The Ballad of Patrick Knowlton
Headline: Witness in [Vince] Foster
death loses conspiracy appeal
Washington Times, January
9, 2001, p. A7
Before he'd arrived at the end of the
line
A little publicity would have been
fine,
Shedding some light and putting some
heat
Upon all those justices' honorable
feet.
The key to the Foster case.
Patrick Knowlton,
The man the press erased.
But they wait till the court in their
wisdom refuse
To give him a hearing to bring us the
news.
It's a story, alas, that is getting
quite old:
A citizen's wronged; then he's out in
the cold,
And once it’s too late, the public is
told.
Patrick Knowlton,
The star of the Foster case.
Patrick Knowlton,
The man can’t
be replaced.
Patrick Knowlton,
The star of the Foster case.
Patrick Knowlton,
He cannot be replaced.
David Martin
The following passage is from pp. 314-315 of The
Murder of Vince Foster: America’s Would-Be Dreyfus Affair:
The only game left was the witness-intimidation
lawsuit of Patrick Knowlton that included several members of the
FBI as parties to his intimidation. The suit had originally
been filed in October of 1996, one year after his harassment on the streets of
Washington, D.C., had taken place. A year later, the judicial branch
provided some reason to be hopeful that that they were actually
interested in justice in the Foster case when they forced Starr to
include Knowlton’s critical submission as part of their official report over
Starr’s strenuous, and well-supported objections from a legal standpoint. We
were to discover later that concerning Knowlton’s motion to include his
devastating critical comments as part of Starr’s report, Judge Butzner had written persuasively to his two
colleagues, “I suspect if we deny the motion we will be charged as conspirators
in the cover-up. I suggest we let the motion
and the attachments speak for themselves."
That little episode proved to be an aberration,
however. After almost three years of sitting on it, on September 9,
1999, federal Judge
John Garrett Penn issued a 29-page dismissal of Knowlton’s lawsuit. Here
is the key quote from pp. 24-25 from that order of dismissal:
Plaintiff's submissions also cause the Court to pause
for another reason. The reports of two Independent Counsel [sic], Robert B.
Fiske and Kenneth W. Starr, officially concluded that Mr. Foster's death was a
suicide and that the overwhelming weight of the evidence supports this
conclusion. See Ayman Alouri's Memorandum in Support
of Motion (attaching as an exhibit the conclusion of report of Independent
Counsel Fiske); Report on the Death of Vincent W. Foster, Jr. (Independent
Counsel Kenneth W. Starr), attached to Federal Defendants' Response to Motion
for Leave to File, at 111 ("The available evidence points clearly to
suicide as the manner of death.") and at 114 ("In sum, based on all
the available evidence, which is considerable, the OIC agrees with the
conclusion reached by every official entity that has examined the issue: Mr.
Foster committed suicide by gunshot in Fort Marcy Park on July 20,
1993.").
In short, he simply invoked the authority of the
reports of Fiske and Starr (minus the Knowlton appendix to it), and power had
effectively trumped truth and justice one more time.
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