Kenneth Starr
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Kenneth Winston Starr (born July 21, 1946) is an American lawyer and former judge who was appointed to the Office of the Independent Counsel to investigate the death of the deputy White House counsel Vince Foster and the Whitewater land transactions by President Bill Clinton. He later submitted to Congress the Starr Report, which led to Clinton's impeachment on charges arising from the Monica Lewinsky scandal. He currently serves as dean of Pepperdine University's School of Law.
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[edit] Early life
Kenneth Starr was born in Vernon, Texas in 1946, the son of a Church of Christ minister and part time barber. He first attended Harding University, where he belonged to the Young Democrats [1], but transferred to George Washington University where he received his B.A in 1968. Starr spent some time working for the Southwestern company at this time. He later attended Brown University (M.A, 1969) and Duke University (J.D., 1973). After his graduation from Duke, he became a clerk for 5th Federal Circuit Court Judge David W. Dyer (1973-74), then for Chief Justice Warren Burger (1975-77).
He joined the staff of the Los Angeles-based law firm Gibson, Dunn, & Crutcher in 1977, working out of their Washington, D.C. office. He was appointed counselor to U.S. Attorney General William French Smith in 1981.
[edit] Pre-Independent Counsel activities
Prior to his appointment as Independent Counsel, Starr had been a federal judge on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals from 1983 to 1989 and was United States Solicitor General from 1989 to 1993 under President George H. W. Bush. As a judge, Starr was respected by both political parties and was considered to be a moderate conservative with a broad view of freedom of the press.[citation needed] When the Senate Ethics Committee needed someone to review Republican Senator Bob Packwood's diaries, the committee chose to Starr, and Starr was praised by Republicans and Democrats alike for his fairness and decency.[citation needed] Before his tenure as independent counsel, Starr was often mentioned as a potential U.S. Supreme Court nominee.[citation needed] Starr also considered running for the United States Senate from Virginia in 1994 against incumbent Chuck Robb, but opted against opposing Oliver North for the Republican nomination.
[edit] Time as Independent Counsel
[edit] Whitewater
In August 1994 Starr [2]was appointed by a three-judge panel to continue the Whitewater investigation, replacing Robert B. Fiske, who had been appointed by the Attorney General prior to the reenactment of the Independent Counsel law. The law conferred broad investigative powers on Starr and the other independent counsels named to investigate the administration, including the right to subpoena nearly anyone who might have relevant information. Starr would later receive authority to conduct additional investigations, including the firing of White House Travel Office personnel, potential political abuse of confidential FBI files, [3] and, most notoriously, possible perjury and obstruction of justice to cover up President Clinton's sexual relationship with Monica Lewinsky.
The Special Division, the three-judge panel that named Starr, was led by Judge David Sentelle, an appointee of President Reagan and a protege of Senator Jesse Helms. In late July 1994, Helms, fellow Republican senator Lauch Faircloth, and Sentelle met for lunch. All three initially denied that the conversation included the topic of the upcoming independent counsel appointment, though later Sentelle admitted that it "may" have come up in conversation. Sentelle also acknowledged that he was looking for a Republican "who had been active on the other side of the political fence" to head the new investigation, in keeping with the tradition of such independent counsels as Archibald Cox and Leon Jaworski (then known as special prosecutors). One of the other judges on the panel was a Democratic appointee to the bench; he registered no dissent over Starr's appointment.
On August 5, Starr was named independent counsel. The Special Division's written statement emphasized that the judges found no fault with the investigation up to that point by Robert Fiske, a moderate Republican appointed by Attorney General Janet Reno, but the newly reenacted law, signed by President Clinton, said that Independent Counsels must be chosen by the three-judge panel and not by the administration under investigation. Although Starr and other independent counsels were later criticized as unaccountable and unstoppable, the statute gave the Attorney General and the Special Division the authority to remove an independent counsel, and the Special Division used it in at least one instance.
