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who is Ken Starr why defend a serial pedophile
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real-human



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PostPosted: Sun Jul 07, 2019 7:58 am    Post subject: who is Ken Starr why defend a serial pedophile Reply with quote

why is Starr defending a serial pedophile? The worst in americas history it appears? And we know he is guilty..

The right wing seems to love Starr and Kavanaugh for going after Clinton... and loves quoting him, so time to make sure we show the real reason Starr is no longer to be respected and time to be thrown under the bus by the right. he is now mainly on Fox and a hero to the right.

Kenny Boy Starr hero of the right, so why does a successful rich (from the Clinton case, made and paid millions by the tobacco industry while he was
the special prosecutor and not doing one hour of work for that money from the tobacco companies) esteemed former college law school dean, defend a serial child pedophile? One that raped at least 100 children to estimated 1000.

Any lawyer representing for hire Epstein I cannot even give them the light of day. Why does the media even allow him on TV to be quoted without bringing up this disgusting background?

Again the right wing declared Hillary not worthy of being president because she was not wealthy too (being wealthy you can take any case you want) forced by a judge to defend a rapist when she had just got out of law school.... and she asked the judge to not make her take the case. Well again here is alan dershowitz and Kenneth Starr a dean of a university and wealthy, why is he representing a guy who is estimated to have 60 settlements for raping children.

IS STARR a friend of convicted pedophile Epstein and so was trump. what a coincidence, NOT. Trump had a case filed against him with witnesses that stated trump also raped a 13-year-old girl in Epstiens home several occasions. So I believe alan Dershowitz as well as Starr was involved in child rape is the only way he would be defending Epstien himself. Epstein must have told him to defend or he would sing sing.

Remember when Epstein pleads guilty to raping a child, he plead the 5th when asked if trump was involved with underage children. Why would a convicted pedophile take the 5th on a question like that.

Now we have another chance with the illegal activities by Trumps appointed former federal prosecutor on the case that let Epstein off. and Barr has had to recuse himself from the case because his firm also represented Epstein. gee was Barr personally involved in such a case. That question was not asked and we need an immediate answer. are all these child rapists being put in top government positions because Epstein has the goods on them?

https://www.thedailybeast.com/epstein-accuser-sues-alan-dershowitz-over-alleged-sex-ring

https://www.thedailybeast.com/jeffrey-epstein-arrested-for-sex-trafficking-of-minors-source

https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4774004/sen-sasse-questions-william-barr-epstein-case

Sen Sasse Questions William Barr on Epstein Case
USER-CREATED CLIP
JANUARY 15, 2019 Sen Sasse Questions William Barr on Epstein Case


here Starr was receiving a million a year and did not hve to do any work for his company while being paid by the government to investigate Clinton. Tobacco, when he was not a expert in such cases of law.

https://www.apnews.com/589eac60c45515bbc610113ed555eff2

Quote:
Dash also defended Starr’s decision to remain in private law practice, where he has earned more than $1 million a year. His clients have included tobacco companies and other opponents of the Clinton White House.


https://www.salon.com/1998/10/06/news950227153/


again what is going on that all these people in trumps administration from attorney general Barr to Labor secretary who is accused of breaking the law to help Epstein? This is no normal case it is the biggest child molester ever caught in USA history. And trump implicated and a child filed suit against trump before he was president.


https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/jeffrey-epstein-taken-into-custody-in-new-york-on-new-charges-relating-to-sex-crimes-involving-minors/2019/07/06/06b86ed0-a058-11e9-9ed4-c9089972ad5a_story.html?utm_term=.9de886ce9bcd&wpisrc=nl_headlines&wpmm=1
Quote:

His case was the subject of an investigation by the Miami Herald, which detailed how then-U.S. Attorney Alexander Acosta, now Trump’s labor secretary,

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PostPosted: Sun Jul 07, 2019 11:14 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

boy can we see what is going on here....
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PostPosted: Mon Jul 08, 2019 7:30 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

again why would a millionaire defend a creep like this.... only one reason is he is involved... absolutely...
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PostPosted: Mon Jul 08, 2019 8:04 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a26467966/ken-starr-jeffrey-epstein/

Ken Starr Is Now the Biggest Fish in the Barrel of Mockery

This, in addition to being one of the least excusable humans of the last half of the 20th century.

