Starr Says Foster Death Was A Suicide

Independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr announced Tuesday he has concluded White House deputy counsel Vincent Foster Jr. committed suicide in 1993, officially resolving a controversy over a death that some opponents of President Clinton had labeled a murder.

Starr said his findings were “based on investigation, analysis and review of the evidence by experts and experienced investigators and prosecutors.”

With the announcement, Starr became the latest in a string of investigators - including a previous independent counsel, Robert B. Fiske Jr. - to reach that conclusion.

But the findings almost certainly will not satisfy skeptics who have filled the Internet and talk radio shows with dark statements that Foster, a close friend of both the president and first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, met his death at the hands of Clinton aides or sympathizers who allegedly wanted to keep him from spilling White House secrets.

Joseph Farah, executive director of an organization called the Western Journalism Center in Fair Oaks, Calif., which has been critical of the suicide conclusion, called the finding “laughable.”

“His investigation was compromised from the start,” Farah said. “He used the same FBI agents that worked for Fiske to review their own work.”