Double Agent Ruddy Reaching for Media Pinnacle

 

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It is hard to think of anything more subversive of our putatively free and democratic system than the penetration of our news media by secret, unaccountable government agents, unless it is the penetration—the “cognitive infiltration” in Cass Sunstein’s terminology—of groups of concerned, civic-minded individuals by those same agents.  Ladies and gentlemen, as a shining example of both, I give you Christopher Ruddy.

 

BloombergBusinessweek.com reported last week that Ruddy’s Newsmax.com will launch its own TV news network this June to compete with Fox for the conservative audience.  “How do you have something so successful in cable that nobody else wants to imitate or cut into their market share? It defies reason,” asks the 49-year-old Ruddy.

 

The Chris Ruddy I Know

 

Christopher Ruddy was only 29 when he came into my life.  I had been laboring pretty much in solitude in my inquiries into the death of President Bill Clinton’s Deputy White House Counsel Vincent W. Foster, Jr.   My motivations were mainly two:  I had a longstanding interest in the John F. Kennedy assassination, and the press reaction to Oliver Stone’s JFK had brought the American press’s culpability in the crime, at least as accessories after the fact, forcefully to my attention.  As a response, I had just completed my first serious political writing, the long poem “Assassins,” which had no immediate outlet in those days before I was online.  I could not help but note a great similarity in the eagerness of the press to accept the official Foster suicide conclusion to their eager endorsement of the lone crazed gunman theory in the JFK case.  Second, the fact that Foster had graduated two years behind me at Davidson College and that, at about the same height, we had matched up in intramural basketball competition had given me something of a personal interest. (As a lifelong Democrat, I had voted for Bill Clinton just months before.) 

 

It also helped that I was working in Washington, DC, but it helped a good deal less than you might think.  The only other people I could find who shared my skepticism of the official story in the Foster case were at the conservative media watchdog organization, Accuracy in Media (AIM).  Its director, the late Reed Irvine, was the main person there interested in the case, but my main point of contact with them was the late Bernard Yoh.  I almost never talked with Irvine.  I had attempted to get the Liberty Lobby involved, but they had demonstrated no interest.

 

Ruddy arrived upon the Foster scene some six months after the death with the first of a series of articles on January 27, 1994, in Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post.  One can gather a little of my sense of excitement at his discoveries by scrolling down to the section headed “Enter Christopher Ruddy” in part 1 of my 6-part series, “America’s Dreyfus Affair, the Case of the Death of Vincent Foster.”  I immediately got in touch with him, and we would see quite a bit of each other in the months ahead.  When he came to Washington he would regularly call on Irvine, Washington correspondent for the conservative Telegraph of London, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, Foster case researcher Hugh Turley of Hyattsville, MD, and me.

 

Ruddy told me that his interest in the case originated with a call from an unnamed reporter at the conservative Washington Times who had been stymied by his editors in his attempt to write the truth about the story.  Dan E. Moldea reported later in his book, A Washington Tragedy: How the Death of Vincent Foster Ignited a Political Firestorm, that Ruddy told him that people at AIM were responsible for igniting his interest.  Now I seriously doubt that either story is true.

 

Ordered to Talk to Ruddy

 

One of the things that most impressed me about Ruddy in the beginning was that, unlike the other journalists who just took what was fed them by the government and passed it along as though they were doing independent reporting, many of whom had clearly not even bothered to go out to Fort Marcy Park, the obscure Civil War relic off the George Washington Parkway where Foster’s body was found, he appeared to have done some real shoe-leather journalism.  He had actually interviewed some of the people who were among the first to arrive at the park on the evening of July 20, 1993.  But here, with the wisdom of hindsight, is a memo for the record written by Turley in 1998:

  

In case anyone is still naïve enough to believe any investigative journalist in America would expose government corruption just look at how one of these reporters "found" his sources....

Christopher Ruddy gained a lot of fame for "digging" up information about the death of White House counsel Vincent Foster.  How did this reporter get those interviews with government witnesses that would not talk to anyone else?

Ruddy's "sources" were ORDERED to talk to him!

