Ken Starr, independent counsel behind Bill Clinton’s impeachment, dies at 76
Ken Starr, whose investigation of Bill Clinton led to the 42nd president’s impeachment, is dead at 76.
Starr died Tuesday at a hospital due to complications from surgery, according to lawyer Mark Lanier, a former colleague.
FILE - In this May 8, 2014, file photo, then Baylor University President Ken Starr testifies at the House Committee on Education and Workforce on college athletes forming unions in Washington. (Lauren Victoria Burke/)
Starr served former Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren Burger as a legal clerk from 1975 to 1977. Justice Brett Kavanaugh worked under Starr during the Clinton investigation two decades before being appointed to the nation’s highest court by former president Donald Trump in 2018.
Lewinsky, Clinton and sex: Ken Starr pointedly mum about the affair he brought into public view
Starr himself went to work for Trump during the 45th president’s second of two impeachment trials in 2020. Like Clinton, Trump was acquitted in the Senate.
Starr was once seen as a contender to someday sit on the Supreme Court. When he was only 37 years old, former President Ronald Reagan made the Duke University School of Law graduate the youngest jurist to serve on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.
An official White House photo taken from page 3179 of Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr's report on President Clinton, shows President Clinton and White House intern Monica Lewinsky at the White House Nov. 17, 1995. (Associated Press/)
From 1989 to 1993, Starr served as 41st President George H.W. Bush’s solicitor general and argued more than two dozen cases before the Supreme Court.
His five-year investigation of Clinton was labeled a partisan attack by some Democrats. It began in 1994 as a probe into an Arkansas real estate deal, eventually uncovering Clinton’s sexual relations with then-24-year-old White House intern Monica Lewinsky. The Starr Report was referred to Congress on Sept. 9, 1998.
House Republicans used the report, which alleged the 42nd president obstructed justice and lied under oath, to impeach Clinton. But he was not convicted in the Senate and remained in office to finish a second term.
Starr lamented what he characterized as the politicization of his probe.
“The assaults took a toll” on the investigation, Starr told the Senate in 1999. “A duly authorized federal law enforcement investigation came to be characterized as yet another political game. Law became politics by other means.”
Barr served as the president of Baylor University in Waco, Tex., for six years ending in 2016. He resigned amid criticism of the school’s handling of sexual assault complaints involving the university’s highly regarded football program.
Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr gives his opening statement before the House Judiciary Committee's impeachment hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington in this Nov. 19, 1998 file photo. (Doug Mills/)
His achievements there included oversight of a $260 million stadium and the relocation of Baylor’s business school to a $100 million facility. Starr also created a scholarship program that generated $100 million over a three-year period, KWTX reports.
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