Ken Starr, the former judge and attorney whose “Whitewater” criminal investigation into Bill Clinton led to the president’s impeachment, has died.
Mr. Starr, who was 76, was nominated by former President Ronald Reagan for a seat on the United States Court of Appeals for the Washington, DC circuit, and served as United States Attorney General under the then president George HW Bush.
But he was best known for his five-year investigation into President Clinton which examined fraudulent real estate deals involving a longtime Clinton aide, delved into the removal of documents from the office of White House Deputy Counselor Vincent Foster after his suicide, and gathered evidence of Clinton’s sexual encounters with Monica Lewinsky, a former White House intern.
The investigation into Clinton’s intimate relationship with Lewinsky was a Washington spectacle.
In 1995, Lewinsky went to work at the White House as an intern and at the end of the year she and Clinton had a sexual encounter in a corridor near the Oval Office, the first of 10 sexual encounters over the next year and a half.
President Clinton eventually addressed the nation on live TV from the White House and admitted having had a sexual relationship with Monica Lewinsky
Ms. Lewinsky confided the report to a colleague, Linda Tripp, who taped some of their conversations and took the tapes to Mr. Starr’s prosecutors.
Ms. Lewinsky was granted immunity from prosecution and became Starr’s main witness against the president, who denied “having had sex” with her.
In a bitter conclusion to his investigation of the Lewinsky affair that has drawn even more criticism, Starr filed a report, as required by law, to the United States House of Representatives.
In it, he concluded that the president had lied under oath, engaged in an obstruction of justice, and followed a pattern of conduct that was “incompatible with the president’s constitutional duty to faithfully execute laws.”
The Clinton-Lewinsky affair was world famous
The White House has ridiculed Starr as a right-wing fanatic who carries out the orders of Republicans bent on destroying the president.
House Republicans used his report as a roadmap for the impeachment of the president, who was ultimately acquitted in a Senate trial.
In 2020, Starr was recruited to help represent President Trump in the nation’s third impeachment trial.
In a memorable statement to Congress during that impeachment trial, Starr said: “We live in what I think can rightly be described as the ‘age of impeachment’.”
He said that “like war, impeachment is hell, or at least presidential impeachment is hell.”
Mr. Starr’s family said he died Tuesday in Houston, Texas, following complications after the surgery.