"I was basically ordered to interview or ordered to speak with one of the reporters and the New York Post again, I was told to talk to this Ruddy person, Mr. Ruddy." -Deposition by US Park Police Officer Kevin Fornshill for US Senate 6/12/94

"I just did it because I was ordered to do it [talk to Chris Ruddy]." -Deposition by Fairfax County EMS worker George Gonzalez for US Senate 7/20/94 

Ruddy served as a spokesman for the government authorities. 

Every member of the American press has gone along with the cover-up of the murder of White House official Vincent Foster.  Ruddy was a little different.  He created the illusion he was a courageous reporter on the side of truth.  Ruddy's reporting was a farce all along and just another layer of the murder cover-up of by the American media.

 

That goes right to the heart of the matter.  In that first Ruddy article Gonzalez is identified as the first emergency worker and Fornshill as the first policeman on the scene at the park.  Had we been a little better versed in espionage tradecraft we would probably have recognized much earlier that Ruddy was playing the classic double agent role.  To be sure, he reported some things that seemed extremely damaging to the authorities, but his reports stayed very well contained.   We were like the enemy who had been shown some of the adversary’s secrets by a fake defector.  He bought credibility with us, while not doing all that much harm to the case of his ultimate employers.  The New York Post is a tabloid that is noted mainly for its witty and sensational headlines, and Ruddy later left it for a much more obscure suburban Pittsburgh newspaper owned by one of the heirs of the Andrew Mellon fortune, Richard Mellon Scaife.  This latter paper put “Pittsburgh” in front of its Tribune-Review name only about the time Ruddy arrived there. 

 

But we really wanted to believe, like Lot in the case of Sodom and Gomorrah, that there was at least one righteous person among America’s press.  There were early straws in the wind had we been more keen to recognize them.  To take one example, some of the key flaws in the government’s suicide case are to be found in the autopsy performed by the late Dr. James Beyer.  In the form that asks “X-rays taken” he had checked the box beside it that said “yes,” but he had elsewhere written that because the X-ray machine was broken, he had taken no X-rays.  This is of great importance because he also drew a picture of a half-dollar sized exit wound in the crown of the head in the picture of the body on the autopsy sheet.  No one who was at the park that night detected any exit wound at all, much less the huge bloody mess that would have been blown out on the ground or vegetation down-range from Foster’s head.  X-rays would have undoubtedly shown the bullet still in Foster’s head.

 

Dr. Beyer had a bit of a checkered past.  In two notable instances in Fairfax County, VA, in which he had performed the autopsy, the police had ruled suicide when there were strong indications of murder. The first was that of 21-year-old Timothy Easley in 1989.  Four years after the initial ruling Easley’s girlfriend had confessed to stabbing him to death.  The second case, that of 21-year-old college student Tommy Burkett, on its face was far more sinister.  The Burketts had returned home on a Sunday evening to find young Tommy dead of an apparent gunshot wound seated in a chair in an upstairs bedroom.  The family’s revolver was in his hand on his lap, but with the cylinder slightly ajar and the bullet hole in the wall behind him was not even close to being in the proper alignment if Tommy had shot himself as the police quickly concluded he had done.  Furthermore, there was fresh blood on the wall of the stairwell leading up to the bedroom and Tommy showed signs of having been beaten about the head.  Again, heavily relying upon Dr. Beyer’s autopsy, though, the police had quickly ruled suicide.  Later the parents were able to get the body exhumed and have an autopsy performed by another experienced forensic pathologist.  He discovered a broken jaw and numerous contusions that could not have been caused by the single gunshot.

 

I drove Ruddy to the Burketts’ home for him to interview them.  I was present when they told him that they had discovered that Tommy had been busted for marijuana and had had the charges dropped in exchange for working as an informant for the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA).  They had found many indications that Tommy had been beaten to death because of what he had learned and reported in his informant role.  They also told him of their attempts to get coverage of their story in the news.  They had talked to several reporters who had shown interest, but nothing ever got printed.  Then they had their phone system screened by a professional and found that they were being bugged.  After that they called a reporter for the local free weekly, the Chantilly Times, from a pay phone.  I had first read their amazing story there.  I was primarily an observer at the interview, but I distinctly remember that it was I and not Ruddy who broached the subject of The Washington Post.  The Burketts had not volunteered it, so I asked them “What about The Post?”