Quote:
omehow, in the ungodly mess that is the Jeffrey Epstein scandal—and I use ungodly in the fullest sense of the word—I somehow have missed one of the greatest proofs yet that the Deity has a whopping good sense of humor. And it's right there in the latest filings, the one where the judge teed up the federal prosecutors for having broken the law in how they let this monster skate as smoothly as he did. And it's not the fact that one of the law-breaking federal prosecutors is Alexander Acosta, the current Secretary of Labor and now perhaps moving up to being the fourth-worst cabinet official down at Camp Runamuck.

No, it's not that. Seriously. From the Miami Herald:

Acosta, in 2011, would explain that he was unduly pressured by Epstein’s heavy-hitting lawyers—Lefkowitz, Harvard professor Alan Dershowitz, Jack Goldberger, Roy Black, former U.S. Attorney Guy Lewis, Gerald Lefcourt, and Kenneth Starr, the former Whitewater special prosecutor who investigated Bill Clinton’s sexual liaisons with Monica Lewinsky.
Is the cosmos jerking my chain? One of Jeffrey Epstein's lawyers was Ken Fcking Starr? The sanctimonious sheet-sniffing yahoo who presented to the Congress a soft-core porn novel in the hopes it would be enough to defenestrate a sitting president, who then went on to a career turning a blind eye to sexual assaults at Baylor University, and who now apparently took up working for a serial sex-maniac predatory pedophile? Oh, my aching pancreas, this is almost too good. In addition to being one of the least excusable humans of the last half of the 20th century, Starr is now the biggest fish in the barrel of mockery, and nobody deserves to be that more than he does.

But how did I not know this? How did I cheat myself of at least six months of delicious schadenfreude?

No question about it. I clearly need to spend more time on the Intertoobz.

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PostPosted: Fri Nov 13, 2020 9:49 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Note right winger hero Kenny Boy Starr was deeply involved in this ... again look at his words when he knew his client had raped hundreds of children... "He admired Epstein" WTF... yep Starr is certainly a man of right wing values and a hero to right wingers...

as I have said before why would a rich lawyer ever represent a serial child pedophile … my conclusion is he is one too.


https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/justice-department/fbi-wanted-arrest-epstein-virgin-islands-beauty-pageant-1-year-n1247788

FBI wanted to arrest Epstein at Virgin Islands beauty pageant months before plea deal cut


Quote:
An FBI supervisor was “extremely upset” about being denied the opportunity to arrest Epstein in 2007, a Justice Department report says.






Quote:
The FBI wanted to arrest Jeffrey Epstein while he was judging a beauty pageant in the Virgin Islands seven months before he signed a non-prosecution deal that shielded him from federal sex crime charges, a Justice Department report says.

The 347-page report obtained by NBC News expands on an executive summary released Thursday of a probe into a more than decade-old sex abuse investigation of Epstein. The Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility found that former Labor Secretary Alex Acosta, who oversaw the case when he was a top federal prosecutor in Florida in the mid-2000s, exercised “poor judgment” but did not engage in misconduct.

The full report quotes one prosecutor as telling a colleague that the FBI had “wanted to arrest [Epstein] in [the] Virgin Islands during a beauty pageant...where he is a judge.”

“The case agent recalled that she and her co-case agent were disappointed” about being denied the opportunity to make the arrest in May 2007, the report says, and an FBI supervisor overseeing the case was “extremely upset” about it.



Quote:


Epstein’s attorney Ken Starr wrote a final email to Acosta when the case was concluded.

“While I am obviously very unhappy at what I believe is the government’s treatment of my client [Epstein], a man whom I have come to deeply admire, I recognize that we have filed and argued our ‘appellate motions’ and lost,” Starr said.


