Ken Starr, the Whitewater and Lewinsky affairs prosecutor whose probe led to the impeachment of President Bill Clinton, is breaking his 19 years of silence to finally dish on the former first family and their “legacy of contempt.”
In his explosive account of the five-year saga into multiple White House scandals, titled “Contempt, A memoir of the Clinton Investigation,” Starr portrays Clinton as a “deeply flawed president who believed he was above the law.” But, he added, Clinton was lucky and escaped removal from office because of an “indulgent” public.
Hillary Clinton takes it harder, as Starr described the former first lady and 2016 presidential runner-up as a serial liar who was a “systematic enabler” of her husband’s years of extramarital affairs and cover ups to hide them.
And, he added, Hillary Clinton made up the charge that her husband was being attacked by a right wing conspiracy “to avert the nation’s gaze from her husband’s many crimes.”
[Opinion: Please keep Bill Clinton away from Ariana Grande]
As for Monica Lewinsky, he wrote, she was the sad face of the parade of Clinton victims. “She carries with her forever the living reality of the Clintons’ victim-strewn path to power, the most visible casualty of the Clintons’ contempt,” wrote Starr.
But she also comes off as a hero of sorts, one who was very cooperative once her family lawyer, dubbed a “goofball,” was fired. She told of having “10 sexual encounters” with Clinton, 50 late night calls with Clinton “that sometimes included phone sex,” 30 gifts from her to him and she provided an 11-page chart detailing their affair.
The book, provided to Secrets in advance of its Tuesday release, confirms many suspicions around the Whitewater and Lewinsky probes and adds many more details like how Rep. Maxine Waters, the California lawmaker now calling for President Trump’s impeachment, attacked him when he appeared before a House panel to detail Clinton’s crimes.
It also provides chilling stories of harassment by Clinton cronies and supporters against Starr and even his daughter Carolyn who needed 24-hour protection from U.S. Marshals after receiving several threats.
Starr himself was often heckled as the Clinton P.R. machine successfully made him the wrongdoer in the relationship.
For nearly 20 years, Starr has kept quiet about the probe. Now, he felt the time was right because with Hillary Clinton’s defeat by Trump, “the Clinton era seemed to be over.” He also wanted to jump into the effort by Clinton defenders to rewrite the history of his scandals.
“By the end of this book,” wrote Starr, “my personal account of the legacy of Bill and Hillary Clinton — a legacy of contempt — I believe most reasonable, open-minded people will agree with me. Or at least they should agree with my basic proposition: that President Clinton and the first lady knowingly embarked on a continuing course of action that was contemptuous of our revered system of justice. I make this bold statement for one key reason: The basic facts are undisputed. The continuing debate is really about the conclusions that ‘We the People’ choose to draw from the crystal-clear record.”
The #MeToo movement makes a showing in the book, as Starr portrays a president and his supporting wife as prime evidence for what the movement is all about.
Dismissing suggestions that he was part of a right-wing effort to take Clinton down in his investigation, Starr wrote: “That was all Hillary-generated nonsense, intended to avert the nation’s gaze from her husband’s crimes. She was a systematic enabler, in the White House no less, just as she had been in Little Rock, viciously attacking the various women who came forward to say they were Bill’s paramours, including Monica Lewinsky.”
He added at the end of the book, “The verbal assaults on women by the Clinton’s and their surrogates, who hurled demeaning epithets such as ‘trailer park trash,’ would become unthinkable in 2017 and 2018.
“But the now-fading Clinton years were starkly different, culturally and politically, in terms of respecting the rights of all persons, especially those subject to the exploitative hands of the powerful. Both as governor and president, Clinton could malign his jettisoned paramours and victims with little if any consequence. In those days, oddly, no one seemed to care about the exploitative power arrangement. That was just Saturday Night Bill from Hot Springs, Ark.”
Other details revealed:
- White House counsel Vince Foster did commit suicide and Starr dismissed conspiracies around the death.
- Current U.S. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein was part of the team probing Whitewater, which resulted in the resignation of Arkansas Gov. Jim Guy Tucker.
- The sting that got Lewinsky to verbally confirm her sexual relationship with Clinton was dubbed “Prom Night.”
- A missing check critical in the Whitewater land deal investigation showed up because of a tornado.
Starr concluded the 338-page book, “As for Bill and Hillary Clinton, the citizens of the United States deserved better. Talented they were, to be sure, but deeply flawed, fundamentally dishonest, contemptuous of law and process. That was a personal tragedy, but even more, a tragedy for our nation.”
