washington Post in particular. But there’s no reason to speculate. This passage comes from a very important op ed piece, “Vincent Foster: Out of His Element,” by Arkansas native, Walter Pincus, in the August 5, 1993 Post: “Near midnight that Tuesday at the Foster home in Georgetown, I sat in the garden with a few of his Arkansas friends for half an hour.” Pincus doesn’t say what time he arrived, but the police, on the record, were there from shortly after 10 to sometime after 11 (In fact, the police in all likelihood were there even longer, arriving sometime before 10. The later arrival time presumes they went to the morgue first to search for Foster’s car keys again in his pants, an almost certain untruth.). He surely would have known that the police were not “turned away,” let alone by Foster family attorneys.

We conclude The Murder of Vince Foster with our poem, “American Gothic.”  Its fifth verse reads as follows:

When all we can hear is one version,
The government truth and no more,
Don't you wonder about all those reporters,
Just who are they working for?

It’s certainly a good question to ask in the case of Michael Isikoff, from the Vince Foster case to the Russia collusion hoax and lots of other government scandals, and he’s hardly an exception.

David Martin