WSJ Review & Outlook
Spinning Starr
Today, a generation after Watergate, we still do not
know the identity of Deep Throat; the editors of The
Washington Post say they will name the inside source confirming so many
of their leaks only after he dies, or gives permission. But in Whitewater,
the current attack on Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr runs, the
important thing is the source of leaks, not the conduct of the President.
What passes for logic from Clinton mouthpiece David Kendall is that there
have been leaks, they have been damaging to the President, and therefore
Mr. Starr must be responsible. In an age when instant communications has
toppled the Soviet empire, they ask us to believe in a hermetic seal around
a case involving the President of the United States receiving oral sex from
a 21-year-old intern. Get real.
Mr. Kendall offers no evidence beyond
newspaper clippings that the leaks come from Mr.
Starr or his office, though a court filing might
produce more. This could be, of course, but is far
from the only possibility. Indeed, the interest of a
prosecutor is usually to assemble his case and
present it at a swoop. On the record Mr. Starr
was trying to delay or stop the publication of the
first leak, Newsweek's scoop of the Lewinsky
tapes. This popped up in the Drudge Report on
the Internet after Mr. Starr had presented his
evidence to the Justice Department, now full of
Clinton loyalists such as the unconfirmable Robert
Litt. The furor was a warning not only to Ms. Lewinsky, but to other
potential witnesses Mr. Starr would have liked to approach privately.
As to the alternatives: Conceivably, though barely so given the current cast
of characters, there is a Deep Throat in the White House, at Justice or
even at Williams & Connolly who thinks the public should know the truth.
The public prints already are full of liberals grossed out by this Presidency;
why not those on the inside?
Possibly the White House or lawyers for various parties think there is
some advantage in confusing Mr. Starr's investigation. Was Presidential
secretary Betty Currie debriefed after her testimony, were memos written
and who received them? Who, by the way, arranged for and paid her
lawyer? In the normal course of a big defense effort, scores of people in
Washington would likely have known of her testimony before it appeared
in the New York Times.
And possibly, as the House's Rep. Dan Burton says has happened with his
investigation, White House tacticians are leaking precisely because they
calculate that the other side will be blamed. Clearly, after all, the White
House is in campaign mode to besmirch Ken Starr. Events of recent days
suggest that an analysis by Mr. Clinton's legal team has concluded that
their strongest strategy is not to meet on the battlefield of facts and law,
but to conduct a political offensive against the IC and his staff.
For those familiar with Mr. Starr's public career, it is amusingly ironic to
hear the likes of Paul Begala pillory him as the ultimate partisan. To the
contrary, when Mr. Starr was George Bush's Solicitor General in the early
1990s, many conservatives thought him professorial to a fault, and
privately criticized his seeming reluctance to push hard to overturn liberal
court precedent. These same doubts about Mr. Starr's toughness
resurfaced when he first got the IC appointment.
And in light of Mr. Starr's current mad-dog reputation, it's ironic to recall
the Pepperdine University episode. By some interpretations, Mr. Starr's
decision to resign his post and retire to Santa Monica suggested at the time
that the former judge didn't have the fortitude to see through an
investigation of the nation's highest public official. Still, ever alert to spin
opportunities, the Clinton side seized on philanthropist Richard Scaife's
financial support of Pepperdine as evidence that Mr. Starr was a pawn of
the far right. This did not prevent an invitation to a White House dinner last
month, approved by Mrs. Clinton, to this same Mr. Scaife for another of
his right-wing philanthropies, the fund to preserve the Presidential
residence.
On our reading, the Clinton geniuses have managed to turn Judge Starr not
into a foaming partisan, but something far more dangerous to their
interests, a real prosecutor. When he took the job, the brainy Mr. Starr
had no credentials as a prosecutor. He knew it, so he recruited a staff that
amounts to a Special Force Team of career prosecutors, with strong
reputations for convicting high public officials of political and financial
crimes. No one, including a President, would choose to take on this
particular prosecution team.
In a way, this makes the Clinton tactics hard to understand as a
calculation, though predictable as a habit. No matter what opposition
they've encountered--Paula Jones, Linda Tripp, Kathleen Willey, Fred
Thompson, Judge Royce Lamberth--the Clinton side has always chosen
the same strategy of stonewalling, smash-mouth lawyering. This brazen
strategy has in a sense "worked," culminating in the current joke that if Mr.
Clinton had been the Titanic the iceberg would have sunk.
But it is a strategy that enrages and hardens nearly all of Mr. Clinton's
presumed enemies; witness Paula Jones's refusal to settle or Linda Tripp's
tape recordings or Judge Lamberth's denunciations of their legal tactics.
The most plausible explanation for Ken Starr's behavior is that the
relentless Clinton stonewalling and public demagoguing have finally made
him as aggressive as the more experienced prosecutors on his staff. This
may produce poor polling numbers for Mr. Starr, but at a purely legal level
simply can't be good news for the White House.
If in fact we are expected to take Mr. Kendall's accusations seriously as a
matter of legal ethics, Mr. Clinton should begin the process of firing Mr.
Starr, as laid out in 28 U.S.C. Sec. 596. This requires "the personal action
of the Attorney General," who must submit the facts and grounds for
removal to the court and to the House and Senate Judiciary committees.
The removed IC then may appeal to the U.S. District Court for D.C.
Given this prospect, don't expect President Clinton or lawyer Kendall to
pursue the logic of their claims against the independent counsel.
Their PR offensive is winning in the polls, which look increasingly to be a
last redoubt; in May of 1973, two months after Judge John Sirica blew
Watergate open, 64% of Americans in a Harris poll thought of Richard
Nixon as a man of high integrity. The Clintonites' past success with the
smash-mouth strategy has come mainly against other politicians or
defenseless women. In Mr. Starr they may finally be meeting someone
beyond their experience, someone who cares less about the polls than
about his duty.
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