Christopher Ruddy on Brett Kavanaugh

“Did he touch your genitals?”

Christopher Ruddy is the Long Island, New York, native who is the CEO of the media organization Newsmax, regularly sought out for interviews by the mainstream press because he keeps the company of his neighbor in Palm Beach, Florida, President Donald Trump and is one of his closest informal advisers. Ruddy first rose to prominence, though, as the only American reporter raising doubts about the mysterious July 20, 1993, death of President Bill Clinton’s deputy White House Counsel, Vincent W. Foster, Jr. His first critical article appeared in the New York Post on January 27, 1994. In 1997 he would publish a book entitled The Strange Death of Vincent Foster: An Investigation. (Amazon used to tout my review of that book as the leading one, based upon the number of viewers finding it “helpful,” which it still is, but they have now deeply buried it away.)

Writing critically on the Vince Foster case, Ruddy could hardly avoid talking about young Brett Kavanaugh, who took over as Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr’s lead investigator after the resignation in disgust of Miguel Rodriguez. In the long passage below, we pick up the story on page 240 of Ruddy’s book. He is talking about the troublesome witness, Patrick Knowlton, who had been tracked down by the British reporter, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard. Knowlton had happened by Fort Marcy Park where Foster’s body was found on the afternoon of July 20, where Knowlton had stopped in to take an emergency leak. Hearing on television that night about the discovery of the body there, he had done his civic duty and called the Park Police to tell them what he had seen. They had demonstrated little interest, taking only a short statement from him.

After Kenneth Starr was appointed, Knowlton received a visit from two FBI agents who questioned him at length. Evans-Pritchard had seen the FBI report on the questioning, but Knowlton had not been easy to find, because his name had been spelled “Nolton,” and an incorrect address had been given for him. It had taken some clever detective work to track him down. When Evans-Pritchard interviewed Knowlton, he discovered that the FBI had seriously misrepresented what Knowlton had told them. They said that he had seen Foster’s car parked there, but Knowlton had been adamant that the Honda Accord with Arkansas license plates that he saw there differed greatly in color and in age from Foster’s car. He had also told them that he could easily identify the swarthy Hispanic or Arab looking man seated in driver’s seat of the only other car there who had stared at him menacingly. The FBI report said that he had said that he would not be able to identify him. Evans-Pritchard had then written a shocking article in the Sunday Telegraph—ignored completely by the American press—with an artist’s rendering of the man who stared at Knowlton and a full report on what Knowlton had told him. That article had caused Knowlton to receive a subpoena, signed by Brett Kavanaugh, to appear before the Whitewater grand jury (named for the corrupt land deal with which the Clintons were connected). Shortly after that Knowlton began to encounter frightening harassment on the streets of Washington, DC. One can see Knowlton describe the experience in the video, “The Vince Foster Cover-up: The FBI and the Press.” Now here’s Ruddy writing in his book:

All of this was having a debilitating effect on Knowlton. At one point he sat down on a concrete ledge housing some plants and put his hand on his stomach, indicating he was nauseated. Upon returning to his building, we decided to get in my car and drive around, when a young man sporting a military haircut, wearing earphones, and carrying a gym bag, pointedly checked my front and rear license plates. Knowlton snapped a photo of this man.

When Knowlton appeared before the grand jury the following week, Brett Kavanaugh, one of Starr’s prosecutors who (according to his official biography) had never prosecuted a case before, was doing the interrogation. Kavanaugh, a Yale graduate, was seen as one of the rising stars on the team: extremely bright, an establishment man in his late twenties with Harrison Ford looks and a demeanor to match. Knowlton would later recount that during the proceedings he “was treated like a suspect,” with Kavanaugh focusing more on his character than on the potentially valuable information he had to offer. Kavanaugh asked a series of questions about Knowlton’s encounter with the Hispanic-looking man including one of a graphic sexual nature.

Though questioning of a witness is not unusual, prosecutors have to establish credibility. The sexual question may have been another matter, however. Jerris Leonard, a former assistant attorney general for civil rights in the Nixon administration and now a prominent Washington attorney, suspects that, assuming such a question was indeed asked, it was for one reason: to falsely paint Knowlton as a homosexual before the grand jury. Leonard was baffled that Starr had allowed a novice prosecutor to serve as the lead interrogator on such an important case.

