Hartnetthas his suspicions about Wellstone’s plane crash

By C. J.
Star Tribune

Count Josh Hartnett among the conspiracy buffs regarding Sen. Paul Wellstone's untimely death in a 2002 plane crash in northern Minnesota.

The cover boy in this month's GQ says, " 'It didn't make any sense' " about the accident that killed Wellstone, his wife, Sheila, their daughter, the pilots and three others.

"He's angry, and he's not convinced that pilot error or mechanical failure or fog was to blame for the crash," writes GQ's Alex Pappademas, who noted that Hartnett "points out how close the race was, how Republicans were hell-bent on winning control of the Senate, how George W. Bush" made several visits to Minnesota "to support Wellstone's opponent, Norm Coleman."

Hartnett is quoted as saying, "It was really, really suspicious, but I don't even want to think that. I just hope it's not true, because that would just be so, so, so wrong."

Pappademas then wrote that when he went to a restroom and that he jotted these observations in his notebook about Hartnett: "Passionate -- unafraid of sounding like a tin-foil hat guy."

I was thinking tin-foil hat-wearing pretty boy.

In an interview Tuesday, Pappademas told me there are a lot of people who believe as Hartnett does. "I have a lot of friends who are from Minnesota, and I quizzed them on it, like On a scale of 1 to 10, how out there is this belief? I don't think anybody believes there is really foul play, necessarily. But a lot of people are suspicious.

"The reason I put it in there is that he did seem passionate about what Wellstone stood for and it seemed to hit him very hard," Pappademas said.