Divine Intervention in Trump Vote Challenge?
Late last week we encountered this surprising and disturbing announcement: “President
Trump’s campaign has tasked David Bossie, his deputy
campaign manager in 2016 and the head of the conservative advocacy group
Citizens United, to lead its efforts to challenge election results in several
states, including Arizona and Pennsylvania, according to a person familiar with
the decision.”
It’s surprising because Bossie
appears to be manifestly unqualified for the task. Most obviously, that is because these
challenges are legal challenges, and Bossie is not a
lawyer. In fact, from what I have been
able to learn, the Massachusetts native, Bossie,
hardly even has any college education, having “dropped out [from Towson University] to pursue politics.” Other than politics, the only thing that
seems to have kept him busy in his adult life has been serving as a volunteer
firefighter.
Based upon credentials alone, the placing of a
responsibility, with the fate of the country and, indeed, the world, into such
hands should be reason enough for anyone to find the announcement
disturbing. But from my own experience
with the man, I can honestly say that that’s not the half of it. Why
Trump would even consider such a man for such a key position is a real puzzler,
but, when it comes to puzzling personnel choices by Trump, Bossie
is almost par for the course. Names like
Jeff Sessions, John Bolton, Mark Esper, Gina Haspel, and Christopher Wray come
readily to mind. As for Bossie, the fact that he first turns up in my new book, The Murder of Vince Foster: America’s
Would-Be Dreyfus Affair, on page 195 in a section entitled, “More Spooks?” is
telling. Even more than the fake
opposition journalist, Christopher Ruddy, he got far more attention from the
mainstream media as a supposed “enemy of the Clintons” than was warranted,
while at the same time he received far too little critical scrutiny. If he and Ruddy are not Deep State
operatives, it’s hard to believe that there even are such people.
Consequently, upon hearing of the choice of Bossie for such a vital position, my first thought was that
it was a sign that President Trump was throwing in the towel, or maybe a better
boxing expression would be that he was taking a dive, appearing to put up a
fight while actually intentionally taking a loss. That’s certainly what Bossie
did in the Foster case, first when he was working for Citizens United and later
when he was working for Rep. Dan Burton.
I turned my attention to the media to see how Bossie was going to throw the fight in the case of the vote
challenge, but he was nowhere to be seen.
Instead, the folks I see being interviewed on behalf of the Trump
challenge are the highly qualified legal bulldogs Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell. Then I discover that Bossie
has tested positive for the coronavirus. That’s
where the headline for this article comes in.
It’s an ill wind that blows no one any good, as the saying goes. Could it be that Trump has been rescued from
another of his bad personnel moves at the most opportune of moments?
In case you might be inclined to disagree with
my assessment of Bossie, I have reproduced below in
its entirety the article I published on September 8, 2016, upon the occasion of
his appointment as deputy campaign manager, complete with a telling addendum
from September 21. Pay careful attention
to the conversation between Bossie and the late Reed
Irvine of Accuracy in Media if you think Bossie
should be in the same room with the likes of a Sidney Powell or a Rudy Giuliani
when it comes to mental acuity. It’s in
the last section entitled, “Bossie’s Revealing Taped
Phone Conversation.”
Does a Real Opponent Hire Fake Opposition?
Donald Trump Brings David Bossie Onboard
“Trump Hires the Original
Hillary Hunter,” screamed the September 1 headline of The Daily
Beast online. They were talking about David Bossie, the head of the
conservative organization, Citizens United, whom Trump had just appointed as
his deputy campaign manager. Here’s a sample of the misinformation
that the left-leaning web site doled out under the headline:
Bossie certainly knows how to dig up dirt, and
his appointment signals that the Trump campaign may be revisiting the
anti-Clinton playbook that Bossie helped
write in the 1990s.
Bossie knows the litany of Clinton scandals
better than most; he’s been bird-dogging the powerful couple since before Bill
became president, and helped get the anti-Clinton
attack machine up and running in Washington.
In the Trump campaign, Bossie will
be steeped once again in some of the darkest conspiracy theories surrounding
the Democratic nominee, including that Hillary Clinton was involved in or even
responsible for the death of White House deputy counsel Vince Foster, whose
body was found in July 1993 in a Washington-area park with a self-inflicted
gunshot wound.
