Whitewater: The Foster Report
This is the full text of the report on the 1993 death of White House counsel Vincent W. Foster, Jr., compiled by Whitewater independent counsel Kenneth Starr. After an exhaustive three-year investigation, Starr reaffirmed that Foster's death was a suicide. This file does not contain the report's footnotes or appendix. Read the Oct. 11, 1997 Post story about the report's findings.
Donald Trump “called theories of possible foul play ‘very serious’ and the circumstances of [Vince] Foster’s death ‘very fishy.’”
— “Trump escalates attack on Bill Clinton,” The Washington Post, May 24, 2016
Donald Trump appears intent on dredging up every last bit of every Clinton controversy, including the 1993 death of the Clintons’ close personal friend, White House deputy counsel Vincent W. Foster Jr.
Foster “had intimate knowledge of what was going on,” Trump told The Washington Post. “He knew everything that was going on, and then all of a sudden he committed suicide.” The presumptive GOP presidential nominee said, “I don’t know enough to really discuss it” but “I will say there are people who continue to bring it up because they think it was absolutely a murder.”
Kavanaugh, then 30, argued that unsupported allegations that Foster may have been murdered gave Starr the right to probe the matter more deeply. Foster's death had already been the focus of two investigations, both concluding that Foster committed suicide.
"We are currently investigating Vincent Foster's death to determine, among other things, whether he was murdered in violation of federal criminal law," Kavanaugh wrote to Starr and six other officials in a memo offering legal justification for the probe. "[I]t necessarily follows that we must have the authority to fully investigate Foster's death.
The four-page memo, obtained by The Washington Post from the Library of Congress, sheds light on how Kavanaugh's thinking evolved on the legal rights of sitting presidents.
His handling of Starr's Foster probe helped elevate Kavanaugh's career, but the lengthy inquiry enabled conspiracy theories to flourish and add to the tumult of the Clinton presidency. Once the Foster matter was closed, Starr's...