Starr took the job part-time and remained active with his law firm, Kirkland and Ellis[4]. This too had been the norm with previous independent counsels, and the statute expressly permitted it. As time went on, however, Starr was increasingly criticized for alleged conflicts of interest stemming from the connection. Kirkland, like other major law firms, represents clients in litigation with the government, including tobacco companies and auto manufacturers. The firm itself at the time was being sued by the Resolution Trust Company, a government agency tangentially involved in the Whitewater matter. And Starr had on one occasion talked with lawyers for Paula Jones, who was suing President Clinton over an alleged sexual assault. Starr told the lawyers why he believed that presidents are not immune to civil suit. When this constitutional issue ultimately reached the Supreme Court, the justices unanimously agreed.
[edit] Vince Foster
On October 10, 1997, Starr's Report on the death of deputy White House counsel, Vince Foster , drafted largely by Starr's deputy Brett Kavanaugh was released to the public by the Special Division. The report agrees with the findings of previous independent counsel Robert Fiske that Foster indeed committed suicide at Fort Marcy Park, and that his suicide was caused primarily by undiagnosed and untreated depression. As CNN explained on February 28, 1997, "The [Starr] report refutes claims by conservative political organizations that Foster was the victim of a murder plot and coverup," but ""despite those findings, right-wing political groups have continued to allege that there was more to the death and that the president and first lady tried to cover it up."[5] CNN also noted that organizations pushing the murder theory included the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, owned by billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife, and Accuracy in Media, supported in part by Scaife's foundation.[6]
[edit] Alleged misconduct
Though his judicial reputation earned him popularity for three and a half years after his appointment[citation needed], particularly after his aggressive emphasis on confronting political corruption in Arkansas - culminating in the successful fraud prosecution of then-sitting Arkansas Governor Jim Guy Tucker and Clinton real estate investment partners James and Susan McDougal.
Starr was accused of doing the bidding of Richard Mellon Scaife, who had funded a position at Pepperdine University that Starr first accepted but later relinquished. (He now holds a different position at Pepperdine.) Rumors began spreading that members of Starr's staff were gay, and Doug Ireland alleged in The Nation that White House aide Sidney Blumenthal was spreading them.[7] Susan McDougal, in the book and film documentary The Hunting of the President, alleges that Starr's office pressured her to lie under oath in order to back up its allegations against Clinton.
Most importantly, the now-defunct monthly magazine Brill's Content accused Starr's office of leaking grand jury testimony in violation of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure, based in part on editor Stephen Brill's interview with Starr himself. Acting on motions of Clinton defense attorneys, US District Court Judge Norma Holloway Johnson ordered an investigation into whether Starr's office had improperly leaked grand jury information (July 1998). She further authorized President Clinton's lawyers to conduct the investigation, by subpoenaing and questioning Starr and members of his staff under oath. The federal appeals court in Washington reversed Judge Johnson's decision and said that any investigation would have to be conducted by a court-appointed Special Master, not by President Clinton's lawyers. Throughout, Starr's office maintained that the information alleged to have been leaked was not uniquely available to it, but was also possessed by Clinton's lawyers, who monitored the grand jury through witnesses' lawyers participation in a joint defense arrangement, and who may have strategically leaked it in order to neutralize the damage and at the same time to blame Starr. After an investigation, a Special Master concluded that no evidence indicated that Starr's office had unlawfully leaked grand jury information. During the leak investigation, however, Charles Bakaly, spokesman for Starr's office, resigned (March 11, 1999). He was later charged with having signed a false affidavit, but acquitted at trial (Oct. 6, 2000). Critics such as Joe Conason and Gene Lyons maintain that the Starr office systematically leaked grand jury information to the press.
Starr's investigation eventually led to the impeachment of President Clinton, with whom Starr shared Time Magazine's Man of the Year designation for 1998. President Clinton was acquitted on both articles of impeachment by the Senate and continued to serve the rest of his term.
Starr's lengthy investigations forced Clinton and his staffers to devote many days and hours responding to requests from the Office of Independent Counsel. Critics of Starr's investigations charged that years of depositions, subpoenas and court hearings demanded by Starr's office distracted the Clinton administration from devoting full attention to international affairs.
[edit] Second thoughts
Starr expressed regret for ever having asked the Justice Department to oversee the Lewinsky investigation, saying "the most fundamental thing that could have been done differently" would have been for somebody else to have investigated the matter[8].
