One of the most shameful episodes in contemporary American history, Kenneth Starr’s outrageous attempt at a bloodless coup d’ etat of an American President has had a dramatic ironic sequel. Starr was special prosecutor who recommended the impeachment of Bill Clinton on the basis of his lie where he denied a consensual sexual relationship with an intern. Starr a self styled, self righteous, sanctimonious, prissy arbiter of public morality, but himself an amoral jurist, has now been disgraced by the fact that under his watch complaints of serious sexual assaults were discouraged and ignored so as not to interfere with the performance of the football team at Baylor College. These incidents occurred when he was President of the prestigious religious Baylor College in Texas. For those who don’t even know what Jay H. Ell is alluding too, and sadly there are so many that are so young nowadays, Starr for practical purposes served the ends of those whom Hillary Clinton once described as “A vast right wing conspiracy that was out to get her husband”.
So lets begin at the beginning.
CLINTON SANCTIONS A SPECIAL PROSECUTOR TO INVESTIGATE THE CLINTONS
From the word go the Clinton’s have engendered a visceral response from the right which has carried on to this day. It’s genesis is not necessarily rational and the underlying thesis behind it is that the pair of them are the worst felons and crooks that have ever hit the political scene. What irks these critics most is that they maintain that the Clintons are “so shrewd and bent” that they always get away with their skulduggery. Swirling around The White House in the dawn of Clinton’s Presidency was that there had to be scandals galore that this Democrat Southern sleeze and his all too clever by half shrew of a wife had perpetrated while running their second rate backward State like a banana Republic. (Remember that for over the previous twenty years the Presidency had been under the aegis of a Republican for sixteen).
It did not take long for the bloodhounds to focus on a failed investment that the Clintons’ were party too, a land development project named Whitewater Development Corporation. There were other smears thrown in as well like a cattle futures deal and a Savings and Loan Company, but the one that dragged on, largely because of the persistence of Clinton adversary David Hale, a convicted felon, was Whitewater. Previous investigations into the scandal had exonerated the Clintons but that wasn’t enough. It was never enough with the Clintons. So Bill Clinton took the unusual step of instituting a Special Prosecutor, who has unbridled power and reach, to investigate the matter once and for all. He obviously did this confident that he and his wife had not indulged in criminal wrong doing.
THE RIGHT WING JUDICIARY TAKE OVER AND APPOINT STARR
The Justice Department appointed a known Republican jurist Robert Fiske as Special Prosecutor and after his extensive investigation he was just about to exonerate the Clintons when his appointment was up for renewal. The latter should have been a formality. However a three Judge Panel, which consisted of known Republican activists, appointed Kenneth Starr who had strong Republican conservative credentials. The Democratic Senators went ballistic in the full knowledge that Senator Launch Haircloth, the leader of “The Remove Special Prosecutor Friske" campaign had lunched with the head of the Judicial Panel, Judge Senelle, who hailed from North Carolina. Also present was Republican Senator Helms a friend and fellow North Carolinian, who apparently had facilitated the meeting between the two. Helms was believed to be very influential in the Judge’s appointment by President Reagan. Furthermore Starr had already opined against Clinton in the Paula Jones litigation and consequently his appointment was a major conflict of interest.
STARR’S “INVESTIGATION” INTO WHITEWATER, VINCE FOSTER’S ALLEGED MURDER BY THE CLINTONS AND TRAVELGATE
The zealous prosecutor re investigated the Whitewater controversy, the alleged murder of Clinton aide Vince Foster and Travelgate and anything he could find on alleged wrongdoing by the Clintons in the 12 years Bill had occupied office in Arkansas, initially as Attorney General and for ten years as Governor. In addition his wife served in several positions in State affairs and as a lawyer. He resorted to tactics that might have been questionable in going after murderers and bank robbers. In his relentless venture Starr’s central uncorroborated witness was David Hale who was getting payments from billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife. The latter financed “The Arkansas Project” which had invested over two million dollars to discredit Clinton. This fact was common cause and by ignoring it Starr risked being labelled a co conspirator in Scaife’s endeavour.
During his scorched earth inquisition he found multiple felonies unrelated to the Clintons by those involved in finance and politics in Arkansas. All in all he laid criminal charges against fourteen individuals. Some of these prosecutions were nothing short of scandalous and were naked attempts to force evidence from individuals who claimed that they were locked up for contempt because they refused to “lie” and tell Starr what he wanted to hear. Most notorious of these persecutions was that of Susan McDougall who claimed that if she answered Starr’s questions honestly she would be charged with perjury by the intrepid public servant.
(McDougal was vindicated in the end. After eighteen months in jail, eight of which were in solitary confinement and having been subject to “Diesel Treatment” being schlepped from prison to prison across the country, she was retried for contempt of court and obstruction of justice. She maintained that she would answer questions to anyone other than Starr. Although by definition her refusal to answer questions to a Grand Jury was contempt, the jury acquitted her by using the rare stratagem of jury nullification. By so doing they implicitly maintained that the law was being wrongly applied to the defendant).
STARR MOVES ONTO SEX, MORE SEX AND SALACIOUS SMUT
Having collected a lemon in his investigation into Clinton malfeasance Starr hit the jackpot when a Linda Tripp surreptitiously taped the outpourings of a friend and confidant who was a Whitehouse intern and who had been having a protracted sequence of oral sex with Clinton. Tripp then contacted the Special Prosecutor’s office and fed him the tapes that she had secretly and some argued illegally made. Starr then reinvigorated his reign of terror attempting to get all the sexual goods on Clinton subpoenaing dozens of civil servants and individuals in order to rake up dirt on the President. Those targeted racked up massive legal bills in an attempt to avoid landing up where Susan McDougal had. The media covered the processions that had to give evidence to the grand jury.
