Another Friend of Bill
The New American
13 April 1998 Joseph Farah
Another Friend of Bill
by Joseph Farah
It is ironic that independent counsel Kenneth Starr is getting so much flak from the Clinton Administration and its surrogates for his investigation into the Monica Lewinsky affair. The protestations notwithstanding, Kenneth Starr, by any objective standard, has done a lousy job of investigating Clinton Administration corruption. Far from being the aggressive, partisan, ruthless prosecutor he is portrayed to be by the White House, the establishment press, and political shills like James Carville, Starr is really a pussycat - maybe even the best political ally the President has right now. That is why it is fascinating to watch Starr effectively demonized as one of the central figures in the "vast right-wing conspiracy."
Starr Performance
Let's look at some of the "accomplishments" of Starr's four-year, $30 million probe:
He let Webb Hubbell off the hook. The former high-ranking Justice Department official is now free to accept consulting contracts arranged by Clinton friends such as Vernon Jordan.
He whitewashed the Vincent Foster cover-up, ignoring the testimony of witnesses and an overwhelming amount of forensic evidence indicating that the White House deputy counsel could not have killed himself.
He has continued to allow Judge David Hale, the most cooperative witness in the Whitewater investigation and a former friend and business associate of the Clintons and James and Susan McDougal, to languish in jail.
Starr was never able to figure out who hired Craig Livingstone or why 2,000 FBI files were floating around the White House.
Insider Credentials
In short, Starr's is not exactly a sterling track record. Yet he makes a convenient scapegoat for the White House. Virtually everything the public knows about Kenneth Starr is what the Administration has told it through the establishment press. The truth is that Starr is no hard-charging crusader. Rather, he is a colorless, uncharismatic bureaucrat who, at this peculiar moment in history, just happens to hold the fate of the nation in his hands.
Starr grew up in San Antonio, the son of a conservative Protestant minister. After graduating from George Washington University and Duke University Law School, Starr clerked for Supreme Court Justice Warren Burger until 1977. Afterward, he joined the law firm of Gibson, Dunn, & Crutcher, where he worked with William French Smith. When Ronald Reagan was elected President in 1980, Smith became attorney general and Starr followed him to the Justice Department.
Kenneth Starr took a job as the Bush Administration's solicitor general, pleading the government's cases before the Supreme Court. He became a well-connected, high-powered lawyer after the Bush Administration was swept from office, pulling down seven figures a year at the Kirkland & Ellis law firm.
In August 1994, Starr accepted the job of independent counsel in the Whitewater investigation. Oddly, he continued to collect more than $1 million a year from Kirkland & Ellis while carrying on his new responsibilities. And that salary and partnership were not without potential conflicts of interest. In January 1996, Kirkland & Ellis was saved an estimated $700,000 when Starr settled an investigation by the Resolution Trust Corporation. More recently, the Justice Department began an investigation of Starr for his role in resolving the government's investigation into the safety of certain General Motors pickup trucks. Kirkland & Ellis represented GM; the Administration backed away from a recall plan; and Starr, a Kirkland & Ellis attorney, was investigating the President. Now the President's attorney general is investigating Starr.
Starr is no firebrand, but a consummate and ambitious Washington insider. While this writer and others felt the full wrath of White House power years ago for trying to expose scandals, independent counsel Starr was busy preparing his resum‚ for an assignment at Pepperdine University and collecting $1 million a year in fees from his well-connected establishment law firm.
The Perfect Foil
The only reason Starr now finds himself in the hotseat is because evidence of abuse of power and moral turpitude in the Oval Office literally fell into his lap. Precisely because he has been so woefully ineffective as a prosecutor during his first four years, he provides the perfect scapegoat - the perfect foil - for the professional attack dogs of the Clinton Administration.
In February, the Washington Post reported that an unnamed friend of the President acknowledged that the attacks on Starr "represent a knowing diversion by the White House." "When you have problems domestically," the Clinton friend said, "you start a foreign war." In the context of the Post article, the "foreign war" reference seems to be about the attacks on Starr. But with the Clinton Administration at the time threatening an imminent attack on Iraq, it is certainly a double entrendre.