He concluded saying, “I would like to have . . . some closure with you on this matter so that in the years to come, neither of us will harbor any ill will over the matter.”
[/quote][/quote]
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PostPosted: Wed Jun 30, 2021 9:39 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

so funny cries impeachment is not right for trump, but spent years investigating clinton and not one grand jury indictment. then goes on to to defend trumps best friend Epstein. and now trump.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jM-4cNclqU8


WATCH: Ken Starr decries the ‘age of impeachment’ | Trump's first impeachment trial


Quote:
Ken Starr, an attorney for President Donald Trump who headed the Whitewater investigation into then-President Bill Clinton, said we are in the “age of impeachment” because of changes that have been made in the past several decades. “Instead of a once in a century phenomenon, presidential impeachment has become a weapon to be wielded against one’s political opponent,” Starr said. Trump’s defense team is presenting their arguments as part of the Senate impeachment trial. The trial has entered a pivotal week as his defense team resumes its case and senators face a critical vote on whether to hear witnesses or proceed directly to a vote that is widely expected to end in his acquittal. The articles of impeachment charge Trump with abuse of power and obstruction of Congress. The House of Representatives impeached the president in December on those two counts.

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PostPosted: Wed Jul 14, 2021 10:41 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

boy they are copying my lead, finally waking up. but not deep enough...

again why does a so called ultra rich religios wacko defend the largest child serial rapest..... a guy who went after a president for 4-6 years for a land deal that clinton lost money in. a guy who spent 70 million or so in investigating clinton 20 years ago so well over150 million in todays money without one single grand jury indictment on the clintons...


https://news.yahoo.com/always-tried-act-integrity-ken-152551473.html


‘I have always tried to act with integrity’: Ken Starr speaks out after book accuses him of helping Jeffrey Epstein


Quote:
Eric Garcia
Wed, July 14, 2021, 9:25 AM·3 min read
In this article:

Jeffrey Epstein
American financier

Ken Starr
American judge and educational administrator

Bill Clinton
42nd President of the United States

Jay Lefkowitz
American lawyer

(AP)
(AP)
Ken Starr, the independent counsel who relentlessly pursued former president Bill Clinton for his affair with Monica Lewinsky, said he would not comment on previous counsel he and his law firm gave in regard to his work for sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

“It’s not appropriate to discuss any counsel I or my law firm provided to a client,” Mr Starr said in an emailed statement to The Independent. “I have always tried to act with integrity and to be guided by the great principles of the American legal system.”

A new book reports that Mr Starr, a former US Solicitor General whose investigations of Mr Clinton led to the latter’s impeachment, engaged in a “scorched earth” campaign on behalf of disgraced financier Epstein, according to The Guardian.

Miami Herald reporter Julie K Brown, who reported on Epstein’s victims, writes in her new book Perversion of Justice that Mr Starr was a “fixer” who “used his political connections in the White House to get the Justice Department to review Epstein’s case.”

The book says Mr Starr and Epstein’s then-criminal defence lawyer Jay Lefkowitz sent emails “campaigning to pressure the Justice Department to drop the case,” with Mr Starr at “center stage” because of his connections to George W Bush’s administration.

Ms Brown reports that Mr Starr wrote an eight-page letter to Mark Filip, who was newly confirmed as deputy attorney general at the time and a former partner at Mr Starr’s firm Kirkland & Ellis. Ms Brown reports that Mr Starr wrote a memo similar to the Starr Report that triggered Mr Clinton’s impeachment, that accused prosecutors of trying to broker a plea deal that could benefit friends.

The book also alleges that Epstein’s legal team accused Marie Villafańa, the lead prosecutor on the case, of distorting negotiations to benefit a friend of her boyfriend, which she denied. Ms Brown reports that an unnamed prosecutor said Mr Starr was central to the legal campaign and that “it was a scorched-earth defense like I had never seen before. Marie broke her back trying to do the right thing, but someone was always telling her to back off.”

The prosecutor added that someone in Washington was “calling the shots on the case” and that even though Ms Villafańa warned that Epstein was probably still abusing underaged girls, the prosecutor said “it was clear that she had to find a way to strike a deal because a decision had already been made not to prosecute Epstein.”

