Impeachment would be ‘hell,’ Starr cautions
Ken Starr, the man who led the investigation that resulted in President Bill Clinton’s impeachment in 1998-99, said Sunday that he was not surprised to see former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort cooperate with special counsel Robert Mueller and that he hopes President Donald Trump does not suffer Clinton’s fate because “impeachment is hell.”
“He was under tremendous pressure,” the former judge said, explaining Manafort’s decision during an interview on ABC’s “This Week.”
“Given the seriousness of the charges that were awaiting him, he did the right thing. He did the smart thing,” he said.
Starr, who is promoting his new book, “Contempt: A Memoir of the Clinton Investigation,” said the deal could signify that Manafort has something useful to Mueller’s investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election and possible links between Russia and the Trump campaign.
“It is very likely that Paul Manafort has indicated through his counsel and directly that he can provide very helpful information, useful information to get to the bottom of what Bob Mueller and his team have been charged to do,” Starr said. “So it is a very significant breakthrough.”
Starr cautioned that cooperating witnesses in deals like this do not always end up giving the prosecutors what they had hoped for. He cited his experience with Arkansas attorney Webb Hubbell, with whom Starr cut a deal while he was an independent counsel in the Whitewater investigation, which looked into alleged improprieties surrounding a 1978 real estate deal that involved Bill and Hillary Clinton.
Starr said Hubbell “really didn’t have as much information as we thought he would.”