George Stephanopoulos, Mr. Clinton's former trusted adviser, made an interesting observation about the latest offensive by the White House. He said the new strategy is not really designed to defuse Starr at all, but rather to fight this battle in the ultimate courtroom of accountability for any President - in Congress. Stephanopoulos implied that the White House would resort to blackmail to diminish interest in a move toward impeachment. He said that if Congress wants to investigate the skeletons in Bill Clinton's closet, members had better be prepared for a counter-offensive focused on their own closets. "There's a different, long-term strategy, which I think would be far more explosive," Stephanopoulos said on ABC's This Week. The President is "willing to take everybody down with him."
"What you're really suggesting is a kind of mutually assured destruction," said George Will in response to Stephanopoulos' candid observation. Stephanopoulos agreed.
Is Starr the kind of man who can stand up to such attacks? Even comments from his friends would leave one in doubt. In answer to the question of whether Starr had a political future, one of Starr's closest friends, ABC correspondent Tom O'Brien, said: "I think he's too nice a guy. I think he can take it, but I don't know that he can dish it out."
The Leaks
There is absolutely no evidence to support White House claims that the leaks spurring press interest in this scandal have come from Starr's office. The many witnesses who have appeared before the independent counsel thus far are as free to talk to the press as President Clinton himself - though the President pretends that he is bound by some imaginary gag order.
It is also entirely plausible that some of the leaks are coming from the White House. In defusing scandals such as Travelgate, Filegate, Whitewater, and Fostergate, the Clinton attack machine learned long ago that damaging information is less explosive when it dribbles out. Think of how powerful a report to Congress on the Clinton sex scandals might have been had none of the leaks yet occurred. All you have to do to imagine such a scenario is to recall how the Lewinsky scandal was played by the press on the first and second days. Tom Brokaw, Tim Russert, and a half-dozen other pundits were so stunned by the revelations that they were already mentioning the possibility of impeachment. It seems with each passing disclosure - no matter how serious - the public and press are getting comfortable with the idea that the President is a sexual predator and sociopathic liar.
There are a couple other interesting dimensions to the condemnation of these "leaks." If they are, indeed, untrue, as the White House consistently maintains, then why would the White House assume they came from the independent counsel? It would seem a very unwise and counterproductive course for Kenneth Starr's office to leak testimony it knew to be false. Furthermore, if the information is untrue, where is the violation of law? And if Starr is as irresponsible as the White House claims, why not just fire him?
That last one is easy. Just as has been the case all along, Kenneth Starr is the best thing the White House has going for it. Despite being caught in the crossfire of literally dozens of ethics scandals, the campaign against Starr - coupled with Starr's ineffectiveness as a prosecutor - has helped Mr. Clinton to achieve the highest approval ratings of his Presidency.
But not all of the American people have been fooled. In a poll on Starr's Foster findings commissioned by the Western Journalism Center, more than two-thirds of those questioned disbelieve the suicide conclusion. A large plurality of those questioned, 46 percent, say they are still not sure what happened to Foster. A staggering 22 percent believe Foster was murdered, while only 32 percent accept the official suicide story.
By nearly two to one, 44 percent to 23 percent, respondents agree that there was a government cover-up involving the facts and circumstances of Foster's death, while almost one out of three, 32 percent, are not sure.
Clearly, Americans do not trust Starr's findings. There are even many Democratic Party insiders and some Administration officials who will tell you - on deep background, of course - that they understood from the time he was appointed that Starr would be good for Clinton. Having never prosecuted a case in his life, Starr was too inexperienced to bring down a sitting President, they said. And having been effectively marginalized as a political partisan, Starr, they believed, would bend over backwards to show the public how fair he could be.
-ÿJoseph Farah
Mr. Farah is executive director of the Western Journalism Center and editor of the Internet newspaper WorldNetDaily.com. |