As reports of Kavanaugh’s treatment of Knowlton leaked out, Starr’s office vigorously denied that Kavanaugh had asked a graphic, sexual question. Knowlton was then recontacted by Starr’s staff and told that a good-faith effort was under way to review his statement. He was asked to revisit the independent counsel’s office, which he did. There he was asked by three investigators, including FBI special agent James Clemente if he would join them in visiting the park to go over his story. To this, Knowlton also agreed.

They went to the park that same day, arriving at about 4:30 P.M., the same time Knowlton said he had arrived at the park on the day of Foster’s death. Acting surprised, one of the agents noted the presence of Robert Reeves, the unofficial “keeper” of the park, and asked Knowlton to join him in saying hello. It was now clear to Knowlton why he had been brought there: to see if Reeves could identify Knowlton as a gay cruiser or other park habitué, something Knowlton has denied.

After the Reeves encounter, a series of young men seemed to pass by, sizing him up, said Knowlton. Upon leaving the park the four men pulled into the gas station nearby where it was obvious to Knowlton the agents were setting him up for a possible identification as a regular customer by the attendants.

“It infuriated me, unnerved me,” Knowlton complained soon after the incident. “It’s not right. I’m just a citizen here to cooperate. Why should I be treated like I did something wrong?” Knowlton, through his lawyer, called the independent counsel’s office to protest the treatment. The office denied he had been set up for identification and said that Reeves’s presence was a coincidence.

Contradicting that claim was none other than Reeves himself, whom I interviewed at his Alexandria home. He told me that the FBI had contacted his wife by phone and requested that he come to the park “to help identify if someone was a regular visitor at the park.” Like any good citizen, Reeves showed up. His account of events matches Knowlton’s.

In Reeves the investigators had a potential warehouse of information that could lead to any number of revelations in the case. But the only interest shown in him seemed to be as a debunker of someone else with potentially valuable information. In fact, Starr’s office had never interviewed Reeves during their “active and ongoing” two-year investigation [sic. They took just over three years].

Can we say “cover-up” boys and girls?

What Ruddy doesn’t tell us is that the episode of street harassment that he, himself, witnessed would not have happened but for his own involvement. Knowlton did not want to leave his building for fear the harassment that he had experienced for several days would happen again, and he did so only at Ruddy’s urging.

Here is what Ruddy wrote on the grand jury questioning in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review on November 5, 1995, omitting the part that we have already quoted from his book:

But telling was the fact that Knowlton said that at no point was his brief Park Police statement and FBI statement read back to him in its entirety to be reviewed by the grand jury. He said prosecutors never read back to him handwritten notes of FBI agents that should back up their statement as to what he said.

He said Kavanaugh quickly moved off the Park Police report when Knowlton began pointing out some obvious errors.

The police misidentified the Hispanic man as a “white male” and even spelled Knowlton’s name wrong in their report.

Kavanaugh, a Yale Law School graduate, is a former clerk to Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy. He is considered one of Starr’s best and brightest prosecutors, and has been assigned significant responsibilities relating to the handling of papers in Foster’s office. With the resignation of Starr’s lead Foster prosecutor, Miquel [sic] Rodriguez, Kavanaugh was saddled with those responsibilities as well…

Knowlton said Kavanaugh ended with a sarcastic question: “Why didn’t you wait for someone to call you?” Knowlton said it implied he was some sort of publicity hound. In fact, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard of the Sunday Telegraph had sought out Knowlton. Starr’s office only contacted Knowlton after the press report, though it has known of his identity for years.

Kavanaugh, the Homophobe?

As rough as Ruddy might have appeared to be on Kavanaugh, he actually pulled his punches. He even assured Kavanaugh and the Office of Independent Counsel that he would be doing so. Here we have a voice mail that Ruddy left with their office as reported in a recent article in Politico about the Ruddy-Kavanaugh relationship. The subject is how Ruddy is planning to write about Kavanaugh’s appalling treatment of Knowlton before the grand jury, but notice how the equally appalling people at Politico carefully avoid naming Knowlton or letting readers in on the significance of his testimony:

"I wanted to let you know that I have removed, there is no reference to genitals or anything really in the sexual issues ah in this article I'm doing," Ruddy said, according to the transcript. "You can assure Brett of that ah also assure him there's nothing in the piece that would be considered an attack on his person in any way ... even though [the witness] swears up and down that he did say it. Ah, I am doing this because of your request and the Christian gentleman I am."