Ultimately, after a secret deal, Epstein was sentenced to only 13 months in jail after being convicted of procuring a child for prostitution and soliciting a prostitute, and was allowed to work out of an office 12 hours a day. Ms Brown’s reporting for the Miami Herald is credited with revealing the details of the “non-prosecution agreement.”

Epstein was found dead his New York cell in 2019 after he was arrested on sex trafficking charges.

The Independent has contacted Jay Lefkowitz and Marie Villafańa for comment.

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PostPosted: Sat Jul 31, 2021 11:05 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jul/13/ken-starr-jeffrey-epstein-book


Ken Starr helped Jeffrey Epstein with ‘scorched-earth’ campaign, book claims


Quote:
Ken Starr, the lawyer who hounded Bill Clinton over his affair with Monica Lewinsky, waged a “scorched-earth” legal campaign to persuade federal prosecutors to drop a sex-trafficking case against the billionaire financier Jeffrey Epstein relating to the abuse of multiple underaged girls, according to a new book.

In Perversion of Justice the Miami Herald reporter Julie K Brown writes about Starr’s role in securing the secret 2008 sweetheart deal that granted Epstein effective immunity from federal prosecution. The author, who is credited with blowing open the cover-up, calls Starr a “fixer” who “used his political connections in the White House to get the Justice Department to review Epstein’s case”.

Audrey Strauss, Acting United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York announces charges against Ghislaine Maxwel in New York<br>Audrey Strauss, Acting United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York speaks alongside William F. Sweeney Jr., Assistant Director-in-Charge of the New York Office, at a news conference announcing charges against Ghislaine Maxwell for her role in the sexual exploitation and abuse of minor girls by Jeffrey Epstein in New York City, New York, U.S., July 2, 2020. REUTERS/Lucas Jackson
‘A story of power’: podcast on Epstein and Maxwell to draw on hours of interviews
Read more
The book says that emails and letters sent by Starr and Epstein’s then criminal defense lawyer Jay Lefkowitz show that the duo were “campaigning to pressure the Justice Department to drop the case”. Starr had been brought into “center stage” of Epstein’s legal team because of his connections in Washington to the Bush administration.

Perversion of Justice will be published next week. The Guardian obtained a copy.

When Epstein’s lawyers appeared to be failing in their pressure campaign, with senior DoJ officials concluding that Epstein was ripe for federal prosecution, Starr pulled out the stops. Brown discloses that he wrote an eight-page letter to Mark Filip, who had just been confirmed as deputy US attorney general, the second most powerful prosecutor in the country.

Filip was a former colleague of Starr’s at the law firm Kirkland & Ellis. Brown writes that Starr deployed “dramatic language” in the letter reminiscent of the Starr report, his lurid and salacious case against Clinton that triggered the president’s 1998 impeachment.

In the letter Starr begins affably, invoking the “finest traditions” of fairness and integrity of the DoJ. He then goes on to deliver what Brown calls a “brutal punch”, accusing prosecutors involved in the Epstein case of misconduct in trying to engineer a plea deal with the billionaire that would benefit their friends.

Brown reports that Epstein’s legal team also went after Marie Villafańa, the lead federal prosecutor in the case, accusing her of similarly distorting negotiations to benefit a friend of her boyfriend – an allegation she denied.

Brown cites an unnamed prosecutor linked to the 2008 case who said of the legal campaign in which Starr was central that “it was a scorched-earth defense like I had never seen before. Marie broke her back trying to do the right thing, but someone was always telling her to back off.”

The prosecutor added that someone in Washington – the book does not specify who – was “calling the shots on the case”. Villafańa warned fellow prosecutors at the time that Epstein was probably still abusing underaged girls, but according to the unnamed prosecutor quoted by Brown “it was clear that she had to find a way to strike a deal because a decision had already been made not to prosecute Epstein.”

According to a former senior department of justice official familiar with the matter, Starr’s request in his eight-page letter was denied, and he was not even afforded a meeting with the DoJ. But the outcome of this process was a secret deal that only became public years later, largely through Brown’s own reporting.

