FBI finds no foul play in Senator Paul Wellstone plane crash

Some 219 pages of FBI documents, newly released and obtained by Minnesota Public Radio into the investigation of a deadly plane crash in which U.S. Senator Paul Wellstone and 7 others were killed,  tries to put an end to rumors and speculation of foul play.

Eleven days before a hotly contested general election, Senator Wellstone, age 58, died in a plane crash near Eveleth, Minnesota, 8 years ago, on October 25, 2002 during a heated political race. The chartered Beechcraft King Air A100 (41BE) in which he was traveling from St. Paul to attend the funeral of a friend's son, crashed into a forest. Everyone on board perished, including his wife, a daughter, the two pilots, and three close aides.

Many suspected foul play as Senator Wellstone was the target of death threats for his liberal political views, one as recently as the day before the crash. Reminiscent of the mysterious disappearance of powerful Teamster's boss Jimmy Hoffa, whose body has never been found, there were rumors that the American Trucking Association had planned to disconnect the aircraft's de–icers because Wellstone was allegedly trying to expose organized crime within the trucking industry.

The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) had investigated the crash, and cited pilot error in their final report, issued on March 30, 2004. The board judged that while cloud cover might have prevented the flight crew from seeing the airport, icing did not affect the airplane's performance during the descent. They later determined that the likely cause of the accident was "the failure of both the pilot and copilot to maintain a safe minimum airspeed, leading to an aerodynamic stall from which they could not recover."

Under a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, Minnesota Public Radio (MPR) obtained the FBI's files on Wellstone, who had been closely monitored by the government before becoming a U.S. Senator, for his anti war activism in the 1960s and 70s. In its reports, the FBI noted that the ill-fated Beechcraft did not have a cockpit voice recorder (CVR) or flight data recorder (FDR). There were also no bullet holes in the aircraft. They also looked into various criminal leads, and found no basis for them.

The Beechcraft King Air A100 is a high performance aircraft which has a cruise speed of 260 mph, a stall speed of 90 mph, a range of 1,530 miles, and a service ceiling of 24,850 feet. It carries a crew of 1-2, and up to 7 passengers.

Not everyone will be satisfied by these reports. As shown in the attached video lecture by Dr. James H. Fetzer, Ph.D, on November 16, 2005 at the University of Minnesota Duluth (UMD), claiming that the plane crash was actually an assassination.

Wellstone, a Democrat, was first elected to the Senate in 1990 against the incumbent Republican, Rudy Boschwitz, in a close race. He beat Mr. Boschwitz again in 1996 by a much wider margin. Republican Norm Coleman won the 2002 Minnesota U.S. Senate Election by two percentage points, just 11 days after the fatal plane crash. Senator Coleman was defeated in 2008 by former Saturday Night Live (SNL) comedian Al Franken, who won the contest by a razor thin 312 votes, and only after court battles and a final recount. It was the same general election in which Barack Obama became the first black person to be President of the United States.

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