Ken Starr, the former special prosecutor who directed a federal investigation into Bill and Hillary Clinton when they occupied the White House, is defending special counsel Robert Mueller against accusations that the federal probe he is overseeing into President Trump is politically compromised.
Trump leveled those unfounded allegations on Thursday. In a series of tweets, the president said that Mueller is “highly conflicted” and overseeing a team of investigators comprised of “Democratic thugs.” But in an interview just days earlier, Starr described Mueller as “Mr. Honesty” and having “total integrity,” cautioning partisans not to make assumptions about what his probe might — or might not — uncover.
“I have great admiration for Bob Mueller as a person,” Starr said Sunday, during an extended interview for the Washington Examiner’s post-election Sea Island Summit in Sea Island, Ga. “So you could say, well, I disagree with this, or disagree with that. He is Mr. Honesty.”
Trump in a morning Twitter thread said:
“The inner workings of the Mueller investigation are a total mess. They have found no collusion and have gone absolutely nuts. They are screaming and shouting at people, horribly threatening them to come up with the answers they want. They are a disgrace to our Nation and don’t care how many lives the ruin. These are Angry People, including the highly conflicted Bob Mueller, who worked for Obama for 8 years. They won’t even look at all of the bad acts and crimes on the other side. A TOTAL WITCH HUNT LIKE NO OTHER IN AMERICAN HISTORY! Universities will someday study what highly conflicted (and NOT Senate approved) Bob Mueller and his gang of Democrat thugs have done to destroy people. Why is he protecting Crooked Hillary, Comey, McCabe, Lisa Page & her lover, Peter S, and all of his friends on the other side?”
Trump’s political allies regularly repeat some form of this critique of Mueller, who served as director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, on social media and other platforms. Starr emphasized that he’s seen no evidence that Trump or his campaign colluded with Russia to influence the outcome of the 2016 elections, and he seemed unconvinced that the Mueller investigation would discover such wrongdoing.
Nevertheless, Starr discouraged partisans on both sides of the Trump divide against drawing premature conclusions about the probe. Having investigated a president over a period of years amid a politically charged atmosphere, Starr said that it’s virtually impossible for most political observers to have a real sense of where the Mueller probe stands.
“We’re all behind a vale of ignorance,” he said.
Starr joined the Washington Examiner’s Sea Island Summit to discuss his book, Contempt: A Memoir of the Clinton Investigation.
It was evident from the candid, hour-long talk that he has no regrets about investigating the Clintons — they were guilty, he said — nor does he harbor any affection for Bill Clinton, the former president, or Hillary Clinton, the former first lady who rose to become a senator, secretary of state, and in 2016 the Democratic presidential nominee.
Indeed, Starr professed some concern that members of Mueller’s team might be driven by “pro-Hillary partisanship.” Mueller removed Peter Strzok from his team in the summer of 2017 after the FBI agent was discovered to hold particularly virulent anti-Trump views that he communicated to another colleague via text messages.
“I have expressed … reservations about some of the people around [Mueller] and the partisanship — the blatant partisanship, the pro-Hillary partisanship — of some of his most senior people,” Starr said. “I was really troubled by them.”
But Starr overall stands by his assessment of Mueller as honest and trustworthy, saying the fruit his investigation has yielded so far are legitimate and far from a “witch hunt” — a term also used by opponents of his investigation of the Clintons in the 1990s. Specifically, Starr lauded Mueller’s prosecution of Paul Manafort, the former chairman of Trump’s presidential campaign.
Starr urged Trump to pay closer attention to Mueller’s indictment of Russian organizations and intelligence operatives. Starr said it is clear to him from reading the federal indictments that Russian strongman Vladimir Putin interfered in the 2016 elections, and he said the president’s insistence on sweeping that fact under the rug is a mistake.
“I thought the Manafort prosecution was righteous,” Starr said. “I was very impressed with the two indictments against the Russians — the Russian organizations and the Russian individuals.”
“Mr. President,” Starr added, “just get over it. The Russians are a very bad lot in terms of what they were doing and your own officers of the Justice Department have now said, here it is, the evidence is just so powerful that oligarchs close to Putin were doing really nasty stuff in our elections. And so, I lament the fact that the president has been willfully blind in acknowledging this Russian interference. I think it erodes his credibility.”
