Monica Lewinsky sounds off on the Mueller report
Monica Lewinsky weighed in Tuesday on the handling of special counsel Robert Mueller’s report on President Trump in a three-word tweet that compared it to the Ken Starr investigation that exposed her affair with President Bill Clinton.
Lewinsky was responding to a law professor’s comparison of Mueller’s still-confidential report on the ties between Trump's 2016 presidential campaign and the Russian government to the 1998 release of the Starr Report. Mueller delivered a report on his probe, which began in mid-2017, to Attorney General William Barr last Friday. On Sunday, Barr issued a four-page summary of Mueller’s report, stating that Mueller did not find any evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.
Mueller did not come to a conclusion on the question of whether Trump obstructed justice, but Barr concluded there was not enough evidence to charge the president with a crime.
“Imagine if the Starr Report had been provided only to President Clinton’s Attorney General, Janet Reno, who then read it privately and published a 4-page letter based on her private reading stating her conclusion that President Clinton committed no crimes,” Orin Kerr, a professor at the University of Southern California Gould School of Law, tweeted Tuesday evening.
Lewinsky retweeted Kerr later that evening with a three-word refrain: “if. f***ing. only.”
The revelation of Clinton’s affair with Lewinsky when she served as a White House intern led to his impeachment by the House in late 1998. Clinton was subsequently acquitted in the Senate. During the course of Starr’s four-year investigation, Linda Tripp, a former White House staffer, provided Starr with secretly taped conversations in which Lewinsky discussed having oral sex with Clinton.
News about Clinton's affair with Lewinsky broke in January 1998. That September, Starr delivered his report to Congress, as required. The House voted to release it to the public and, full of lurid detail about the affair, it became one of the most-read documents ever posted on the internet.
Following the public release of the Starr Report, the Justice Department put in place new regulations to give the attorney general discretion over what to submit to Congress and the public.
Democrats have been urging Barr and the Justice Department to release Mueller’s report in its entirety.
Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., told the Associated Press Wednesday that Barr is going through the special counsel’s report on the Russia probe, removing grand jury and classified information, in the hopes of releasing it in April.
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