Kavanaugh urged graphic questions in Clinton inquiry
WASHINGTON — Brett Kavanaugh, President Donald Trump’s Supreme Court nominee, urged prosecutors investigating President Bill Clinton to question him in graphic detail about his sexual relationship with Monica Lewinsky, a White House intern, according to a memorandum released Monday by the National Archives.
Kavanaugh spent more than three years working for Ken Starr, the independent counsel who investigated a series of scandals during Clinton’s presidency, and he worked on the report that led the House of Representatives to impeach Clinton. Kavanaugh drew up the memo as other members of Starr’s team were preparing to question Clinton.
The memo, dated Aug. 15, 1998, was shot through with disgust for Clinton’s behavior and seemed animated by the deep animosity that had developed between the White House and Starr’s team.
The document betrayed deep hostility to Clinton, and it included 10 proposed questions about matters like oral sex and masturbation.
Former members of Starr’s team have said that Kavanaugh, who is now a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, immediately regretted its tone. But in the memo, he was unrelenting. “The president has committed perjury [at least] in the Jones case,” Kavanaugh wrote, referring to the sexual harassment case brought by Paula Jones, an Arkansas state worker who said Clinton had made lewd advances toward her in a hotel room when he was governor.
“He has lied to his aides,” Kavanaugh wrote. “He has lied to the American people . ... It is our job to make his pattern of revolting behavior clear — piece by painful piece,” Kavanaugh wrote.
To that end, Kavanaugh wrote, Clinton should be asked extremely detailed questions unless he first either resigned or admitted to perjury and publicly apologized to Starr. Kavanaugh listed 10 possible questions based on Lewinsky’s testimony, such as: “If Monica Lewinsky says that you had phone sex with her on approximately 15 occasions, would she be lying?”
The substance of the memo has long been available, notably in a 2010 book, The Death of American Virtue: Clinton vs. Starr, by Ken Gormley. But the full memo had not been made public until Monday, and it provided striking details about the hard line Kavanaugh urged his colleagues to take.
Kavanaugh took a different approach when Starr was about to provide Congress with a report laying out possible grounds for impeachment, urging his colleagues to use discretion in describing Clinton’s interactions with Lewinsky.
He lost that fight. The final report included all of the sexual details, and it was quickly made available on the internet.
The memo was released as tensions between Trump and Robert Mueller, the special counsel investigating links between Trump and Russia, seem to be rising with each passing day. Kavanaugh seems certain to be questioned about the memo and what it suggests about the Mueller investigation at his confirmation hearings next month.
“I believe that the president should be excused from some of the burdens of ordinary citizenship while serving in office,” he wrote in 2009 in the Minnesota Law Review, after an extended stint in the George W. Bush White House and after he became a judge.
Among those burdens, Kavanaugh wrote, were responding to civil lawsuits and criminal charges.