Please note the use of
the ever-popular “conspiracy theories” pejorative, meaning, as always,
explanations for heinous crimes that differ from those given by the government
and the mainstream press, and the clever way in which The Daily Beast assures
you that in one notorious case the alternative explanation is
false. Rather than stating as though it were a proven fact that
Vince Foster committed suicide, they say that his body was found “with a self-inflicted
gunshot wound,” which is just another way of saying precisely that.
Ruth Marcus in her follow-up opinion piece in The Washington Post had
this to say:
If Bossie’s name doesn’t ring a bell, you’re lucky,
because it means that you haven’t been immersed for the past
two decades-plus in the mucky minutiae of the right’s no-holds-barred
war against Bill and Hillary Clinton.
This is a war in which Bossie has
risen from foot soldier to general, in large part thanks to his willingness to
do anything in pursuit of his prey. He is the Captain Ahab of
Clinton haters.
Bossie’s Clinton Popgun
No, Ruth, I have been
observing Bossie much more meticulously and
objectively than you have for a long time, and when it comes to Clinton scandal
hunting I can say with some confidence that he is much more the
Elmer Fudd than the Captain Ahab of the Clinton
hunters. “I’m going to get you, you wascally wabbit.” Not
only have I observed him, but I have documented my
observations. The following passage is from my January 27, 2012,
article, “Who Is Citizens United?”
In Dreyfus 5 we saw one very good way of identifying members of the
propaganda sub-strata. That is the unjustified publicity they often receive
from those on the crust. The Washington Post told us how
Citizens United had two full-time researchers looking
into the death of Deputy White House Counsel, Vincent Foster, researchers who
curiously didn't seem to be scoring any hits in what the military would call a
target-rich environment. Here is part of the relevant passage:
Before leaving the
subject of apparent cloak-and-daggery involved
in the Foster "political firestorm," we must mention a couple of very
curious organizations showcased by [Dan E.] Moldea [in
his book Washington Tragedy, How the Death of Vincent
Foster Ignited a Political Firestorm]. Referring to a March 13, 1994, article in The
Washington Post, he writes, "[Michael] Isikoff also
spotlights Floyd Brown, the chairman of Citizens United, a nonprofit
conservative group, which has hired two full-time investigators to investigate
Foster's death. One of the investigators is David Bossie,
known by some as a young attack dog who has been brought on, specifically, to
investigate President Clinton in a practice known as opposition research."
He also reminded us that Brown had been behind the production of the Willie
Horton commercials which played on racial fears and made Michael
Dukakis, in his presidential campaign against George Bush in 1988, appear to be
soft on crime.
That Isikoff article—and particularly that passage—had
jumped out at me when I first read it, but certainly not because I believed it
was true. I surmised that what I was witnessing was the propaganda technique
that would later reach its finest flower in the Moldea book. The
Post, I suspected, was intentionally showcasing Citizens United to give the
group free publicity, building them up as legitimate, though unscrupulous,
overzealous, and exceptionally-partisan conservative
opponents of Bill Clinton. Those thinking of themselves as conservative would
then gravitate toward the group rather than form their own groups while
everyone else would be given an easy explanation as to where all these
scurrilous, irresponsible and unfounded charges against the Clintons might be
coming from. For their part, Brown and his group could be counted on the create
a lot of sound and fury primarily about minor and complicated Clinton financial
shenanigans centered around the joint vacation-home investment with the McDougals [Jim and Susan] known as Whitewater, with perhaps a sexual peccadillo or two thrown in for
spice.
These were my suspicions
because, active as I was in looking into the Clinton administration misdeeds by
this time and although I lived and worked in the Washington area, I had never
heard of Citizens United. Most importantly, in the small world of people nosing
into the Foster death the paths of the "two full-time investigators"
had never crossed mine. Bossie had not been
named as one of them, as Moldea implies,
and, at any rate, I had not heard of him either. I also wondered how, if they
were spending so much time on the case they were yet
to come up with anything that had been made public, considering all there was
to come up with. I tracked down a phone number for the group and called them,
asking them who the two Foster investigators were. The woman on the other end
of the line didn't know what I was talking about and couldn't find anyone there
at that moment who did. I requested that she have one of their two
investigators call me so we could compare notes should she ever ferret him out
and asked her to send me some of the group's material. I never heard from the
"investigators," but I did get some material from them although it
took at least a month to arrive. The literature was slick and
expensive-looking, with a number of boxes to check at the bottom of the last
page for how much money I would send them, ending on the top end at some
outrageously high figure, but the disclosures of Clinton misdeeds were so bland
and the organization had been so languid in responding to my initial inquiry,
one had to wonder why anyone would be moved to send them a dime. The distinct
impression left with the perceptive reader was that the plea for contributions
was there to give the group some visible means of support. To this day I have
never read or heard of the first thing with respect to the Foster case that
this organization has ever uncovered or publicized.
