Starr memoir rips Clintons
WASHINGTON — Ken Starr, the former independent counsel whose investigation led to President Bill Clinton’s impeachment, writes in his upcoming book that if Monica Lewinsky had cooperated with his probe from the beginning, “the country would not have been dragged through an eightmonth ordeal.”
Recounting his Clintonera investigation, Starr contends that the former White House intern who had a sexual relationship with the president carried “fierce but misguided loyalty” and “allowed herself to become a tragic figure of late twentiethcentury America.”
“She carries with her forever the living reality of the Clintons’ victim-strewn path to power, the most visible casualty of the Clintons’ contempt,” Starr writes in “Contempt: A Memoir of the Clinton Investigation.” The Associated Press obtained a copy of the book, which will be released Sept. 11.
Starr’s book recounts his reluctant yet duty-bound decision to serve as independent counsel in the Whitewater probe that ultimately led to Clinton’s impeachment by the House on charges he lied under oath and obstructed justice. The case cast the former solicitor general and appellate attorney as the archnemesis of the Clinton White House.
The memoir arrives two decades after Congress was presented with the Starr Report, the culmination of an investigation that captivated the nation and ultimately ended with Clinton’s acquittal by the Senate. He offers a scathing critique of Bill and Hillary Clinton, describing the former president as someone “who believed he was above the law.”