Despite his essential role in the Bill Clinton impeachment, Ken Starr represented Donald Trump during his first impeachment trial in 2020.
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It was especially unnecessary because Clinton’s acquittal was pretty much a foregone conclusion. Even many Republican senators doubted that the charges amounted to constitutional crimes. But the GOP leadership, joined by Starr, pressed on. In the end, of the four charges that the Judiciary Committee reported, two failed to gain a majority even in the Republican-controlled House. The other two were rejected by the Republican-controlled Senate. But if the damage to Clinton was minor, the disruption to the country had been enormous. Starr’s decisions over many years — to take over from Fiske, to veer into sexual politics, to run with the Lewinsky affair, to make sex the centerpiece of his report — which stemmed from his prosecutorial zeal, had helped poison the atmosphere in Washington and deepen the tendency to use sexual behavior as the basis for partisan warfare.
Ironically, it was already becoming clear that many of the president’s antagonists had their own sexual secrets to hide. House Judiciary Chair Henry Hyde was revealed to have had an affair in his 40s, which he tried to downplay as a “youthful indiscretion.” Gingrich, damaged by the GOP losses at the polls, was overthrown as speaker amid talk that he had been conducting his own extramarital affair. His intended replacement, Robert Livingston, declined the speakership when his past infidelities surfaced. The eventual speaker, Dennis Hastert, was later convicted and imprisoned for child sex abuse. And of course Starr’s key aide Kavanaugh — who pushed hard to grill the president and Lewinsky about the sexual details of their relationship — was, as a Supreme Court nominee in 2018, alleged to have sexually assaulted Christine Blasey Ford while they were in high school. Even Starr’s eventual successor as independent counsel, Robert W. Ray, was charged with stalking an old girlfriend.
Amazingly enough, it eventually emerged that Starr too, for all his moralizing, had carried on his own extramarital affair, with Judi Hershman, an adviser to the independent counsel’s office. More damningly still, Starr had to resign in 2016 as president of Baylor University after it was reported that he had covered up a string of sexual assaults, including rapes, by members of his football team. One victim had even sent him an email, while he was president, informing him that she had been raped. “I honestly may have (seen it),” he said of her message. “I’m not denying that I saw it.” Her rapist was sentenced to 20 years.
Despite his essential role in the Clinton impeachment, Starr in 2020 not only defended President Donald Trump during his (first) impeachment trial, but somehow managed to summon the chutzpah to impugn the Democrats for bringing charges — never mind that the charges against Trump, for conspiring with a foreign government to compromise the 2020 election, were far graver than those against Clinton. “The Senate is being called to sit as the high court of impeachment all too frequently,” Starr piously lamented in Trump’s defense. “Indeed, we are living in what I think can aptly be described as the Age of Impeachment.”
Perhaps we are living in such an age. If so, the person most responsible for that sad state of affairs is none other than Ken Starr.