Later when I learned that Bossie had
ended up, in spite of his lack of legal, law-enforcement or even journalistic
experience, as Rep. [Dan] Burton's chief investigator of the Clinton scandals,
I was not at all surprised. I was even less surprised when he turned out to be
the guy held responsible for the Burton-discrediting selective release of Webb
Hubbell's prison tapes. It is no less than what one should expect of a
fake-right operative.
Republican Dan Burton Also Fake Opposition
As one could have well expected, Bossie’s performance
for Burton, particularly when it comes to the Foster case, was every bit as
feckless as it was when he was working for Citizens United. One can
get some appreciation of his untrustworthiness and unreliability right off the
bat in this taped telephone conversation between Burton and Reed Irvine of Accuracy
in Media. At the beginning of the conversation Irvine tells Burton that he has
a contact who has some hot information on the crash of TWA 800 that he would
like to share with key members of Congress like Burton but he has one big
reservation, that is, that it might fall into the irresponsible hands of Bossie who might leak it prematurely.
The full conversation reveals that as fake opposition goes, Burton
and Bossie were really a perfect
match. I have analyzed it in “Taped Exchange Exposes ‘Pit Bull’ Dan Burton as Yapping Lap Dog.” Key background for understanding the
significance of the conversation is in this passage:
When the Republicans had gained control of the House of
Representatives the previous November and Burton had unexpectedly been elevated
to the chairmanship of the Government Reform and Oversight Committee, critics
of the government in the Foster case had good reason to believe that, at
last, a truly independent inquiry would be made. A leader among
that group was a man who had already done quite a bit of investigation of his
own, Reed Irvine, the head of the conservative media watchdog organization,
Accuracy in Media. His most notable discovery known at the time to those
of us who had also looked into the Foster death was that the X-ray technician
responsible for maintenance of the X-ray machine that was to have been used in
the Foster autopsy reported that the machine had been installed only a little
more than a month before the autopsy, and no problems with it had been
reported. This contradicted autopsy doctor James Beyer’s report that no
X-rays were available because of a faulty machine with which he said they had
had “numerous problems.” (See Part 3 of my “America’s
Dreyfus Affair, the Case of the Death of Vincent Foster.”)
In the phone conversation Irvine’s exasperation is palpable as it
becomes evident that Burton, with Bossie by
his side, is going to welch on his promise to Irvine that he would, with his
new power of committee chairman, investigate the Foster death.
Bossie Meets DC Dave
My one personal encounter with Bossie came
in the summer of 1998, a little more than a half-year after Kenneth Starr’s
team had released its report concluding, once again, that Vince Foster had
committed suicide. To those of us who are concerned with truth and
justice, the really important thing about that report is that the three-judge
panel that appointed Starr forced him to include at the end the submission by the lawyer, John Clarke, for the aggrieved witness in the case, Patrick
Knowlton, that, to my mind, thoroughly demolishes the suicide
conclusion. At least as important as that fact is the further fact
that the American press completely blacked out the news of this addition to the
report. In Part 3 of “America’s
Dreyfus Affair, the Case of the Death of Vincent Foster” I called it “The Great
Suppression of ’97.” They continue to suppress that news to the
present day, and it is only because of that suppression that they can get by
with scoffing at critics of the official suicide-from-depression conclusion and
calling them schoolyard style names. One would expect that, in
contrast to the mainstream media, the leading investigator for the leading
Congressional critic of the Clintons would be all over this Clarke-Knowlton
submission and would, indeed, be wielding it like a club. At
least, that is what one might expect from a genuine Clinton
opponent. Here is my report on our encounter:
David Bossie, former lead
investigator for Rep. Dan Burton's Committee on Government Oversight and
Reform, in response to a question at a small gathering at the National Press
Club, said that he had only read "part" of the report by Kenneth
Starr on the death of Vincent Foster and expressed surprise to learn that there
was a 20-page addendum to the report submitted by the lawyer for Patrick
Knowlton, the witness who is suing members of the FBI for harassment and
intimidation. He also demonstrated annoyance at getting questions on the Foster
death case, saying that he was unprepared, when he came to the gathering
presided over by veteran journalist, Sarah McClendon, to talk mainly about his
experience with the Webster Hubbell prison tapes.
