Word: starrs
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...silence in the ongoing Paula Jones sexual-harassment suit against the President. The story rang a bell with the prosecutors, who had been pursuing evidence that Jordan helped obtain a lucrative consulting contract for another Clinton pal who was a potential witness in the Whitewater land-deal probe. Starr's team had heard enough from Tripp to wire her up for a planned meeting on Jan. 13 with Lewinsky, who ended up confiding more damaging information about Clinton: she claimed he had told her he planned to deny their affair in a deposition by Jones lawyers four days later...
...Uncertain how to proceed, Starr decided to defer to the DOJ, prompting the Holder meeting, which took place at 6 p.m. on Jan. 15. The deputy AG sat in silence as he heard the allegations. He knew they had to be investigated quickly. The question was by whom. His own department, run by Clinton appointees, had an obvious conflict. A new independent counsel could be brought in, but not in time to gear up for the President's Jan. 17 deposition. He saw no alternative but to let Starr's office carry the ball. Reno formalized the decision...
...lawyers believed Holder made the right call legally - he had no real choice, given the facts presented by Starr's deputies. But Clinton aides were livid. After years of strained relations with Reno and the six independent-counsel probes she had initiated, Holder had been viewed as someone they could deal with. The deputy had successfully urged Reno not to launch a seventh probe into questionable fundraising practices by Clinton in his 1996 re-election campaign, resisting pressure from Congress and DOJ career lawyers. Holder, in fact, looked like he was being groomed for the top job if Reno decided...
...deputy AG acted more subtly in February after Clinton lawyer David Kendall charged that Starr's office had leaked grand-jury information. When Starr announced plans for an internal investigation of the leaks, Holder advised him to stand down until the federal judge overseeing the case found merit in the complaint. But at the same time, Holder quietly called the judge and offered the DOJ's help in pending issues raised by the President's lawyers, which included the leaks question. When Starr learned about the unusual intervention, he saw it as a betrayal. (Holder has denied that he "ever...
...From the outset, Clinton's lawyers sought to discredit the Lewinsky investigation as a witch hunt by right-wing lawyers headed by Starr, who, while not politically active, was a conservative Republican. Holder never publicly endorsed that view but fanned it by drawing public attention to similar allegations in the Whitewater case: a prosecution witness had supposedly received payments by anti-Clinton philanthropist Richard Mellon Scaife to discredit the President. In April, Holder wrote to Starr, urging him to look into the matter, and then released the letter to the press. The accusation rested on shaky stories by questionable sources...