Word: prosecutors
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...confusion stems partly from the independent-counsel law itself. Because it provides such wide-ranging powers, it can make even the most scrupulous prosecutor look at times like the Grand Inquisitor. The unlimited budget and open-ended time frame of an independent counsel give Starr's probe an ominous bulk even when it's idling in neutral, as it was during much of the year before the latest scandal exploded. "Any federal prosecutor has more resources than the target of his investigation, but other federal prosecutors must assign priorities among investigations," says Theodore Olson, a former assistant attorney general...
...major setback to Starr. Branscum's attorney, Dan Guthrie, a former federal prosecutor himself, complains that Starr applied the full firepower of his office to a case that might ordinarily have been relegated to banking regulators. "No prosecutor's office anywhere would even take that case," says Guthrie, who charges that Starr's office also continually leaked negative stories to the press. "His tenure is a classic example of how not to prosecute these cases...
Then came the call to be special prosecutor, and with it instant charges that Starr was too partisan for the job. He was chosen to replace a more moderate Republican, Robert Fiske, following an unusual luncheon attended by Judge David Sentelle, the head of the three-judge panel that named Starr, and conservative Republican Senators Jesse Helms and Lauch Faircloth, one of Fiske's loudest critics. Sentelle and Helms have denied discussing Starr's appointment. By that time Starr had nearly entered the Virginia Republican Senate primary that Oliver North eventually won, and had considered writing a Supreme Court brief...
...America struggles to understand the Lewinsky affair, there's a natural temptation to make sense of the drama by reducing it to a clash between individual heroes and villains. And so we have a parade of soap-opera caricatures--the overzealous and partisan prosecutor, the lusty young temptress, the bloodless wife, the philandering husband--all competing for blame in the public...
...imagine that this is the first presidency you've known. Kids must think Special Prosecutor is a Cabinet post, with someone always rooting around in bedrooms and closets. With any luck, they have forgotten that Clinton's closest adviser last year was a guy who savored women's toes and helped run the President's campaign while in bed with a hooker...