Starr persisted, at tax payers’ expense to pry into all Clinton’s extramarital sexual exploits and heavens knows he had ample material. He included all in his final report barely mentioning the Whitewater scandals he had been appointed to review. For example he discussed Katherine Willey who had alleged that Clinton had groped her in the Oval Office and banally opined that no one knew who was telling the truth Clinton or Willey. All this when his chief snitch Linda Tripp had reported to him that Katherine Willey had discussed with her, (Tripp), Willey’s, desire to have an affair with Clinton. Willey’s lack of credibility was further in evidence when a WhiteHouse aide accused her of wanting her to produce a false affidavit which would have indicated that Willey had told her of Clinton’s alleged groping. Starr instead of leaving it at that charged the WhiteHouse aide with making false statements! Willey was, to put it kindly, not a credible witness and the case was dismissed. In addition Clinton released letters from Willey that corroborated Tripp’s version of her state of mind. Yet Starr saw fit, in his judicial report,to introduce this tenditious gossip that wouldn’t have passed muster for publication in the National Enquirer.
It was not until Clinton was entrapped by the special prosecutor in a deposition in the Paula Jones litigation that Starr finally hit pay dirt. Starr colluded with the right wing Jones legal team and fed them what Tripp had told them about Lewinsky. Clinton, for practical purposes, denied having “sexual relations” with Lewinsky. That “lie” proved to be the basis of Starr’s 336 page referral to the Republican controlled House Judicial Committee for Clinton’s impeachment.
A storm of criticism was showered on Starr that significantly included the legal community. The acknowledged guru of the American bench, Chief Justice Posner of the Seventh Circuit, maintained that to entrap a target in this fashion was outside the accepted norm. He went further adding that the gratuitous sexual detail he went into his report was plainly just to embarrass the President. The motive for this approach was likely because Starr detested the President. Posner concluded “We expect better from our prosecutors - they are not to hate their quarry”.
Jay H. Ell believes that regardless of the motive of the Special Prosecutor’s vilifying behavior, the result was the same - to provide the weaponry needed to axe Clinton as President. Short of assassination impeachment was the only option to effect this end. He had diverted from his original mandate and went into the gutter and exposed behavior that where not illegal was none of anyone’s business as was reflected by society giving Clinton a seventy percent approval rating following the Republican attempt to remove him following impeachment.
THE SEQUELS
The only positive outcome of Starr’s controversial exercise, which had cost eighty million dollars, was that he had shown himself to be so partisan and biased that no Republican Administration could ever nominate this former Federal Judge and Attorney General to the Supreme Court. Back in the civic world he flirted with litigation but then went into a succession of academic positions, the most recent being the President of Baylor College.
In the past two weeks Starr has made the national news on two separate occasions. The first related to a damning report by an independent legal firm investigating him as College President and the football coach for their handling of sexual assault allegations against members of the football team. The report concluded, Inter alia “ The University’s student conduct processes were wholly inadequate … and in some cases the University failed to take action”. Even more damning was the statement, “ That unnamed Baylor Administrators directly discouraged complainants from reporting and in one instance retaliated against a complainant who had alleged rape”. “All in all rather than eliminate a hostile environment they accommodated or created one”, the investigators found. The Baylor football team was characterized as a “rogue state” beholden to no one. In spite of all the publicity surrounding the scandal including outcomes of criminal trials, Starr claimed ignorance. The University Regents removed him as President but to date have allowed him to remain as Chancellor.
The second instance of Starr’s recent national prominence involved his remarks in Philadelphia on the launching of a book, “The Presidents and the Constitution: A Living History where he had contributed a chapter on Reagan.But it was not Reagan who he opined on, rather it was Bill Clinton. He regretted that Clinton’s legacy was viewed through the “legacy of unpleasantness”. (“Unpleasantness is the euphemism Starr has utilized to reference the whole sordid episode and outcome of his notorious intervention). He continued that Clinton had been the most gifted politician coming out of the baby boomer generation. The former President had “remarkable gifts and a genuine empathy for human beings”, he informed. The now disgraced University Administrator lauded the work of the Clinton Foundation.
AT THE END OF THE DAY
In a sequel to the sequel Starr lamented the “Utter decline and erosion of civility and discourse in current American politics”. What he omitted to say is that he wrote the playbook and while he praised the Clinton Foundation as “redemptive” there is nothing that the man, who has been called a Sleezeball, can do to undo the havoc he has wreeked, the lives he has ruined, including that of naive consenting young intern and the legacy of polluting American politics with salacious pornography and by dignifying rumor and smear with an eighty million dollar investigation that proved nothing but provided material for the innuendo to live on.
All his effort was to be capitalized on by an intellectually bankrupt opportunistic Presidential nominee, Donald J. Trump, who is an avid student of the book that Professor Starr wrote.Trump is doing him the ultimate honor by putting it all into practice. By so doing Starr’s legacy has been kept alive. History will show that it was he that dramatically paved the way to the “decline and erosion…. in American Politics”. In defense of his protege, Donald J. Trump, unlike his mentor, he has never claimed respectability.
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