Given the number of victims and the severity of the allegations, Epstein got off exceptionally lightly with a sentence that saw him serve just 13 months in jail. During his sentence, Epstein was allowed out to work in his private office for 12 hours a day, six days a week, in a breach of jail norms.

Jeffrey Epstein, in a photo provided by the New York State Sex Offender Registry.
Jeffrey Epstein, in a photo provided by the New York State Sex Offender Registry. Photograph: AP
In 2018 Brown published a three-part exposé in the Miami Herald that lifted the lid on the “non-prosecution agreement” that had been reached covering up Epstein’s sex trafficking operation. The reporter managed to identify 80 potential victims, some as young as 13 and 14.

Following Brown’s exposé, a judge ruled that the secret agreement was illegal, opening up the possibility of a renewed federal prosecution. Epstein was arrested on sex trafficking charges in July 2019 – 11 years after Starr and the rest of his legal team had worked so hard to shield him – and died in jail the following month in what was ruled a suicide.

In the fallout, Alex Acosta, who as Miami’s top federal prosecutor in 2008 had signed off on the Epstein sweetheart deal, was forced to resign as Donald Trump’s labor secretary.

Though Starr’s role in securing the Epstein deal was public knowledge, Brown’s book reveals the lengths that the lawyer was prepared to go to in order to protect from federal justice an accused sexual predator and pedophile. The extent of his involvement is all the more striking given the equally passionate lengths that Starr went to in 1998 to pursue Clinton for perjury and obstruction of justice, given the much less serious sexual activity that sparked that investigation.

Starr’s handling of sexual assault scandals has dogged him during other phases in his career. In 2016 he was stripped of the presidency of Baylor University after the institution under his watch failed to take appropriate action over a sexual assault scandal involving 19 football players and at least 17 women.

Four years later Starr served as a member of Trump’s legal team in the former president’s first impeachment trial over dealings with Ukraine.

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PostPosted: Sun Oct 10, 2021 11:40 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W63INqN7hpc


NEW INFORMATION: Ken Starr, Wife Of CNN’s Chris Cuomo Reportedly LINKED To Jeffrey Epstein

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PostPosted: Mon Mar 14, 2022 7:44 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

oh my goodness/badness Kenny was Fing not his wife....
but now outed because he is such a slime... gee this never made national front page did it... again it is not a liberal media is it... I would have had it front page for a year...

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/08/ken-starr-clinton-epstein-baylor-affair-allegation.html

How Is Ken Starr Still Everywhere?

Quote:
Ken Starr can look like a Pixar character: grandfatherly, dimpled, with long pillowy cheeks and cunicular teeth. It’s not distinctive; it’s the kind of face you swear you’ve seen many times. Indeed, you probably have, because if you examine a certain subset of American politics, he’s everywhere. Look at his Supreme Court connections alone: John Roberts once served under Starr. Brett Kavanaugh was his mentee. He was pals with Antonin Scalia, vetted Sandra Day O’Connor, and calls Clarence Thomas “a whole lot of fun.” Theodore Olson (the lawyer who’d go on to represent George W. Bush in Bush v. Gore and become his solicitor general) spent that fateful election night watching the results come in at his house. Ken Starr is basically the Forrest Gump of Republican America. You might not have noticed, but he’s usually around. Right now, for instance, he’s on the advisory board of Turning Point USA, a conservative activist group started by Charlie Kirk. You might also know him as a Fox News commentator or scandal-ridden ex–university president, as a member of Trump’s first impeachment team, or, most famously, as the independent counsel in the Bill Clinton years whose combination of piousness and prurience taught an entire generation of American children about oral sex.

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It’s that five-year stewardship of the Clinton investigation that made Ken Starr a household name. And it’s against those five years that everything he’s done since must be measured. The sporadic headlines he’s since generated in some ways reflect the general decline of his party. Once criticized for a sense of rectitude so priggish it began to appear perverse, Starr course-corrected by defending Jeffrey Epstein and then Donald Trump. The guy who took a popular president down a peg for lying about sex lost his own job as a popular university president for presiding over a system that shielded rapists and ignored victims. And now the great investigator of Clintonian infidelity stands accused of having an extramarital affair himself.