 

I can’t recall the reporter’s name, but one did come and interview them after they had found out about their phone bug and he responded excitedly to their story.  His editor killed the story, though, and to this day The Post, the same newspaper that has done more than any other to sell the Foster suicide line to the public, has not reported anything about the Burkett death.  Afterwards, on March 8, 1994, Ruddy had an article in the New York Post entitled “Foster Coroner Has Been Dead Wrong on Suicide Before.”  It is about the Easley and Burkett cases, but there’s not a peep about the DEA or the phone bugging or The Post’s news suppression.  Mainly, Dr. Beyer and the Fairfax County police come across as incompetent in Ruddy’s account.  One gets the same impression from his Appendix IV, “Case Histories of Dr. James Beyer” in his 1997 book, The Strange Death of Vincent Foster.  The general corruption of the government beyond the Foster case and the role of the press as accomplices were apparently off limits.

 

Sometime later, something occurred that much more obviously should have brought Ruddy’s legitimacy into question in my eyes.  A colleague, hearing me voice skepticism over the Foster “suicide” conclusion, revealed to me that he had previously worked for the Mitre Corporation, and that they had installed the surveillance system around the White House compound.  He said, as you might expect, that it is state of the art and that it could tell you how closely Foster had shaved in the morning when he came to work.  As it happens, among the many gaping holes in the government’s case is the question of the time and the manner of Foster’s departure from the White House compound on the day of his death.  Officially, the last person to see him alive was the secret service agent on duty at the door at the west end of the White House.  There is no official record that we know of of his ever having left the fenced White House compound.  He could have simply been going to the Old Executive Office Building next door when he left the White House proper.  But when did Foster leave the compound?  Was he with anyone?  Was he in a car or on foot?  Was it his own car or someone else’s?  The surveillance camera should have provided a definite record.

 

I put the question to Ruddy.  A few days later he got back to me with the explanation that he had received from his “contact in the White House.”  Would you believe, those surveillance cameras had cramped President Clinton’s carousing, tom-catting style and he had had them removed, he said?  I passed that response on to my colleague, and he merely rolled his eyes in disbelief.  Had the surveillance camera issue ever been raised publicly, which Ruddy could have done, this obvious fallback position would never have survived public scrutiny.

 

Other, subtler, indications that Ruddy was not what he appeared to be also began to emerge.  The mainstream press gave him publicity, but as something of a whipping boy.  It was similar to their treatment of the obviously phony outfit, Citizens United.  Two instances stand out.  On March 7, 1994, the day before his article on Dr. Beyer, Ruddy had a New York Post article headlined “Cops Made Photo Blunder at Foster Death Site” that began this way: “The U.S. Park Police never took a crucial crime-scene photo of Vincent Foster’s body before it was moved during the investigation into the death of the White House deputy counsel, FBI sources told The Post.”  Not long after that, ABC Evening News came out with a report that showed a black revolver in the dead Foster’s hand, which they said they had obtained from the Park Police.  Ruddy was left with egg on his face.

 

Worse than that, Ruddy had later collaborated with the Strategic Investment newsletter on a video on the Foster case in which the confident claim was made that the gun-in-hand photo was phony because it showed the gun in the right hand when, in fact, Foster was left-handed.  That set him up to be on CBS’s 60 Minutes as the very symbol of the lunacy of the Foster-case skeptics.   Mike Wallace got Ruddy to admit before a national audience that there was no good evidence that Foster was, in fact, left-handed, but at that point he stressed that the video was not his, but was a Strategic Investment production.  “But you edited the tape, didn’t you?” Wallace shot back, and Ruddy could only sheepishly confirm that he had.

 

Again, with the wisdom of hindsight, it is abundantly clear that both public relations disasters were planned by those orchestrating the cover-up, and Ruddy’s intentional “blunders” and his anonymous FBI “sources” were all a part of it.

 

Ruddy was also publicized by the Clinton White House itself as being right at the epicenter of Hillary Clinton’s “vast right-wing conspiracy.”  They produced a volume in 1995 awkwardly titled “The Communications Stream of Conspiracy Commerce,” and it was provided to the media in January of 1997.  The main villain in the story is Ruddy’s employer Richard Mellon Scaife, who ostensibly financed many right-wing, anti-Clinton publications and organizations, but Ruddy himself is also a major figure.