Contradicting a 1994 report by Michael Isikoff in The
Washington Post, he said that when he worked for Floyd Brown's Citizens
United, he was the only investigator the organization had. Isikoff reported that the organization had "two
full-time researchers working on the Foster case alone." He claimed at the
gathering tonight that he had interviewed some of the emergency workers who
were at Fort Marcy Park the night the body was discovered,
but could remember no names.
Bossie excused his former boss, Burton, for not pursuing the Foster
case (and challenged a questioner who proclaimed that Foster was murdered by
asking, "How do you know? Were there witnesses?) by saying that
Burton had done more than any member of Congress to advance the case and he had
been pilloried for his actions by both Democrats and Republicans. More
investigation of Foster, he intimated, would interfere with their inquiry into
such serious matters as the funneling of funds from the Chinese government to
the Clinton campaign. He said the D'Amato Committee had already called
witnesses on the Foster death and there was no point in going through that
again.
Bossie also revealed that he, like reporter Christopher Ruddy, is a
product of Morton Blackwell's Leadership Institute.
Media Creation Bossie
In spite of Bossie’s humiliating
dismissal from Burton’s staff, later in the year he got some gratuitous free
publicity from one of the newspapers blacking out the crucial part of Starr’s
report on Foster, the “conservative” Washington Times. Here
is a sample of what I wrote about it at the time:
Page A4 of today's Washington Times, in a section
labeled "On Media," has this headline: "New
web site focuses on Clinton scandals." What follows is 17
column inches of free, totally uncritical advertising for the new web site
nominally attributed to the infamous David Bossie who "...was
forced to resign in May after a complex Capitol Hill flap. Under Chairman Dan
Burton, Indiana Republican, the committee publicly released doctored
transcripts of Webster Hubbell's jailhouse conversations, which cast the first
lady in a poor light, indeed."
"President Clinton called the edited material a 'violation'
of Mr. Hubbell's privacy."
"Yet Mr. Bossie has
enjoyed a reputation as a straight shooter among many Hill denizens and media
members."
---
You will never see [the
URL for “America’s Dreyfus Affair, the Case of the Death
of Vincent Foster”] given in The
Washington Times like the Bossie site (dead link) that they give us in their
article. They tell us further, with breathless enthusiasm, that "With
no more publicity than a mention in Roll Call last Friday, his
new Web site has already been visited by 500 users."
With this article they are doing their best to elevate that
number.
Bossie’s Revealing Taped Phone Conversation
Virtually as I am composing this essay, the most damning evidence
yet of Bossie as Clinton-hunter has come to
light. Irvine didn’t just talk to his employer Burton; he talked on
the phone to Bossie, as well, and Irvine taped
all his phone conversations. Here we get to listen to Bossie tout
to Irvine the just-published book Blood Sport by James
Stewart, a book that Hillary had urged him to write, Stewart tells us in his
prologue. It is also a book that claimed, most improbably, that
Foster had laid bare his marital troubles to Clinton crony Susan Thomases just a few days before his violent
death. Bossie pushes that story strongly
to Irvine, who is skeptical. Bossie’s stumbling
effort to overcome Irvine’s skepticism is very revealing.
Writing in the house organ AIM Report, Irvine tells us why this story that Stewart attributes to Thomases is almost certainly not true:
Stewart says Foster
killed himself because he was seriously depressed. He claims everything in
Foster's life was falling apart, including his marriage. He got that from
Hillary Clinton's good friend, Susan Thomases.
He put it in his book, not knowing that an FBI interview report dated 6/14/94,
records that Thomases saw no change in
Foster's appearance or demeanor and was completely shocked by his death. She
"could offer no reason or speculation as to why he may have taken his
life."
