Starr Rebuffs Critics at Forum

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.