 

The beginning of my final estrangement from Ruddy began on a positive note.  We had gone to some Foster-related function together and I was carrying with me the book I was reading during my bus and subway commute at the time, Barbara Tuchman’s The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World before the War, 1890-1914.  It had a long section on the Dreyfus Affair in France.  I had been struck by one passage for its similarity to the Foster case and I showed it to Ruddy.  Boiling down the position of General Auguste Mercier and his case against Captain Alfred Dreyfus, Tuchman had written, “All the strength, except truth, was on his side.”

 

“You should write something up showing the parallels between the two cases,” suggested Ruddy.  So I did, and “America’s Dreyfus Affair, the Case of the Death of Vincent Foster” is the result.  One of the main “strengths” that Mercier had was a generally compliant press, and I stress that point heavily throughout what became a six-part series.  Ruddy’s reaction after reading what is now Part 1 was not at all what I thought it would be.  I had made him something of a heroic figure, likening him to the young Dreyfus defender, Bernard Lazare.

 

Ruddy seemed thoroughly displeased with what I had written, but he only seized upon one item to object to.  “You said that I wrote that the Park Police didn’t take any crime scene photographs, and that’s not what I said.  I was talking about the photo of the overall scene that would have made it clear where the body was in the park, not crime scene photos generally.”

 

If that was the information he meant to convey by his article he certainly did a very poor job of communicating because no objective reader could come to any other conclusion than that no crime scene photographs at all had been taken.  But Ruddy had his excuse to reject my work, and he was sticking to it. 

 

In reality, I believe, Ruddy had a big problem with my pointing out the press complicity in the cover-up. *  Perhaps an even bigger problem than that was that he had been chosen to lead the parade of the skeptics, and with my “Dreyfus” paper, I had moved up pretty close to the front.

 

Enter Knowlton and Clarke

 

The others who moved up toward the head of the skeptic parade managed to sink Ruddy’s credibility completely.  They are the witness, Patrick Knowlton, who had happened by the Fort Marcy Park parking lot to relieve himself, his lawyer John Clarke, and the aforementioned Turley, who assisted them.  What transpired after that is well laid out in Sam Smith’s Progressive Review here.  My complete undressing of Ruddy can be found in Part 2 of “Dreyfus.”  There I reveal that Ruddy first tried to undermine them with a whispering campaign against Clarke and in the end left out the story of Knowlton’s lawsuit against several FBI agents from his 1997 book, all the while ignoring the most salient fact that Knowlton had revealed, which was that Foster’s car was not at the park when his body was.

 

When Clarke was able to get his devastating letter appended to Kenneth Starr’s official report on Foster’s death by the three-judge panel that appointed him, and over Starr’s strenuous objections, and that fact was blacked out by the entire American press, Ruddy participated in the blackout at the time. ** For all practical purposes, he was completely out of the closet—though in virtually the reverse way as CNN’s Anderson Cooper.

 

When Newsmax started up in 1998 with Ruddy as its head, we longtime Ruddy watchers never thought of it as anything more than a propaganda operation.  Ruddy was being rewarded for a job well done in misdirecting the public and helping keep the lid on the Foster case, similar to the way in which members of Starr’s cover-up team, Brett Kavanaugh and John Bates were rewarded with federal judgeships.

 

Newsmax

 

As the head of Newsmax, Ruddy has further embellished the impression that he was only a right-wing extremist out to get the Clintons.  For the most part it has turned out standard Fox News, Weekly Standard-type war-hawkish establishment conservative fare.  At the same time he began a slow and steady retreat from all the good work that pointed so clearly to the fact that Vince Foster was murdered.  I described the Ruddy technique in a short article in 1999, “More Ruddy Trickery”:

 

          Christopher Ruddy, investigative reporter for Richard Mellon Scaife's Pittsburgh Tribune Review, editor of the online service Newsmax, and author of the book The Strange Death of Vincent Foster, is portrayed by the mainstream media as the leading critic of the government in the Foster case. The fact that he is singled out for publicity by that disreputable crowd should be sufficient evidence of his phoniness. The numerous self-discrediting things he has done such as claiming that the Park Police took no crime-scene photographs and that Foster was left-handed when the gun was found in his right hand also give him away. Lest we tend to forget about his deceitfulness and treachery he keeps reminding us with little gems on his web site such as promoting Foster cover-up books by the likes of Ann Coulter and Howard Kurtz.

