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Ambrose Evans-Pritchard

The work of British journalist Ambrose Evans-Pritchard is a mix of industrious investigative reporting and irresponsible rumor-mongering. His book, The Secret Life of Bill Clinton: The Unreported Stories, is an example of material that should remain unreported by the general media until it is corroborated with further documentation. A significant number of footnotes track back to rightist anti-Clinton sources, especially to the American Spectator, a neo-conservative magazine that ran articles on Clinton with allegations that often lacked adequate corroboration.

One chapter in The Secret Life of Bill Clinton alleges official misconduct and a cover-up in the death of Vincent Foster, tracing the conspiracy all the way to special prosecutor Kenneth Starr. Other assertions in Evans-Pritchard's book include the claimed assassination of two teenagers who, Evans-Pritchard says, stumbled across a major drug delivery tied to Clinton. Other deaths attributed to Clinton or his operatives are discussed: "Already, people associated with the case were beginning to die in what amounted to a reign of terror among young people in...Arkansas."⁵¹ Evans-Pritchard tells the story of one parent who "joined up with a California film producer named Pat Matrisciana to make a documentary on the deaths."⁵² Matrisciana runs Jeremiah Films, which produces hard right Christian apocalyptic videos simmered with conspiracy theories, and made a widely circulated anti-Clinton video, The Clinton Chronicles.

Evans-Pritchard uses a colleague, James Davidson of the rightist newsletter Strategic Investment, to introduce the idea that Clinton's actions mirror those of Nazi totalitarians.⁵³ Davidson is a far right prophet of financial doom whose book, The Story of a One-Term President, forecasts a vast economic collapse and "bloodbath in U.S. stocks and bonds" under Clinton.⁵⁴ Davidson's in-house "muckraker" for Strategic Investment is Jack Wheeler, described in his bio as a "Veteran of six anti-communist guerilla wars [and] anti-Soviet insurgencies, including those in Nicaragua, Angola, Mozambique, Cambodia, and Laos."⁵⁵

Evans-Pritchard cites Davidson's Strategic Investment several more times, noting that Davidson financed examinations by several handwriting experts of the Foster suicide note.⁵⁶ Claims that the suicide note was a forgery were later debunked, and one "expert" was later revealed as having misrepresented his credentials.⁵⁷ Hard-right ideologue Joe Farah from the Western Journalism Center is introduced as a dispassionate media ethics expert.⁵⁸

According to the 1995 White House memo, Evans-Pritchard was a crucial link in taking hard right conspiracism and publishing it in the London Sunday Telegraph where it was picked up and reported on by mainstream US media. Another British reporter who played a similar role was William Rees-Mogg of The Times of London.⁵⁹

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