So, Kenneth Starr was fired from his position as president of Baylor University due to the university’s failure to properly address accusations of sexual assault against members of the Baylor football team. He has resigned his position as chancellor, but will be allowed to continue teaching law.
Starr joined Baylor in 2010, and “appears to have been devoted to helping turn the school into a football powerhouse,” according to a recent article on the unfolding scandal by Sue Ambrose and David Tarrant of The Dallas Morning News.
What's interesting is the superficial examination of the sexual assault that was done by the university, which was condemned by the prosecution when the case went to trial as “cursory and unprofessional,” and Starr’s weak, written defense of it (his staff did not have subpoena power). It is interesting because during the 1990s Starr would stop at nothing in his attempt to indict a president. Back then, he displayed the same callous disregard for the impact of his actions on another 20-something young woman that he showed for the women of Baylor as he refused to allow anything to stop the school from building a football powerhouse.
From a recent New York Times article on Kenneth Starr:
A federal judge in the Reagan administration and the solicitor general under President George Bush, Mr. Starr was named independent counsel in 1994, taking over the investigation of the Whitewater real estate venture and the suicide of Vincent W. Foster Jr., a deputy White House counsel. He expanded the investigation to include the Paula Jones lawsuit and the Monica Lewinsky scandal.
Mr. Starr’s conclusion that Mr. Clinton had committed perjury in sworn testimony denying having had “sexual relations” with Ms. Lewinsky eventually led to Mr. Clinton’s impeachment.
This reminder and the ongoing primary race prompted me to read the infamous Starr Report once again. It was a reminder of how bad—how incredibly bad—it was. Two days after Starr presented his report to the House Judiciary Committee, and over the objections of the Democrats on the committee who wished to allow the White House time to prepare a response, the report was released online on September 11, 1998.
Regardless of what one may think of the behavior of Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, it is worth keeping in mind that when the affair (using th term loosely) between the two of them began, she was 21 years old, fresh out of college. Perhaps a year or two older than the young women who were raped at Baylor. In All Too Human, his book about Clinton’s 1992 election and his first term, George Stephanopoulos writes of a 1996 encounter with Monica Lewinsky:
I hadn’t seen her in nearly a year, but I vaguely remembered her as a pretty, busty, flirty intern I’d pass in the halls or see hanging out at Starbucks on weekends. A few times at work, she had tried to surprise me with a double-tall latte, but my assistant Laura Capps would stop her at the door.
She may have been flirty and a little bit forward, but she did not deserve to be locked up in a hotel room, denied access to her attorney, and interrogated for 11 hours. Nor did she deserve what Kenneth Starr did to her in his report:
Had it been published 40 years earlier, it would have met the Supreme Court's existing definition of pornography. Quoting Lewinsky's extended descriptions of each of her multiple sexual encounters with Clinton, the report laid out a case that the president had committed perjury in denying the affair. It did so in a manner calculated to maximize his embarrassment and encourage a Nixon-like resignation to avoid impeachment. Not content with documenting admissions by Lewinsky that she and Clinton had engaged in conduct that he had denied, Starr's report described in vivid detail every instance of kissing, fondling, oral sex, and telephone conversations about sex between the two. The phone sex descriptions in particular were questionable evidence of the alleged perjury but unquestionably an effective means of undermining the president's public image.
The graphic nature of the report was widely condemned, including this from law professor Doug Linder at the University of Missouri-Kansas City Law School:
The Starr Report, however, went far beyond establishing that the President lied when he denied having sexual relations with Lewinsky, and included sexual details of various encounters that suggest the Report also had as its purpose to embarrass Clinton and thus limit his effectiveness as President. Perhaps no detail revealed in the Starr Report better illustrates this prosecutorial overkill than the decision to include a description of Clinton putting a cigar in Lewinsky's vagina, then putting it in his own mouth and saying that it "tastes good" (3-31-96).
Designed to embarrass President Clinton, it devastated Monica Lewinsky. Her humiliation was aggravated by the media, the refusal of the White House to support her, and the reaction of the leading feminists of the era. The fact that her relationship with the president had absolutely nothing to do with Whitewater, Vince Foster, Madison Guaranty, or Paula Jones’ lawsuit did not seem to matter to Starr. For Starr, it was far more important to use the Tripp tapes to entrap the president in a lie during the deposition in the Paula Jones lawsuit and then call him as a witness before the grand jury, according to Robert W. Gordon of Yale Law School who wrote in “Imprudence and Partisanship: Starr’s OIC and the Clinton-Lewinsky Affair,” page 705:
The OIC [Office of Independent Counsel] certainly did not have to subpoena the President as a witness before the grand jury in order to pursue its factual investigation. Starr's referral in almost so many words admitted that its purpose in calling the President before the grand jury was to put him in a position where he would have either to admit lying in the Jones deposition or, by denying he had done so, to utter another lie.
Most of us would have simply pled the Fifth to avoid perjuring ourselves in the same situation. For a politician, that is not realistically an option. Starr knew that. But then, he did not want the truth: He wanted to bring down a president. Gordon further states that the OIC ...
...refused to consider, or at any rate drastically discounted, the damage its investigations would inflict on witnesses and other innocent and not-so-innocent persons,
It does seem that the men who impeached President Clinton were some of the last men on Earth who were morally or ethically qualified to do so. And they did it based on a report that was clearly a partisan political attack designed only to delegitimize a Democratic president. In March 2002, Josh Marshall, writing for Salon discussed the “$70 million bag of garbage” that Starr produced.
Of course, it’s not just the expense that rankles. Congress and the Clinton administration were paralyzed by the Starr investigation and by impeachment for almost two years — crucial years during which the nation failed to use a budget surplus to solve pressing problems, while the al-Qaida terror network grew stronger.
I watched as these events unfolded, as closely as I watched the Watergate investigation and the impeachment of President Nixon. I read the leaks, saw the debates, and realized that the only thing the two events had in common was the word “impeachment.” Kenneth Starr never had a case against Bill Clinton—so he made one up.
When we elect Hillary Clinton, she will face a new round of made-up stuff from the radicals on the right. There is no way to know today what the subject will be, only that there will surely be one or more. It appears to be the closest that the Republican Party can come to governance since Newt Gingrich introduced his Contract With America. And it is probably the reason that the approval rating for Congress has remained in the tank.
Kenneth Starr was recently quoted as giving high praise to President Bill Clinton as “the most gifted politician of the baby boomer generation,” and, with a total lack of self-awareness, he expressed concern over the “erosion of civility” in our current political discourse.
“The utter decline and erosion of civility and discourse has, I think, very troubling implications.”
No kidding.