 

          He contributes to the Foster murder cover-up most recently almost in passing in an article comparing the thwarted investigation of Chinagate with obstructions of the Senate "investigation" of tangential occurrences around the Foster death (as though the Senate were serious about either investigation). Here is the telling passage:

 

          Thus, one of the great mysteries of Whitewater slipped between the cracks: Did Foster know about the Hale office search? If the answer is yes, then he knew that Whitewater was about to explode, which no doubt caused him great distress.

 

          Just hours after the Hale office search warrant was issued, Foster's body was found in a remote Virginia Park; his gunshot death ruled a suicide." (Friday, June 11, 3:37 am, "The Aborted Chinagate Search: Deja Foster?")

 

Get that, dear reader? Sure sounds as though Foster killed himself because he was distressed over Whitewater, doesn't it? Thus does the great Clinton critic, Ruddy, cover for Clinton and the whole sorry crowd responsible for Foster's murder and the cover-up that continues by reinforcing the absurd line that Foster killed himself because he was somehow "disturbed." We ought to all be more than a little disturbed over the machinations of people like Christopher Ruddy.

 

Ruddy’s completely folded tent for truth about the Foster death became completely obvious with the appointment of arch-Foster-cover-up writer, Ronald Kessler as Newsmax’s chief Washington correspondent in 2006.  In his book on the White House Kessler devotes 11 pages to the Foster death, and it’s all pure cover-up, the apparent complete antithesis of Ruddy’s book on the subject.  You can read about it in my article “Kessler, Ruddy, and the Parade of Lies.”

 

Watching this sorry performance by Ruddy, one can’t help but feel for the 23 out of 32 customer reviewers on Amazon.com of his book on the Foster death and all the people they represent, who gave the book five out of five stars and wrote glowing, trusting reviews.  They could see that he was on to something.  Now he seemed to be giving them a big “never mind.”  But when it comes to betrayal by the putative Irish Catholic Ruddy, they hadn’t seen anything yet.

 

While Ruddy’s image as the Foster-death truth-seeker steadily ebbed, his image as a garden variety Clinton hater flowed.  It probably reached its high-water mark in 2002 in a book he wrote with Carl Limbacher, Jr., Catastrophe: Clinton’s Role in America’s Worst Disaster that can be summed up by the picture on the cover.  Bill Clinton is in the foreground and a disintegrating twin tower is in the background.  The book parrots the official 19-Arab-hijacker line but blames the Clinton administration for carelessly letting it happen with its presumed softness on terrorism.  Though clearly a very poor excuse for a book, the Ruddy handlers at Newsmax must have been pleased by how well it achieved its polarizing objective.  As of this date, 15 of the 39 customer reviewers had given it five stars and 22 had given it only one star.

 

The Born-Again Ruddy

 

Now, in the most cynical move yet, as if to show how contemptuous the opinion molders are of the American public—at least those who think of themselves as conservative—Ruddy has been permitted to cash in his Clinton-hater card.  Worse than that, he has even done it by seeming to take back all the good apparent truth-seeking work he did when he first came upon the national journalistic scene. 

 

“He has become friends with Bill and Hillary Clinton and won’t rule out supporting Hillary for president in 2016,” writes Businessweek.  Further on, they say this:

 

In a recent Newsmax editorial lambasting Rand Paul for dredging up the Monica Lewinsky affair, he wrote, “As one of the participants in those battles back then who was a critic of President Clinton, I can say with some degree of certainty we made a mistake.” About the only area in which he remains a staunch party-line conservative is foreign policy.

 

Take that, all you folks who went to the trouble of reading The Strange Death of Vincent Foster and especially the ones who wrote good reviews about it online.  He’s a changed man.  Hear him tell Joe Scarborough on MSNBC that he was wrong.  He cares no more about the truth now than do his newfound friends, as if he ever did.  And lest you think he’s just talking about the Lewinsky business, which I can’t recall his ever having written anything about, look who has kind words to say about the “reformed” Ruddy:

 

Ruddy’s own conservatism, despite a fervent anti-Obama streak, is far from Tea Party obstructionism. “People mellow or change or get perspective as they age,” says liberal journalist Joe Conason, often Ruddy’s foil during the Clinton battles, who now counts him as a friend. “Or most people do. He’s not this right-wing kid that he was.”

