‘I think that will be a big plus sign for President Trump and the integrity of the campaign…’
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) Unlike President Donald Trump—who never asserted executive privilege even as members of his campaign inner-circle faced jail time—the administration of impeached President Bill Clinton actually took his investigator, Special Counsel Kenneth Starr, to court.
Clinton sued Starr repeatedly in order to block access to witnesses like the shady communications adviser Sidney Blumenthal, as well as to overturn criminal convictions of White House associates, according to a May 1998 article from The Washington Post.
“While Starr has been criticized by the White House for spending four years and more than $30 million on his investigation, yesterday’s ruling underlines how much of his resources have been absorbed fighting various court challenges,” wrote The Post.
Even though Clinton’s effort largely failed in the courtroom, The Post‘s coverage—like much of the media’s coverage at the time—never once raised the specter of a possibility that challenging the special prosecutor would itself warrant accusations of obstruction or arouse suspicion of guilt.
Rather, the coverage characterized Starr’s probe as something like a footrace in which hurdles randomly sprung up—or perhaps as an equal clash of forces in which justice happened casually to fall with the prosecutor appointed to investigate the president.
“The executive privilege dispute has been one of many legal hurdles erected in Starr’s path as he investigates whether Clinton lied under oath about having a sexual relationship with [White House intern Monica] Lewinsky and asked her to do so as well,” The Post wrote.
“But Starr has won a string of victories in recent weeks,” the two-decades-old report continued. “[Chief U.S. District Judge Norma Holloway] Johnson has also sided with Starr by ordering Lewinsky’s first attorney to comply with a subpoena and by rejecting the former White House intern’s claim of a binding immunity agreement with prosecutors.”
The newly released Mueller Report delivered the goods some in the current partisan press had hoped for, recounting moments in which Trump put up a strong resistance to the Russian collusion witch hunt. The President used choice profanities to rail out former Attorney General Jeff Sessions over his recusal, and he also attempted to get White House counsel Don McGahn to fire Special Counsel Robert Mueller due to his conflicts of interest.
However, both might have seemed reasonable measures to the one person who was acutely aware from the start that no Russian collusion had occurred and that deep-state political forces were, in fact, making an active effort to undermine his presidency.
In light of that, the more surprising revelation is the degree to which Trump lent support to the probe, despite his public spectacle of almost daily denunciations.
Starr, whose investigation into Clinton resulted in his impeachment by the House of Representatives for obstruction of justice and perjury, said in a recent Fox News appearance that Trump’s cooperation stood in stark contrast.
“For the White House counsel to spend 30 hours answering questions of Bob Mueller and his staff is extraordinary, talk about unprecedented,” Starr said. “That’s an unprecedented level of cooperation with a special counsel investigation.”
During his Fox News segment, Starr went on to observe that not only did Trump not seek to collude with Russia, but he actively resisted Russian overtures to do so.
“I think that will be a big plus sign for President Trump and the integrity of the campaign,” he said.
On the contrary, some have noted that Russians were working, to a degree, with Fusion GPS, the company hired by the Clinton campaign to compile the notorious, since-debunked Steele Dossier.
Both the Attorney General’s Office and the Senate Judiciary Committee have signaled their intention to investigate the circumstances under which FBI spying on the Trump campaign occurred.
The fraudulent and unvetted information in the dossier, likely from sources within the Kremlin itself, was promoted by deep-state partisans to the upper ranks of the intelligence community and then leaked to the media.
As to whether any of the revelations in the Mueller Report deserved additional scrutiny following the nearly two-year probe, Starr said the petty, partisan snipes would only continue to weigh in Trump’s favor after his having endured it all and come through unscathed.
“Here is a key that no one should lose sight of—Bill Clinton committed crimes. Richard Nixon committed crimes,” Starr said.
“Whatever this report shows, the bottom line is no crimes are being charged by those who are charged with making that decision—that’s the Justice Department.”