Fuck You, Kenneth Starr
Kenneth Starr says he never should have led the investigation that resulted in the impeachment of former President Bill Clinton.
Starr said his role in a yearslong investigation of Clinton should have focused instead on Clinton's role in the failed Arkansas land deal known as Whitewater.
"There was a sense on the part of the country that my (Lewinsky) effort was an effort somehow to expand the (Whitewater) investigation, when it was separate," he told the Santa Barbara News-Press following a speech on Wednesday.
The former independent counsel, now dean of the Pepperdine University law school, says "the most fundamental thing that could have been done differently" was for somebody else to have investigated Clinton's statements under oath denying he had an affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky.
Does anybody else smell a rat?
For those of you who were either too young to remember or were living in a cave, this is what Hardon Kenny is referring to:
( The WaPo has a pretty comprehensive timeline here )
1978 - the Clintons and McDougals jointly purchase 230 acres of land in Arkansas. The deal didn't work out and the Clintons ultimately lost $42K.
1993 - Clinton inaugurated, Clinton family friend and White House Counsel Vince Foster commits suicide. Congressional Republicans have been shrieking and flinging shit like deranged howler monkeys since the election - now they begin seriously putting the screws to Attorney General Janet Reno to appoint an Independent Counsel to investigate the land deal and the details of Foster's death.
1994 - In January, Reno appoints Robert Fiske as IC. Said then-Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole (R-KS), "People who know him think he is extremely well-qualified [and] independent." Senator Alfonse D'Amato said of Fiske, "He is a man of enormous integrity." Needless to say, the Loony Right found independence and integrity unacceptable. Enter North Carolina Senators Helms and Faircloth. James Carville lays it out nicely:
Helms and Lauch Faircloth, the unofficial spokesmen for the raving ultraright, paid a visit to a fellow Tarheel, Judge David Sentelle. But they weren't just paying a call on a neighbor for some iced tea. Helms and Faircloth don't go anywhere without a program, and they had one to share with Judge Sentelle. Judge Sentelle, by fortuitous coincidence, was head of a three-judge panel that oversees the independent counsel. And by an equally happy coincidence, Sentelle happened to have a cozy history with Senator Helms.
Not only is the good judge a member of Helms's conservative National Congressional Club and a longtime Helms supporter, but his very appointment to the federal bench was sponsored by none other than that esteemed senior senator from North Carolina. Heck, he even served on the appeals panel that overturned the conviction of that old renegade colonel and Iran-contra operative Oliver North....
Now to this day nobody really knows what those three men discussed at their table. Sentelle declared that they spoke about cowboy gear and their prostates (a great lunchtime topic if you don't feel like eating much). But you've got to ask yourself, as I did, if it's possible that maybe, just maybe, North Carolina's dynamic Clinton-bashing duo put in a request for a more aggressive partisan prosecutor, one who would work harder to make a Niagara Falls out of Whitewater.
Well, all I know is what happened after that lunch: Less than a month later -- just eight months after Robert Fiske had been appointed as independent counsel -- Judge Sentelle suddenly fired Mr. Fiske for "perceptions of conflict" mainly arising from his having been appointed by Janet Reno. And then his wife got a nice job working for Senator Faircloth not too long after.
And by now, you know who Judge Sentelle's panel appointed in Fiske's place.
Enter Kenneth Starr. With demented zeal the bastard child of Torquemada and Captain Ahab, this Scourge of Democratic Evildoers, routinely trampled American citizens, Federal & various State laws and common decency in pursuit of something - anything - on which to nail the Clintons.
Julie Hiatt Steele faced down a Grand Jury and ultimately lost nearly everything, including her health, for refusing to corroborate the dubious accusations of her former friend (and merry widow???) Kathleen Willey. Susan McDougal actually did eighteen months for contempt of court, for refusing to lie about her relationship with WJC. Seven months into her sentence, the ACLU filed a lawsuit alleging that McDougal was being held, at Starr's request, in "barbaric" conditions (including 23 hrs/day in a locked, windowless room) in an attempt to coerce her to testify. In May '98, Starr had her indicted for criminal contempt and obstruction but the trial, like so many of his fishing expeditions, was a flop.
The guy was everywhere: holding poor, dumb Monica incommunicado, threatening her mother with jail time, sending armed agents to her brother's dorm.... The bastard's list of victims grew daily- college professors, State employees, anybody he thought he could lean on - truth be damned. Dude even "had his agents rifle thru Hillary's underwear drawers in [the Clintons'] bedroom just to prove what a complete asshole he could be." (old but brilliant piece by Bartcop)
November 19, 1998 - During the first day of impeachment hearings, Starr clears Clinton in relation to the firing of White House travel office workers in 1993 and the improper collection of FBI files revealed in 1996. He also says his office drafted an impeachment referral stemming from Whitewater in 1997, but decided not to send it because the evidence was insufficient. Instead, in order to please his rightwing masters (and ensure that job at Pepperdine - delayed though it was ) he sends Congress the gratuitously pornographic Starr Report.
Now he's back in the news, suggesting that he may have mishandled certain aspects of his original investigation.... Call me suspicious, call me tinfoil - but whenever bad news from your past shows up, and at such a pivotal moment, I get nervous.
So Ken, do the world a favor: shove your retrospection and just crawl back under whatever slimy rock you've been defiling for the past several years, mm-kay?
posted by wfh @ 21:24
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