Legendary investigative reporter Jerry Seper has died: 'pursued news without fear or favor'

Legendary investigative reporter Jerry Seper has died – with his passing and journalistic achievement remembered and memorialized in a front-page story Wednesday by his former paper, The Washington Times. He was 79.

The hard-boiled instincts – and exterior – Seper picked up on the streets of Los Angeles County as a beat cop served him well as an investigative reporter, his colleagues said.

The former Vietnam veteran also was as dogged about fact finding in D.C. City Hall as he was for the Clinton White House.

"Jerry Seper was a lion of a newsman, and living proof that when journalism is practiced properly it sows public good,” said Just The News founder John Solomon, who was Seper’s executive editor and editor-in-chief at The Times in 2008-09 and 2013-15. 

"He was an equal opportunity investigator, who pursued news without fear or favor and with the assurance it would always be delivered accurately, precisely, fairly and neutrally," added Solomon.

"I admired his tenacity and compassion, his willingness to mentor new talent and his uncanny ability to make you laugh with a joke or smile with a story. He leaves a huge void in a news industry sorely in need of successors rooted in his legacy."

Seper died last week at his home in Arizona, according to The Times, which ran his obituary on page A1 of its Wednesday edition.

Condolences and memories of Seper’s work and the soft-heart behind the tough exterior have poured in this week on social media.

"He was a great storyteller, a prolific writer, an old school journalist who was as fair as he was fierce," former Times reporter Audrey Hudson writes in a Facebook post. "He took great pleasure in holding official Washington’s feet to the fire. God help the politician caught in Seper’s crosshairs.

"He was loved, respected, and a little feared by those who knew him. … Seper had a wicked sense of humor. When he wasn't writing stories on corrupt Washington, he was regaling the younger reporters with war stories about journalism's glory days. He was a prankster whose favorite hobby (aside from fishing) was torturing editors. They were our mortal enemies, he instructed."

"Seper joined The Times several years after its founding in 1982 and brought the still-fledgling operation major credibility," reads the newspaper's obituary.

He broke news that key records had been taken out of the office of top Clinton White House aide Vince Foster after his shocking suicide. 

Democrat Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, weeks after that report, became the first major Democrat to call for a special prosecutor to investigate Clinton and first lady Hillary Clinton. That probe would become the Ken Starr investigation that eventually led to the second-ever impeachment and trial of a U.S. president.

Seper also was at the scene of the FBI's sting operation to nab then-D.C. Mayor Marion Barry smoking crack cocaine. 

Among the awards Seper won during his career were the Barnet Nover Memorial Award for investigative reporting, based on his work on Bill Clinton. He accepted the award at the White House Correspondents Association’s annual dinner where the presenter, by tradition, was the president himself.