The owner of one of the most famous conservative “brands” has mainly succeeding at muddling it. Starr’s swampward trajectory corresponds roughly to the rise of reactionary populism, but his individual decisions can still surprise; spurts of pro bono work and disquisitions on faith serve as occasional reminders—against a seamy backdrop—of what Starr’s profile used to be. It has been argued that the man many knew as a bland and scrupulously correct son of a minister changed during his stint as independent counsel—that in the course of becoming a public figure while also learning on the fly how to be a prosecutor, he became more of a persecutor too, less concerned with ethical constraints while technically respecting legal ones. (Mostly. Sam Dash, who was lead counsel to the Senate’s Watergate Committee and acted as special ethics adviser to Starr’s team, resigned in protest over what he saw as Starr’s decision to act as an “aggressive advocate” for impeachment.)

That increasingly appetitive (or deranged) prosecutorial approach earned Starr so much contempt that it has perhaps overshadowed some of his less controversial qualities. Friends and associates unfailingly describe Starr as pleasant, for instance. They also describe him as extremely hardworking. He is rarely, however, called brilliant, and this is surprising: The man almost became a Supreme Court justice. According to a 1998 Michael Winerip piece in the New York Times Magazine, Starr’s name may have been scrubbed from the Bush administration’s short list in 1990 because Starr was considered—at least then—a mite too ethical. As the senior Bush’s solicitor general, he’d sided with whistleblowers against the administration that hired him in a case involving defense contractors. The administration did not care for that. Here’s one way to gauge what this earlier version of Starr was like: The folks who chose David Souter for their nominee to the Supreme Court dismissed Starr as insufficiently conservative. He’d been faulted with, among other things, failing to disclose O’Connor’s pro-choice views to his fellow Republicans when he vetted her. It’s hard to imagine how different Starr’s public profile might be today if things had gone differently.

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Black and white photo of Starr, Bates, and Kavanaugh sitting at a conference table in a drab room. Bates and Kavanaugh smile broadly.
Independent counsel Kenneth Starr, center, talks with deputy independent counsel John Bates, left, and aide Brett Kavanaugh, right, in the Office of the Solicitor General in D.C. during the Whitewater investigation on Nov. 13, 1996. David Hume Kennerly/Getty Images
For someone with such Zelig-like ubiquity, not much has been written about his early years. Before the Clinton Whitewater investigation, Starr, who clerked for Chief Justice Warren Burger, was rising in Republican circles with impressive and perhaps questionable speed. As Winerip writes, “Starr had to learn as he went. He became an Appeals Court judge in 1983, though he had never been a lower court judge; the Solicitor General—the Government’s lawyer to the Supreme Court—in 1989, though he had never argued before the Supreme Court; the independent counsel in 1994, though he had never been a prosecutor.” This trend would continue after his stint investigating the Clintons: He was hired to helm Pepperdine’s law school and then Baylor University despite having no administrative experience to speak of. (Perhaps, given the sexual assault scandal that would later consume Baylor, experience matters.)

If the Clinton years gave him a taste of real fame—he was Time’s Man of the Year in 1998, along with Bill Clinton—the aftermath saw him trying to capitalize on it. Starr became, if not quite a mercenary himself, the mercenaries’ lawyer. He’d done plenty of that before, of course: He was profitably defending tobacco companies even while he was investigating Clinton (who was trying to regulate them). But his years digging into the president empowered him to use his prestige in a slightly different way—as the guy who maybe knew a guy. When Whitewater needed investigating, Starr had been there to do it and his reasons were at least nominally public-spirited. But when Blackwater needed defending in 2006, he was there to do that too—this time by joining a lawsuit that had been well underway in order to petition John Roberts, his former deputy in the solicitor general’s office, who had only recently joined the Supreme Court. Marc Miles, the attorney representing the families of the four Blackwater contractors killed in Iraq, said at the time, “I think that Blackwater has brought in Kenneth Starr to somehow leverage a political connection to help them succeed in a case where they can’t win on the merits.”