 

See, it was only because he was a right-winger that Ruddy cared about the Foster case.  In truth, Joe Conason is to Chris Ruddy as David Corn is to Joe Goulden.  Conason is the co-author with the infamous Gene Lyons of The Hunting of the President: The Ten-Year Campaign to Destroy the Clintons.  To get some flavor of that book, all one needs to do is to check out my article with the subtitle, “Gene Lyons, Paid Liar, Murder Enabler.” In that article I meticulously document the statement, “Lyons' lies are important because they are so enormous and outrageous, they are easily proven to be lies, and they go right to the heart of the Foster murder and its cover-up.”

 

As for the Conason-Lyons book, one can get some idea of its quality from their very first mention of Foster’s death at the beginning of chapter 6:  “[Foster’s] body was discovered at 5:45 P.M. by officers from the U.S. Park Service police, who treated the incident from the very first as a routine investigation, made politically sensitive only later by the identity of the victim.”

 

There is not a single word of truth in that statement, even according to the officially approved story.  It’s abundantly evident from this one sentence that neither of these shills has ever even set foot in Fort Marcy Park or they would know how extremely unlikely it is that any patrolling policeman would have stumbled across Foster’s body where it was found in a back corner of the little-visited park.  The official story is that a passing motorist who had gone there to urinate spotted him, though there are some serious questions about that story as well.  And had the Park Police treated the matter routinely, they would have followed the police manual and treated this violent death by gunshot as a murder until they had accumulated sufficient evidence to disprove it.  They did not do that.  And an absolutely amazing number of things went on in the park that night that were very far from routine.  Clarke, Knowlton, and Turley heavily document those things in their court submission/book Failure of the Public Trust.  Furthermore, the Fairfax County emergency workers who were at the scene that evening recorded the death as the result of a “likely homicide.”

 

Conason and Lyons, according to their index, mention Ruddy on 10 pages and Evans-Pritchard on 11 pages, and almost every time it’s in terms of the blackest villainy.  They weren’t just political opponents of the president and his wife, after all, they were part of a “campaign to destroy Bill and Hillary Clinton.”  However, also according to the index, two very important names connected to these two vilified journalists are completely missing from the book.  They are Miguel Rodriguez and Patrick Knowlton.  Rodriguez was initially Starr’s lead investigator who apparently really tried to get at the truth, but resigned in disgust.  In my review of Ruddy’s book I say that his Chapter 9 about that episode alone would make a very good movie.  For his part, by far the most important thing Evans-Pritchard did related to the Foster case was to ferret out Knowlton and interview him.  Only then did Knowlton know that his FBI interrogators had falsified what he had told them in their official reports. 

 

The only index listing concerning Foster’s death directly in the Conason-Lyons book is tellingly entitled “suicide, rumors concerning,” drawing from #3 of the “Seventeen Techniques for Truth Suppression.” The subject comes up on 26 pages in the book, but somehow they can’t find the occasion to mention either Rodriquez *** or Knowlton.

 

Christopher Ruddy is now telling us in so many words that we should believe what they have written about the Foster death, not what he has written.  Just think about that when you watch anything from his upcoming network news production.

 

Whose Operation?

 

If Newsmax is an operation, whose operation is it?  Businessweek tells us that the first investor in Newsmax was former CIA director William Casey’s daughter Bernadette.  That looks like a good lead, but in all likelihood what it means is that we can rule the CIA out. 

 

Looking back at Ruddy’s work on the Foster case, the most likely candidate by far would seem to be the FBI.  Throughout his writings he referred constantly to one anonymous FBI source or another.  He obviously had connections there.  He also covered up for them.  He concealed their active involvement in the investigation from beginning to end.  According to Ruddy, anything that was ever done wrong was the work of the bungling Park Police or that insidious Clinton crowd at the White House.  It was never the FBI.  Maybe they’re too obvious as well.

