THE LAWRENCE WALSH SHOW

Of Kenneth Starr’s multitude of critics, Walsh is among the most severe. From the second that Monica Lewinsky appeared on the scene, Walsh has been at Starr’s heels, questioning his judgment, deriding his methods, and accusing him of an unwarranted interest in sex. Does he feel a sense of solidarity with Starr, being one of the few who have occupied that position? “Not really,” he answers. Has he ever felt a pang of empathy as he has seen Starr under attack? “Not one bit.” Walsh insists to anyone who will listen that Starr has done a gross disservice to Clinton, the presidency, and the office of independent counsel.

On January 21 — Day One of Monica Madness — Walsh complained on CNN that Starr was being drawn into matters with “no relationship to [Clinton’s] performance as president.” Ordinarily, “prosecutors like to stay away from this type of allegation.” After all, “activities of this sort have gone on for years and years, and generations and generations,” and “people typically lie” about them. Walsh’s advice to the president? “Trust the country to be wise enough to disregard [the Lewinsky matter] in the end.”

On Day Two, Walsh was on MSNBC, wondering how “after 30-odd million dollars spent investigating Whitewater” Starr wound up “policing the Paula Jones private litigation,” which was “beyond his jurisdiction” (though not according to Clinton’s own attorney general, Janet Reno). On Day Three, Walsh did double duty, lighting into Starr on Good Morning America and National Public Radio. Starr, he said, “should not be permitted to intrude into an ongoing civil lawsuit, disrupting it and practically sitting at the plaintiff’s table.” In any event, if all of Washington officialdom “were held to a standard of truthfulness in their private affairs, their private litigation, we’d never be done with it. Congress wouldn’t be able to do anything but conduct impeachment proceedings.”

Over the next several months, Walsh seldom missed a chance to jab at Starr. The testimony of Secret Service agents? Starr was only “exploiting a publicity opportunity to damage the president politically.” Obstruction of justice, perjury, witness tampering? These were mere “pretenses,” designed to “embarrass the president for a personal escapade.” Allegations that Starr was leaking to the press? “Very disturbing,” in need of “clearing up.” Walsh was by turns vitriolic and condescending. Prosecution “is a matter of judgment,” he averred, and “Judge Starr still has a lot to learn.” The Lewinsky probe, he declared, “is harassment of the president,” pure and simple.

Walsh’s detractors, of course, are aghast that the former independent counsel has appointed himself the quasi-official scold of the current independent counsel. It is Walsh, they say, who abused his office during a six-year investigation that hounded its targets unremittingly. The brief against Walsh? He re-indicted Caspar Weinberger five days before the 1992 election, implicating Bush. He treated relatively minor offenses as though they were capital crimes. He surrounded himself with deputies who were fiercely partisan Democrats. He leaked profligately to the media. And (unlike Starr) he subjected administration officials to withering public rhetoric. Walsh, say his stillriled opponents, is in no position to raise his voice against Starr.

C. Boyden Gray, Bush’s White House counsel, speaks for many when he swears that “no prosecutor could ever equal Walsh for his lack of restraint. He habitually violated every known precept of the Department of Justice. His re-indictment of Weinberger was totally gratuitous and absolutely, unforgivably outrageous.” As to the leaking, “Walsh could have the front page of the Washington Post whenever he wanted, and none of us ever dreamed of confronting him on it.” Neither was Walsh above taking the low road, according to Gray, alarming the president’s men with his knowledge of their sexual misdeeds: “He went after some fairly high-powered people in terms of their potential lady friends in faraway places. And it had an intimidating effect.”

Walsh offers no apologies. “The difference between my consideration for President Reagan and even Bush,” he says, “and [Starr’s] consideration for President Clinton is night and day.” The Starr inquiry, like his own, “is an expensive operation, and it ought not to get into consensual adultery.” Walsh does not regret the timing of his re-indictment of Weinberger, protesting that the calendar imposed by the court “gave me no choice.” He freely admits to using the media — Walsh saw to it that he met with reporters individually at least one day a week — but he claims that it was necessary to counter the administration line.

Furthermore, Walsh says, “I received harsher treatment from the Reagan and Bush administration than Starr has received. I was hamstrung by classified-information problems, while Starr is not. Everything was top secret.” On reflection, Walsh does make a concession: “I wasn’t abused personally, as Carville and others are doing. But when we re-indicted Weinberger, it was bad. Senator Dole took after us. Still, it wasn’t daily, as with Starr.” As for the issue of illicit liaisons, Walsh explains that “if you investigate 50 people, you’re bound to run into some sexual impropriety. And we did. But we never exploited it, as Starr is doing now.”

Walsh maintains that he bears no personal animus against Starr — only that he has an honest “judgmental difference” with him. He notes that Starr, like Judge David Sentelle (who sat on the panel that appointed Starr), is a member of the Federalist Society, “an organization of right-wing ideologues.” There may be “nothing sinister” about it, he hastens to add, but “the appearance is unfortunate.” Walsh himself is always identified in the press as a Republican. He says he usually votes the straight Republican ticket, but has cast a Democratic ballot for president three times: for Lyndon Johnson and for Clinton, twice.

The crux of Walsh’s case against Starr is that “he takes the law and pushes it to the extreme.” As a prosecutor, says Walsh, “you have to have a sense of the importance of the person you’re undermining, weighed against the importance of what you’re trying to achieve.” Walsh, though, was himself perpetually faulted for just this absence of prosecutorial balance. The late Arthur Liman, the liberal litigator who served as counsel to the Iran-contra committee in Congress, writes in his posthumous memoir that Walsh acted “as if he were prosecuting a massive antitrust case, not a matter of constitutional dimensions. It mattered not a whit to him that it took six years to complete his investigation, or even that the president had long since retired. Moreover, like prosecutors who expand the reach of the criminal law, he tried to make criminal cases out of political offenses.”

In his own memoir, published last year, Walsh makes a stirring defense of an aggressive independent counsel: “Some observers have argued that actions that violate the criminal statutes against fraud, obstruction, or perjury should — if undertaken by members of the executive branch — be viewed merely as political rough-housing, or playing hardball. . . . But dishonesty seems a poor substitute for thoughtful analysis and forthright advocacy. Otherwise, we are left to believe that certain people . . . are above the law.”

And, near the close of his book, Walsh includes a passage that Kenneth Starr might particularly appreciate. In fact, Walsh would do well to ponder it, too: “Prosecutors must not be deterred by partisan attacks. . . . [They] cannot acknowledge personal concern; their concern must be only for the public duty that is being hampered. Their obligation is to apply law enforcement evenly to high officials as well as low and to go as far as is possible and fair. When these efforts are blocked by partisan politics, independent counsel must publicly expose the derogation of the rule of law.”

Jay Nordlinger is associate editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.