[edit] Post-Independent Counsel activities
After five years as independent counsel, Starr resigned and returned to private practice as an appellate lawyer and a visiting professor at the George Mason University School of Law. Starr is now a partner at Kirkland & Ellis, specializing in litigation. He was one of the lead attorneys in a class-action lawsuit filed by a coalition of liberal and conservative groups (including the ACLU and the NRA) against the regulations created by the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002, known informally as McCain-Feingold Act. In the case, Starr argued that the law is an unconstitutional abridgement of free speech.
On April 6, 2004, he was appointed dean of Pepperdine University's School of Law. He originally accepted another Pepperdine post in 1996; however, he withdrew from the appointment in 1998, several months after the Lewinsky controversy erupted. Critics charged that there was a conflict of interest due to substantial donations to Pepperdine from billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife, a Clinton critic who funded many media outlets attacking the president. (Scaife's money, however, supported the Foster-was-murdered theory, according to CNN, and Scaife defunded The American Spectator after it endorsed Starr's conclusion of suicide and mocked a Scaife-aided book.[9] ) In 2004, some five years after President Clinton's impeachment, Starr was again offered a Pepperdine position and this time accepted it.
Starr often refers to the years of the Clinton and Whitewater Investigations as "the unpleasantness."
[edit] Anti-Death Penalty
In 2005, Starr worked to overturn the death sentence of Robin Lovitt, who was on Virginia's Death Row for murdering a man during a robbery in 1998. Starr provided his services to Lovitt pro bono. On October 3, 2005, the Supreme Court denied certiorari. (Lovitt was granted clemency and had his sentence commuted to life in prison without parole, on November 29, 2005, by Governor Mark Warner of Virginia.)
On January 26, 2006, the defense team of convicted murderer Michael Morales (which included Starr) sent letters to California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger requesting clemency for Morales [10]. Letters purportedly from the jurors who determined Morales's death sentence were included in the package sent to Schwarzenegger. Following revelations on February 11 that these jurors have denied the validity of the declarations [11], Starr and his team had to withdraw the forged documents on February 13 [12].
[edit] Sarbanes-Oxley
Ken Starr announced that he will challenge the portion of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act which gives authority to the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB)[13].
[edit] Fredrick vs. Juneau School District
On May 4, 2006, Starr announced that he will represent the Juneau, Alaska school district in its appeal to the United States Supreme Court in a case brought by a former student, Joseph Fredrick. The former student, unfurled a banner saying "Bong Hits 4 Jesus" as the Olympic torch was passing through Juneau, prior to arriving in Salt Lake City, Utah for the 2002 Winter Olympics. Although it was not a school event, and not during school hours, the board decided to suspend the student. The student then sued and won at the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which stated that the board violated the student's first amendment right to free speech [14]. On August 28, 2006, Starr filed a writ of certiorari for a hearing with the Supreme Court.
[edit] References
- Clinton, Bill (2005). My Life. Vintage. ISBN 1-4000-3003-X.
- Conason, Joe and Lyons, Gene (2000). The Hunting of the President. Thomas Dunne Books. ISBN 0-312-27319-3.
- Schmidt, Susan and Weisskopf, Michael (2000). Truth at Any Cost: Ken Starr and the Unmaking of Bill Clinton. HarperCollins Publishers. ISBN 0-06-019485-5.
[edit] External links
- "Starr, in New Role, Gives Hope to a Needy Death Row Inmate" - The Washington Post, March 14, 2005
- Ken Starr's campaign contributions
- A geocities Web site critical of Starr dating from the time of what the page's developer termed "The Starr Scandal."
| Preceded by: Charles Fried |
Solicitor General 1989–1993 |
Succeeded by: Drew S. Days, III |
| United States Solicitors General |  |
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Categories: Articles with unsourced statements | 1946 births | Living people | Brown University alumni | Duke University alumni | Judges of the United States Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit | Law school deans | Prosecutors | Solicitor General of the United States | Time magazine Persons of the Year | Washington, D.C. lawyers