 

Maybe the answer is to be found in an important bit of information that is left out of the Businessweek article.  They tell us that Ruddy studied abroad at the London School of Economics, which is unusual enough for this 12th child of a policeman and a homemaker, but they fail to tell us where else he has studied abroad, at Hebrew University in Jerusalem.  Imagine that.  Businessweek says that Ruddy comes from a Catholic family that didn’t regularly go to church.  Did the mother, perhaps, take them to the synagogue, instead?

 

It’s not just because of Ruddy’s studies in Jerusalem and the conventional pro-Israel neocon politics of the Newsmax web site that I raise the question.  Once I happened to make some rather routine critical comment about Israel, and Ruddy’s sharp rejoinder in disagreement really surprised me.  He seemed to take what I was saying about Israel personally.  I recently ran across an observation by Professor Kevin MacDonald that reminded me very much of how Ruddy reacted at that time:   “I have encountered many liberal, politically correct Jews who react vociferously (almost violently) to the most innocuous comments about any topic related to Israel or Jews.”

 

Take out the liberal and politically correct part, and that was Ruddy, though I’m not sure now about the need to remove the liberal part.  There really wasn’t any real point in taking issue with my offhand observation, it seemed to me, and he definitely wanted to stay on my good side, but it was like he couldn’t help himself.  I just marked Israel off as anything I could make small talk about with Ruddy, and we never found anything further to disagree about that I can think of. 

 

There’s also the coziness and mutual admiration between Ruddy and the duplicitous arch-Zionist Alan Dershowitz that Businessweek does mention and Ruddy refers to as well in his interview by Joe Scarborough.  Could it just be the fact that they’re both skunks that they have this affinity for one another or is something else going on?

 

Now it’s quite possible for a crypto-Jew, if that’s what Ruddy is, to be working for the CIA or the FBI, but it also brings another intelligence organization into the possible Newsmax mix, and that would be the Mossad.

 

Finally, Businessweek hints that Ruddy is motivated by personal pecuniary considerations as much or more than by any political ideals: “Ruddy earns what he describes as a modest six-figure salary, but he’s plainly as interested in his own success as in advancing his conservative agenda.”

 

Let us take a stab at what that six-figure salary amounts to.  What would the Biblical thirty pieces of silver be worth these days?

 

 

* I had previously not gone into detail as to what “all the strength” was that General Mercier had on his side in the Dreyfus case.  It included a very cooperative press.  As it happens, one of the reporters who covered the trial that convicted Dreyfus on the basis of secret evidence was Theodor Herzl, reporting for an Austrian newspaper.  He was part of that compliant press at the time because he reported that Dreyfus was probably guilty.  Later he would say that it was the abiding anti-Semitism revealed by the railroading of Dreyfus that moved him to found the Zionism movement.

 

**Ruddy later had a catch-up article about the Knowlton-Clarke addendum.  Here is Hugh Turley’s assessment of it:

 

Some have posted Ruddy's November 4th article published almost ONE MONTH after the October 10th event as evidence that the addendum to Ken Starr's Foster report was reported to the American people.  The date of the Ruddy article is never posted with the article NOT EVEN AT RUDDY'S WEBSITE because it is embarrassingly late. 

I had to shame Ruddy into doing the story.  In October Ruddy told me he would NOT report the order from the US Circuit Court of appeals because he "was not a court reporter".  Ruddy said, "I am an investigative journalist, you have to get someone that covers the courts to do that story."  It was good that Ruddy finally got it published in the small circulation Pittsburgh paper but he had many facts wrong in the article. 

Here is what I wrote about Ruddy's article on November 10, 1997: 

Ruddy is known to most folks, including Mike Wallace of CBS, as the "leading journalist on the Foster story."  Too bad he does not lead with the correct facts.  Ruddy's November 4th article reporting that Patrick Knowlton's attorney won approval of the court to attach a 20 page letter to Ken Starr's report over Starr's objections deserves criticism on several points.  

It is not a well known but the witness Knowlton and Ruddy are barely on speaking terms. It is certain Ruddy did not fact check his story with Patrick Knowlton or his attorney John Clarke.  Chris did call me to tell me he was doing a story on Knowlton but he did not seek advice so the omissions and errors in his story are his own. 