In contrast with Ruddy’s toned-down version, here is how Richard Poe described the grand jury interrogation, the details of which he got from the chapter entitled “Street Fascism” in Ambrose Evans-Pritchard’s 1997 book, The Secret Life of Bill Clinton:

Perhaps the most telling indication of Starr's attitude toward Knowlton is the humiliating cross-examination to which this brave man was subjected before the grand jury.  Knowlton says that he was "treated like a suspect."  Prosecutor Brett Kavanaugh appeared to be trying to imply that Knowlton was a homosexual who was cruising Fort Marcy Park for sex.  Regarding the suspicious Hispanic-looking man he had seen guarding the park entrance, Kavanaugh asked, Did he "pass you a note?"  Did he "touch your genitals?"

Knowlton flew into a rage at Kavanaugh's insinuations.  Evans-Pritchard writes that several African American jurors burst into laughter at the spectacle, rocking "back and forth as if they were at a Baptist revival meeting.  Kavanaugh was unable to reassert his authority.  The grand jury was laughing at him.  The proceedings were out of control."

It was at that point, reports Evans-Pritchard, that Patrick Knowlton was finally compelled to confront the obvious: "the Office of the Independent Counsel was itself corrupt."

Poe is also quite hard-hitting in his description of the cavalier attitude of Starr’s team toward Knowlton’s street harassment:

No one knows who ordered the harassment team to begin its operation against Patrick Knowlton on October 26, 1995.  However, someone close to the Starr investigation must have tipped them off that Knowlton had received a subpoena.

Throughout Knowlton's ordeal, Starr's team treated the beleaguered witness with extraordinary contempt.

When the street harassment began, Knowlton called the FBI and requested witness protection.  Nothing happened for two days.  Finally, Agent Russell Bransford—the same FBI agent who had delivered Starr's subpoena—showed up.  "He had this smirk on his face, as if he thought the whole thing was amusing," says Knowlton.  "I told him to get the hell out of my house."

At the same time Knowlton was calling the FBI, Ruddy and Evans-Pritchard called Deputy Independent Counsel John Bates to report the intimidation of a grand jury witness.  Bates's secretary jotted down some notes.  "An hour later I called again," says Evans-Pritchard. "She let out an audible laugh and said that her boss had received the message...Bates never called back.

What did Starr's people find so funny about the situation?

As a last resort, Knowlton prepared a "Report of Witness Tampering" and took it personally to the Office of the Independent Counsel.  "It was their responsibility, at the very least, to find out who leaked word of his subpoena," notes Evans-Pritchard.  According to Evans-Pritchard, John Bates responded by calling security and having Knowlton removed from the building.

These passages are from pages 106-107 of Poe’s 2004 book, Hillary’s Secret War: The Clinton Conspiracy to Muzzle Internet Journalists.

The best summing up of what went on between the Office of the Independent Counsel and the witness Knowlton was provided by Evans-Pritchard in his book:

…there is [an] important point to understand about Kenneth Starr.  He is by character a servant of power, not a prosecutor.  One thing can be predicted with absolute certainty:  He will never confront the U.S. Justice Department, the FBI, and the institutions of the permanent government in Washington.  His whole career has been built on networking, by ingratiating himself.  His natural loyalties lie with the politico-legal fraternity that covered up the Foster case in the first place.  (p. 112)

Who could deny that the passage works just as well if one were to substitute “Brett Kavanaugh” for “Kenneth Starr?”

Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh?

Now let’s fast forward to July 2018. From the perspective of America’s mainstream press, the ugly caterpillar of a conspiracy theorist, Ruddy, has wondrously metamorphosized, in contrast to his actual appearance, into the respectable and influential butterfly of a much-respected CEO and “one of President Donald Trump’s closest confidants,” as Politico calls him. One might think that from what he knows of Kavanaugh’s key role in the Foster cover-up, he would have certainly used his influence with the President to advise against nominating Brett Kavanaugh, of all people, who wasn’t even qualified for the federal judgeship that George W. Bush gave to him (and another to Bates) for one of the nine positions in the highest court in the land. One would think wrong. He did the opposite if the Chicago Tribune article entitled, “Inside Trump’s Sometimes Wavering Decision on Brett Kavanaugh” reprinted from the Washington Post, can be believed:

As late as lunchtime on Sunday at Bedminster, Trump was asking friends — including Fox News host Sean Hannity and Newsmax chief executive Christopher Ruddy — for their input.

