Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [102]
Under oath before a Senate committee in 1999 he stated: “There is no vast right-wing conspiracy out to get anybody, and if there was one, we would not meet in the Senate dining room. We would do it by telephone or in secret somewhere. If we were that nefarious, we are not that dumb.”
Even Judge Butzner, who vigorously opposed the appointment of Starr, believed that the uproar over the Sentelle lunch amounted to constructing a mountain out of a molehill. At the same time, Butzner remained distressed by other problems, which seemed to mount by the day. Democratic Senator Carl Levin of Michigan—who headed the subcommittee overseeing independent-counsel matters—wrote to the three-judge court on August 12 charging that Starr “lacks the necessary independence.” Among other things, Senator Levin pointed to the fact that Starr had appeared on the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour just months earlier, taking the public position that the president could be sued civilly in a sexual harassment lawsuit such as the Jones case.
On his own copy of Senator Levin’s letter, Butzner underlined these charges of partisanship against the appointee. He scribbled on that portion of the letter, which was later preserved in his private papers: “Mr. Starr did not mention this at our interview. Nor did he comment on a brief in the Paula Jones case [referring to news reports that Starr had consulted with a conservative women’s group about filing an amicus brief in the Jones litigation].”
Butzner continued to believe that the entire decision to replace Fiske with Starr was ill considered. Straightening his thick glasses, then pushing away the oxygen tube that lay against his yellow sweater, the white-haired retired judge sat up in his wheelchair and uttered a clear, unambiguous statement, the only full sentence he would muster during this interview session. He said, slowly and emphatically, “I was against Starr, from start to finish.”
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13
KEN STARR: SPECIAL PROSECUTOR
As Ken Starr’s Office of Independent Counsel got under way—just two months after Starr had consulted with Gil Davis about the Paula Jones case—President Clinton blamed himself and the Democrats in Congress, in equal measure, for allowing the expired independent counsel law to rise from the grave and wreak havoc on his presidency. His own Democratic Party, he lamented, “always wanted to look purer than Caesar’s wife.” Admitted Clinton, “I was as guilty as anybody else. I signed [the law]. We forgot that this whole independent-counsel thing was an overreaction to President Nixon’s firing of Archibald Cox. And that in truth, the system worked there. Nixon wound up with an independent counsel. That worked. It worked its way through the system.”
In hindsight, the president admitted, reviving this “legal monstrosity” was a horrible blunder for which he paid a steep price. “You have to go all the way back to the early days of [the republic] to find politics as personally venomous as they were in my presidency,” he said. “And the Framers would not have been surprised at all at the conduct of Starr and his aides. They thought anybody given unaccountable power would abuse it.”
Ken Starr, as he settled into his role as independent counsel, did not view himself as an out-of-control ogre with a partisan political agenda. He later expressed deep disappointment that Clinton would assail him, in such a personal fashion, when he was simply doing his job. Sitting on a couch in his home in McLean, Virginia, after the trauma of the Clinton investigation had subsided, Starr noted that his staff consisted of top-notch professionals, “some of whom had voted for President Clinton.” He hastily added, “I came to find out. I never asked about politics in interviews.” According to Starr, his overriding goal as Whitewater independent counsel “was to re-create a microcosm of the Justice Department … complete with procedural safeguards to guard against the abuse of power.”
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