Sorry. Trump's Attacks Aren't Remotely Like Clinton and Starr
By JOSH MARSHALL Published JULY 21, 2017 11:25 AM
With the flurry of news over the last 24 hours over President Trump’s expanding war on Robert Mueller, we’ve heard a growing chorus of voices comparing this battle to that between the Clinton White House and Independent Counsel Ken Starr during the Whitewater/Lewinsky investigations. The comparison is quite simply lazy, baseless and stupid. It is fair to note that I am a bitter critic of President Trump and during the 1990s was a strong supporter of President Clinton. So my perspective is not disinterested. But I think the facts of the matter are so elementary that the case can be argued on the merits in a very convincing way.
Let’s go through some basic facts.
Then-Attorney General Janet Reno appointed a Special Prosecutor to investigate ‘Whitewater’ in January 1994, roughly one year into the Clinton presidency. But it wasn’t Ken Starr. It was a man named Robert Fiske, a respected Republican lawyer and former US Attorney, albeit a generally apolitical one. Fiske investigated various aspects of the Whitewater scandal and other dubious controversies that rose up around it (like the death of Vince Foster) and found no wrongdoing by the Clintons. At no time was there any serious discussion or I think any discussion at all that President Clinton would fire Fiske, which legally he would have been in his powers to do. Fiske ended up finding no wrongdoing on the part of the Clintons and brought no charges against them. But of course as in any investigation there was no guarantee of that going in and it should be treated as a given that the Clintons did not welcome the probe.
Reno appointed Fiske because the Independent Counsel law of the post-Watergate era had lapsed. But Democrats, who were generally supporters of the law, reenacted it in 1994. When that happened, Reno recommended that Fiske be retained in that position by the federal judges who it now fell to to appoint an Independent Counsel. A highly partisan Republican Judge, David Sentelle, led a three judge panel which chose to replace Fiske with Ken Starr. Starr was a former Solicitor General and Federal Judge. There was a group around Clinton who from the start argued that whatever his veneer of judicial respectability, Starr was in fact a fairly dyed-in-the-wool partisan. The subsequent four years would do a lot to bear them out. It is unquestionably true that by 1998, when and especially after the Lewinsky scandal broke, the Clintonites were fiercely critical of Starr and his entire effort. But that’s getting ahead of ourselves. Starr decided to in essence toss out the results of Fiske’s probe and start from scratch. His probe (eventually taken over by someone else in late 1998) went on for another eight years. By the time the Lewinsky scandal broke out in 1998 (leading to Clinton’s impeachment and trial in the winter of 98/99) Starr’s probe had been going on for four years. The bad acts in question were to do with President Clinton’s interactions with Starr over events which took place years after Starr’s probe even began – Clinton’s sexual encounters with Lewinsky.
But let’s back up and observe some key differences. Fiske was a moderate, apolitical Republican investigating a Democratic President. Clinton had the legal power to fire Fiske but the idea never even came up. Starr was a highly partisan Republican investigating a Democratic President. Clinton did not have the power to fire Starr. But by the time his White House went really into battle with Starr it was four years into the investigation after which Starr’s probe had become deeply interwoven with various politicized legal efforts against the Clintons. Just as noteworthy, over the course of these probes Clinton had developed a highly frosty relationship with FBI Director Louis Freeh. During the Lewinsky phase of the scandal Freeh sent FBI agents to take the President’s blood for Starr’s investigation! The idea that Clinton might fire Freeh never even came up.
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