Word: starrs
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Starr wouldn't set the trap. His job, he told colleagues, was to encourage Clinton to tell the truth, not catch him in a lie. When the DNA results came back, on July 31, Starr had deputy independent counsel Bob Bittman contact Kendall to request a presidential blood sample. Kendall asked if Starr's office had "a precise factual basis" for the demand--something against which to match Clinton's blood. A "substantial" one, Bittman replied. Seventeen days later, Clinton appeared before the grand jury and admitted an "inappropriate" relationship with Lewinsky. Alerting Clinton to the test results, Starr told...
...When Starr had a chance to trap Clinton in a way that could have destroyed the President overnight, the prosecutor declined. The story, told here for the first time, involves the infamous blue dress, which Lewinsky gave Starr's office on July 29, saying it might be soiled with evidence. The dress presented prosecutors with a choice: the office could keep secret the results of its DNA analysis until after the President's testimony, or it could tip off the President before he swore his oath. Clinton knew Starr had the dress, of course, and could have surmised what...
...perhaps the most convincing evidence of Starr's good intentions was the way he structured his office. Trained in appellate law--a protected world of polite debate over constitutional issues--Starr decided to apply the same set of values to the far harsher world of criminal prosecution. He says he modeled his decision-making process on "the way judges on a collegial court operate," a consensual, deliberative style that was alien to most of his prosecutors. Every afternoon at 5 o'clock when he was in Washington, he and his 30 lawyers and 10 investigators crowded around...
Part of the answer lies in the makeup and background of Starr's handpicked team. Though Starr prides himself on having created a "microcosm" of the Justice Department, "but perhaps more elaborately fine tuned," true legal diversity eluded him. He had tough prosecutors and brilliant litigators recruited from around the country, but his Lewinsky team had few lawyers with strong criminal-defense backgrounds to provide balance, help plot the next move or weigh in on the treatment of witnesses. "Government lawyers have never had to sit in a room with somebody who is completely innocent," says a former Starr assistant...
CHAPTER TWO: STARR TRANSFORMED...