Published on Wednesday, May 10, 2000
Starr Rebuffs Critics at Forum
By MARC J. AMBINDER
Crimson Staff Writer
A defiant Kenneth W. Starr last night defended his five-year
tenure as independent counsel, sharply and sometimes
sarcastically reproving student questioners who criticized his
investigation.
And Starr sharply accused the Clinton Justice Department of
hindering his own attempt to probe whether his prosecutors leaked
information to the media.
Starr's appearance at the ARCO Forum was billed as a public
address, and for 20 minutes, he delivered a prepared speech on
the constitution and the independent counsel statute.
But his strongest and most passionate words came during the 45
minutes of questioning.
E. Clarke Tucker '01, a native of Little Rock, Arkansas, was the
first to question Starr.
Tucker said the intrusiveness of Starr's extensive corruption
probe in his home state, which often dipped into the personal
lives of the accused, "was the worst thing to happen in the
history of our state."
"You were wrong. Will you admit to it?" Tucker asked.
Starr put his hands on the podium. "This has been very unhappy
for Arkansas. But, Clarke, unfortunately for the state of
Arkansas, it deserved better government than it had," he said.
Starr said he wouldn't apologize for his investigation or its
methods, calling it his "duty" to root out corruption.
Throughout his speech and the questioning period, Starr defended
the scope of his work, repeating that he had a "mandate" to look
into "perjury, intimidation of witnesses, subornation of perjury
or obstruction of justice."
To a French journalist, Starr said, "If you read my mandate--and
I'm sure you report this to your readers in France--Ken's mandate
does not use the 's' word. It did use the 'p' word, and the 'o'
word and the 'I' word, because those are federal crimes in the
United States," said Starr as some members of the crowd began to
hiss.
Starr used the twenty minutes allotted for the speech to sketch
the reasons he thought the Senate had not sustained President
Clinton's impeachment.
Starr, the solicitor general in the Bush administration, said the
"structure" of American government made impeachment an untenable
alternative.
He said all branches of government are biased toward stability.
"The American people decided that they wouldn't support the
removal from office of a duly elected president," he said.
"Censure was a more narrowly tailored and appropriate remedy to
the President's misconduct."
Starr said the independent counsel statute, which Congress
enacted in 1978 following the turmoil of Watergate, was bad
government.
"It was a well-intention but illusory effort to eradicate
politics or the appearance of politics from the administration of
Justice," he said.
Starr avoided direct criticism of Janet Reno's Justice
Department, with the exception of one story during the
question-and-answer period.
On Feb. 9, 1998, Starr's office was accused by Clinton lawyer
David Kendall of leaking grand jury testimony to the media.
Starr said that as soon as he was made aware of the allegations,
he called the FBI and spoke with assistant director Neil
Gallagher.
Starr said he asked that FBI agents investigate his own office.
But, he said, "the Justice Department forbade the FBI from
providing that assistance."
Starr denied that he or his prosecutors leaked grand jury
testimony, which would have been illegal under federal law. He
said that Clinton's lawyers had shared that information with the
media.
"I believe that we conducted ourselves honorably," he said.
Starr's odyssey from a federal appellate judge known mainly to
Washington insiders to a symbol of the Clinton's impeachment
crisis began in 1994, when a three-judge panel asked him to
become the independent counsel charged with investigating the
Whitewater land deals and other matters.
In late 1997 and early 1998, Starr began to investigate whether
Clinton had pressured a White House intern, Monica S. Lewinsky,
to lie in her deposition to the Paula Jones lawsuit.
When cyber-gossip Matt Drudge made public the new tack of Starr's
probe, the White House fought back.
Starr was pigeonholed as prurient and incompetent.
"It got very nasty," said Newsweek's Michael Isikoff, the
reporter who broke the Lewinsky case. "You [had] so many people
who [were] portrayed as enemies of the Clintons and as driven by
hatred and deep seated animus," he said. "The White House people
were very successful in portraying Starr as the right-wing zealot
when the truth is, he was not that at all."
But Gene Lyons, the former editor of the Arkansas
Democrat-Gazette, said that the criticism of Starr is deserved.
The prosecutor's team in Arkansas "turned the whole state upside
down," Lyons said. And as to whether the president perjured
himself or suborned Lewinsky's perjury, "they assumed Clinton's
guilt, and they set out to prove it, no matter how they were
going to get there," he said.
Both Isikoff and Lyons have authored or co-authored books about
the scandals.
Starr's investigation, which resulted in the trial and conviction
of 14 former Clinton associates on charges ranging from bribery
to perjury, cost taxpayers more than $50 million dollars,
according to a just-released General Accounting Office report.
Since he stepped down from the post in February, Starr has
lectured around the country. He is currently an adjunct professor
of law at New York University.
The Forum event was Alan Simpson's last. Taking the lectern after
Starr had finished, Simpson left the audience with a few of his
homemade pearls of wisdom. The final one, which he said applied
to himself, to Starr and to any politician, was an appeal for
moral judgement.
"If we have integrity, nothing else matters. If we don't have
integrity, nothing else matters," he said.
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Kadosh, Kadosh, Kadosh, YHVH, TZEVAOT
FROM THE DESK OF: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
*Mike Spitzer* <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
~~~~~~~~ <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
The Best Way To Destroy Enemies Is To Change Them To Friends
Shalom, A Salaam Aleikum, and to all, A Good Day.
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