President Trump repeatedly denigrated Ken Starr, whom he appointed to his legal team Friday, during Starr’s time as an independent counsel investigating President Bill Clinton, calling him a “freak,” a “lunatic,” and a “disaster.”
”Starr’s a freak,” Trump said in a 1999 interview with Maureen Dowd. “I bet he’s got something in his closet.”
And in an interview with Matt Lauer of NBC, Trump said, “I think Ken Starr’s a lunatic. I really think that Ken Starr is a disaster.” Trump’s comment, in a transcript unearthed by CNN, came in response to a question of whether he thought Clinton should be impeached.
Here’s the video of Trump calling Starr, now defending him on his team, a lunatic in 1999. He also called him “a freak” and “wacko.” pic.twitter.com/o3xArNVwp6
— andrew kaczynski? (@KFILE) January 17, 2020
Starr’s Whitewater investigation of Clinton led to the second presidential impeachment in U.S. history. He has since expressed regret over the handling of the Monica Lewinsky affair but disputed any notion of a vendetta against Clinton, calling such claims “bogus, totally made up, and completely without foundation.”
Trump, then a New York real estate mogul with vague presidential ambitions, was frank in his assessment of Clinton’s dalliances. “He handled the Monica situation disgracefully,” Trump said. “It’s sad because he would go down as a great president if he had not had this scandal. People would have been more forgiving if he’d had an affair with a really beautiful woman of sophistication.”
“Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe were on a different level. Now, Clinton can’t get into golf clubs in Westchester. A former president begging to get in a golf club. It’s unthinkable.”
Twenty years later, Trump weathered his own storm on the Hill when in September 2019, House Democrats opened an investigation into payments to porn star Stormy Daniels and said they had enough evidence to name the president as a co-conspirator to longtime fixer Michael Cohen. Cohen pleaded guilty one year earlier on campaign finance charges stemming from cash payments that he made to Daniels and to Playboy model Karen McDougal.
On October 18, 1999, Starr resigned in a letter to the three-judge federal appeals court that appoints independent counsels, citing “intense politicization” of the independent counsel’s office.