Stewart has repeated
these serious errors even after they were called to his attention. He
apparently feels safe in doing so. The New York Times and other big media won't
expose such flaws even when it is clear that they are based on lies and deceit.
Why? Because the Times
and other big media, like James Stewart, are so committed to the suicide theory
that they refuse to acknowledge its weaknesses.
In his phone
conversation, Irvine provides supporting evidence for his assertion that Foster
was hardly the sort of man to have confided such intimate things to anyone,
much less to the sort of person that Susan Thomases was. For
what he means by his poke at Thomases, we turn
to page 228 of Joyce Milton’s 1999 book, First Partner Hillary Rodham
Clinton:
Thomases shared
many of Hillary’s more abrasive qualities, except that unlike Hillary she made
little attempt to keep them under control. She monitored other
people’s smoking and eating habits, and had an unjustified
faith in her own snap judgments and used up a lot of the energy in whatever
room she happened to be in at the moment. “I’ll kill you for that”
or “You’ll never work again in this business” was her idea of a mild rebuke,
and she was soon embroiled in feuds with the Democratic National Committee
chairman David Wilhelm, campaign counsel David Ifshin,
Dee Dee Myers and even Al Gore.
This writer has
also weighed in previously on the improbability of this little
encounter, and further, the great insensitivity of relating it:
And they say it’s the skeptics who don’t care about the feelings
of the Foster family.
The fact that Vincent Foster had to be savvy enough to realize how
it would certainly be taken for him to run down his wife after nightfall in the
privacy of another woman’s boudoir, even if he didn’t mean it that way, is
reason enough to doubt firmly that this extraordinary conversation ever took
place. The fact that Ms. Thomasesneglected
to tell the FBI about it when they interviewed her as a part of Robert Fiske’s
investigation is another strong reason to doubt it. What she told her FBI
interviewers is that she last saw Foster on the previous Wednesday or Thursday,
about the time of the belatedly reported nocturnal tete a tete,
but she believes they had lunch together with some other people. "She
noted no change in his demeanor or physical appearance...His death came as a
complete shock to her and she can offer no reason or speculation as to why he
may have taken his life." And that would include marital difficulties, we
must infer.
Now we learn that the
press-touted “Clinton hunter” David Bossie energetically
pushed the story at the time and, by his own assertion, played an important role
in putting the Hillary Clinton-inspired book together. One
must wonder if Donald Trump realizes what sort of man he has hired as his
deputy campaign manager. If he does, we must wonder further what
sort of game is being played here.
Addendum
I have discovered this 2010 interview question by John Hawkins of
the Internet site rightwingnews.com and Bossie’s response:
Now I need to ask you one more Clinton question because you were
also involved in the Whitewater investigation. There’s one question that comes
up a lot about that, still to this day, and you hear people ask about it, more
in private than in public — but simple question, Vince Foster — do you think he
killed himself?
I do.
I actually was on the crime scene the next day and evaluated the
crime scene. I have been a firefighter in Montgomery County, Maryland now for
21 plus years. At the time I had only been there several years. But I’ve seen a
lot of things and received a lot of training related to walking up on folks. It
just doesn’t seem like there was any other way.
At the time, there were concerns and questions. My biggest
question at the time was about the cover-up at his office. His office was sealed and you had law enforcement, including the Secret
Service, kept at bay. The Justice Department lawyers were kept outside, while
you had Bernard Nussbaum, Patsy Thomasson, and Maggie Williams…man, I
haven’t thought of these names in years. All of them were seen by a Secret
Service officer by the name of Henry O’Neill. Why I remember all these
things I have no idea….
Forget the second paragraph. It’s all
misdirection. What about the evidence that Bossie says
he gathered from his visit to the scene at Fort Marcy Park the day after
Foster’s death, the evidence that he says persuaded him that it was a suicide. Does that make any sense to
you? I didn’t think so. Imagine what follow-up questions
Reed Irvine might have had if he had been the interviewer, or
think of what questions you would like to ask. I don’t know about
you, but I wouldn’t even want the guy fighting a fire at my house, although he
might be just the sort that Dr. Matthew McNiece would want working for him at Howard Payne
University. Bossie would not exactly
intimidate him with his intellect, and he strikes me as the sort who would be
quite good at sucking up to his boss.
David Martin
November 12, 2020
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