One of DC Dave Martin's 13 techniques for truth suppression [now 17] is "To come half clean."  This is the technique used by Ruddy throughout his article. Ruddy's article about Knowlton's attachment appeared in the weekday edition and lowest circulation edition of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.  Ruddy downplays Knowlton's historic attachment by running the story with a lengthy article about Arkansas State trooper trivia as if that was more important.  The Knowlton article begins, "Two Arkansas state troopers are not alone in complaining..." 

Ruddy can be extremely accurate when he wants to be.  I know because I have seen him in action typing on my own computer keyboard and he has edited and corrected press releases for me. Therefore his obvious errors jump off the page at me since they are supposedly from the "leading reporter on the Foster story."  

Ruddy wrote, "Knowlton, the first person known to have been in Fort Marcy Park on the afternoon of Foster's death..." This is incorrect because everyone familiar with the case knows that another man was already at Fort Marcy Park when Knowlton arrived.  We've seen this man's face too. [published in Ruddy's first book] 

Ruddy wrote, "[Knowlton] was surprised he was not asked to review the [Starr's] report."  This statement is a total fabrication by Ruddy.  I know Pat Knowlton well and I know he never expected Starr to ask him to review his report and he was certainly not surprised that he was not asked.  The statute allows that persons mentioned in the report may submit comments and the court would decide if those comments would be added and if so in whole or in part 

Ruddy wrote that John Clarke, "filed an appeal...supplying more that 118 exhibits and a 400 page report..." What Ruddy calls a "report" is in fact a civil rights lawsuit against FBI agents filed last year under seal.  It was unsealed on November 12, 1996 in U.S. Court in the District of Columbia.  A press conference was held that day announcing the lawsuit and it was attended by all of the major newspapers, television networks, Phil Weiss was there and so was Ambrose Evan-Pritchard.  Ruddy, "the leading reporter on the Foster story" did not attend Knowlton's press conference.  Like the entire rest of the media (with the exception of the Washington Times which did a short, inaccurate, skeptical inside-page bump-and-run) Ruddy did not report it.  I was not surprised that Ruddy does not call the document what it is and instead calls it simply "a report."  Expect a ruling soon by Judge Penn on the status of Knowlton's civil suit. 

Ruddy wrote, "The judges voted unanimously to allow Knowlton and his attorney to review the report."

This is completely false.  Knowlton and Clarke did not see Starr's entire report until it was made public on October 10.  Ruddy should know this because Clarke refers to this fact in the 20-page attachment.  Clarke wrote, "Even though our review is limited by the fact that we were provided only the passages reprinted below so the context is unclear..." 

Ruddy wrote, "Knowlton, noting numerous discrepancies and omissions in the Starr report, filed a 20 page memorandum..." This is false again because Knowlton did not read Starr's report until October 10 and if he and Clarke had the 20 pages would have packed even more dynamite.  Ruddy calls Clarke's 20-page letter a "memorandum" giving the historic letter an informal and insignificant spin.  Ruddy also refers to Clarke's letter as a "memo". 

I could go on with smaller errors but as usual Ruddy failed to point out the importance of Patrick Knowlton and that is that Patrick Knowlton did not see Vincent Foster's car at Fort Marcy Park when Foster was already dead.  This important fact is misstated in Ruddy's book and now completely ignored in Ruddy's catch-up Knowlton article. 

Credit should be given where credit is due and now three and one half weeks late Ruddy does report that Knowlton did attach 20 pages to Starr's report.  So at least Ruddy can say, "I reported that" to maintain his leadership role as "the leading reporter on the Foster story."

 

*** Ruddy, for some reason, told everyone that Rodriguez spells his first name “Miquel” with a “q” instead of the conventional “g”.  That’s why you will find it misspelled throughout my “America’s Dreyfus Affair,” just as it is misspelled in Ruddy’s book, in The Failure of the Public Trust, Evans-Prichard’s The Secret Life of Bill Clinton (not his choice of titles, he tells me), and all the writings of Reed Irvine.   Only when we found and published Rodriquez’s resignation letter did we realize that Ruddy had not told us the truth.  Ruddy, like all of the mainstream press has ignored this letter that did not come to light until 2009 just as he and they have ignored Rodriguez’s crucial memorandum that we published in September of 2013.

 

David Martin

March 14, 2014

 

 

 

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