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If this was the case, it didn’t work—Roberts rejected his former superior’s argument that Blackwater should be “constitutionally immune” to the lawsuit. (Roberts would rule in Starr’s favor the same year in Morse v. Frederick.) It wouldn’t be the last time Starr appeared to peddle his influence. When Jeffrey Epstein needed help evading charges for raping and trafficking minors in 2007, the Texan with a reputation for primness joined the pedophile’s legal team and, as described in reporter Julie K. Brown’s book, became one of the prime architects of a defense notable for its innovative savagery, which included attacking prosecutors and impugning their motives. Starr attempted to leverage his contacts in the Justice Department to try to get the federal charges dropped. It also didn’t work. But the plea deal Epstein got was famously and shockingly lenient, thanks in no small part to Starr’s efforts.

And perhaps most incongruently, when the most prolific liar in American presidential history—who paid the women he had extramarital sex with to shut them up—faced impeachment charges in 2019, Starr didn’t just rush to defend him (even though he’d once called Starr a lunatic). The author of the Starr Report, which even Diane Sawyer derided as “demented pornography for puritans,” showed up in a black cowboy hat and a trenchcoat—dressed as an almost literal black-hat version of the finger-wagging disciplinarian of errant presidents he used to be.

It’s a discordant set of jobs for someone who had built a monumental and much-mocked reputation for prudish propriety. In a plot turn that would be more poetic if it weren’t so unsurprising, it emerged this month that Starr, that avatar of good Christian values who once stood for everything the Clintons weren’t, had himself allegedly conducted an extramarital affair with a woman who had once worked closely with him. (She says it began in 2009, roughly a decade after his investigation of Clinton concluded.)

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The woman, Judi Hershman, explains she is disclosing her affair with Starr (which she’d planned to take to the grave) because of his response to a story she wrote for Slate about a disturbing encounter with Brett Kavanaugh that she’d informed Starr about back in 1998. She wrote that Kavanaugh had screamed at her with “a deranged fury” when he found her working in a conference room. (In her Medium piece she adds that Starr’s response when she requested an apology from Kavanaugh was: “I’m apologizing to you for him. This is it.”) Starr’s comment on Hershman’s story in Slate was “I do not recall any mention of any incident involving Brett Kavanaugh.” But the simple denial was not enough. In what Hershman calls an “embellishment,” he added: “To the contrary, throughout his service in the independent counsel’s office, now-Justice Kavanaugh comported himself at all times with high professionalism and respect toward all our colleagues.”

We know now that this is the basic template for how Ken Starr responds to a crisis because he was recorded doing it. In a 2016 TV interview for KWTX News 10, Starr was asked about an email a woman had sent him on Nov. 3, 2015—and there the email was, in full view, bearing his email address—in which she reported being raped. The subject line, “I Was Raped at Baylor,” seems hard to overlook. Starr’s first response squishily acknowledges this: “I honestly may have. I’m not denying that I saw it.” But then a woman named Merrie Spaeth, a communications consultant and family friend he’d brought with him (and who had been Hershman’s boss during the Clinton investigation), interrupts to ask the news director not to use that portion of the interview. He refuses and she takes Starr to another room to confer. “She needs to ask you that question again. Whether you do it on camera or not it’s up to you,” Spaeth says to Starr when they return. Starr then says to the camera: “All I’m gonna say is I honestly have no recollection of that.” He then turns to Spaeth. “Is that OK?” But then he tries again and, as with his response to Hershman, he doesn’t leave well enough alone. He adds. “I honestly have no recollection of seeing such an email and I believe that I would remember seeing such an email” (emphasis mine). By 2018, two years after he’d been ousted as university president, the line had evolved beyond all recognition: “Unfortunately—and this is going to sound like an apologia, but it is the absolute truth—never was it brought to my attention that there were these issues.”