Ruddy, a Kavanaugh booster, told to the president that the judge was admired by Ed Meese, who served as Ronald Reagan's attorney general, as a genuine conservative. It was a seal of approval the president appreciated, according to people briefed on the discussion. (emphasis added)

What, Ruddy is now a cheerleader for Kavanaugh? One might well wonder what in the world is going on. All I can say is, “Welcome to the Deep State, my friends.” The first thing that you should know is that the link you see behind Ruddy’s name is the Chicago Tribune’s, not mine. If I were to sum up what one needs to know about Ruddy with a single link, it would be to my article, “Double Agent Ruddy Reaching for Media Pinnacle.”

The title of that article says it all. There has been no change in Ruddy. He is the same treacherous fellow he always was, the almost too obvious Deep State operative. Why, in the first place, did he get so much attention by the media as this big conspiracy theorist of a journalist working for the moneybags “conservative” Richard Mellon Scaife? Real government critics don’t get any publicity. How much have we heard from the mainstream media, or even the gatekeeping alternative media, about Knowlton and his lawyer John Clarke and their fbicover-up.com web site? Both Ruddy and Kavanaugh, who were clearly teammates all along, owe their subsequent success to how well they played their assigned positions in the cover-up of Foster’s murder. Ruddy’s job was to monopolize the critical noise up until the “conservative” Kenneth Starr put his stamp on the suicide verdict and then to retire to the lockerroom, which is what he did. From there he proceeded upon his magical metamorphosis.

Here is how Politico permits Ruddy to rationalize his apparent disavowal of virtually everything that he wrote about the Starr cover-up at the time, and in his book:

Despite their tense interactions two decades ago, Ruddy seems to have warmed to Kavanaugh over the years and forgiven any differences.

"The Starr investigation was controversial, and many today look at it with a 20/20 view," Ruddy said in an email Wednesday. "At the time I may have differed with the Starr probe, but I believe Ken Starr and Brett Kavanaugh did an honest job. Brett has had a long, respected and stellar career in government and on the bench. When evaluating anyone you have to look at the big picture."

One should not be surprised at Ruddy’s chameleon imitation. A similarly unlovely Deep State journalist, we are given to believe, has gone through an even greater Bruce-Jenner-like political change. We are talking about David Brock, the writer of “His Cheatin’ Heart,” the big exposé for the conservative American Spectator magazine of Governor Bill Clinton’s use of his state trooper entourage as procurers of women for him. Later Brock turned on a dime and became the firebrand baiter of conservatives as the head of his own “progressive” version of Newsmax, the non-profit critic of all things conservative, Media Matters for America. From what I know of how things work in our thoroughly corrupted political system, Brock, like Ruddy, is exactly the same unprincipled role player that he always was.

That brings us to the man who is now so close to Ruddy and who has now nominated Kavanaugh for the Supreme Court. Might I remind readers of the article that I wrote in September of 2016 entitled, “Does a Real Opponent Hire Fake Opposition?” upon the occasion of Trump’s appointment as deputy campaign manager of a less-intelligent version of Brock and Ruddy in the person of one David Bossie. Listen to this really embarrassing taped telephone conversation of Bossie with Reed Irvine of Accuracy in Media to learn everything you need to know about the man.

That Donald Trump should have people of the quality of Ruddy and Bossie whispering in his ear hardly inspires one with confidence in the principled nature of our leadership. As for the top dog himself, read and take to heart this early 2016 piece from Conservative Review entitled, “Donald Trump, A Typical New York City Liberal Then and Now.” The only fault I can find with the article is that it gives the impression that the proper "conservative" default position toward Israel is the kowtow.  That is not really a left-right issue as much as the Limbaughs, Hannitys and Ruddy’s Newsmax crowd, in their Zionist conservative-shepherd role, would like their followers to believe it is.

In summing up what’s going on with Trump, Ruddy, and Kavanaugh, the best metaphor for—and perhaps exposé of—the situation one might find, I believe, is a 2013 YouTube video entitled, “Mr. McMahon and Donald Trump’s Battle of the Billionaires Contract Signing.” Yes, folks, it’s all professional wrestling.

David Martin

July 15, 2018

See also “Is the Fix in for Trump’s Supreme Court Nominee?”

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