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Is it interesting that a man who spent years trying to prove that an evasive and lawyerly president lied ended up agonizing over how exactly to legalistically phrase his own failures? No! It is only moderately more interesting that the Starr marriage—which openly courted comparisons to the Clintons’—now appears to be in the position it smugly criticized: In 1999, Alice Starr famously said she’d divorce her husband if she were in Hillary’s place, remarking that she would “rather not be married to someone who doesn’t love me enough to remain faithful.” “We took a vow to be faithful to one another when we married,″ she said of her own marriage, adding that they’d “lived up to that vow.″ In response to Hershman’s affair allegation, Alice Starr provided a statement through Merrie Spaeth affirming her marriage to Ken: “We remain devoted to each other and to our beautiful family. Judi Nardella Hershman was Alice’s friend. Alice set up jobs and board appointments for her in McLean, Virginia.” (Ken Starr himself had no comment, according to Spaeth, who also added that because of how busy the independent counsel’s office was in the days before the 1998 House Judiciary Committee hearing, it would have been impossible for Judi Hershman to have found herself alone in a conference room with Brett Kavanaugh.)

That Alice is standing by her man is no surprise; when Ken began his tenure at Baylor, she said in an interview, “He can’t do anything but tell the truth—ethics are extremely important.” What those ethics are remains something of a mystery. Starr’s post-Clinton priorities were interesting and not altogether predictable: They have ranged from appealing for clemency for death row inmates in 2005 and 2006 to defending Epstein in 2007 to campaigning against same-sex marriage in 2008 to signing (in 2013) a letter asking that a teacher who pleaded guilty to molesting five female students get no jail time, just community service.

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Put differently, Starr has occupied some strange spaces in American controversies besides the one he’s best known for. He supported Merrick Garland’s nomination to the Supreme Court, for instance, but he also testified about “troubling questions” at Sen. Ron Johnson’s circus of a Senate hearing on so-called election irregularities. He’s a little too odd to classify as a mere hypocrite. Even his condemnations take some surprising turns: In a chapter of his latest book, Starr comes perilously close to condoning the removal of Confederate monuments: “It’s one thing to tear down monuments of Confederate generals, as military champions of the unspeakable institution of slavery. Whether you like these desecrations or not, that reaction is understandable, albeit lawless.”

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Starr’s isn’t a story of straight decline. He never really left, for one thing; that makes a comeback trickier. But neither has he ascended to become a fixture in the conservative firmament. The way he engages with modern conservatism is almost hilariously anti-strategic: Though certainly capable of partisan bile, he’s at other times so quaintly bookish that he barely seems to understand his party at all. When he addressed the young Trump-crazed Republicans at the 2019 Turning Point USA summit (other speakers included Sean Hannity, Kimberly Guilfoyle, and Donald Trump Jr., to give you a sense), he interrupted the music and the lights to ask everyone to sing “My Country, ’Tis of Thee” and then delivered a lecture encouraging them to study history, including the writings of Louis Brandeis and Lincoln’s second inaugural address.* It is bold—in a mild way—to lecture about history when you know you’re up against Guilfoyle’s incantatory shouts. It might also explain the limits of his influence. Then again, so might the lack of a consistent agenda. Starr’s lawyering has been deployed in the service of both conventional and distasteful efforts but doesn’t coalesce into any particularly cohesive sense of purpose. And while his books register a real desire to provide intellectual backing for conservative impulses, what little ideology he has—to the extent that it’s faith-based—is compromised by his own hypocrisy.


Starr does still seem to enjoy the spotlight even if he’s not especially gifted at keeping it. Thirty years after he shot to national fame, he hasn’t lost the ability to provoke an “Oh, him!” reaction when his name comes up, and Trump’s impeachments presented not one but two occasions for him to reemerge to the broader public as a voice of authority on the thing he has long been most famous for. But his interventions on those fronts have been strangely muddled. He obsessed over the finer points governing special counsels in a magazine article but then cut an absurd figure in a black cowboy hat at Trump’s side. Having made an impression neither as an intellectual nor as a firebrand, he’s now on the board of an organization fiercely touting an anti-vaccination agenda. He’s on Fox News. And he’s earning headlines for allegedly cheating on his wife. It’s not exactly the Supreme Court..

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