THIS FAR AND NO FURTHER
A Timeline of Events Surrounding the Radical Right's Attempt to Subvert American Democracy
Written and Compiled by Black Max
1994
August
"The homosexual blitzkrieg has been better planned and executed than Hitler's." -- Republican representative William Dannemeyer, The New Republic, August 1, quoted by Brandi Mills
Stephen Breyer joins Supreme Court
- August 4: Stephen Breyer is sworn in as Associate Justice of the Supreme Court.
Supreme Court
Nominated by Clinton as a moderate who would not draw the ire of conservatives, Breyer, a former law professor and appellate court judge, replaces the retiring Harry Blackmun. Like Blackmun, he is generally a political moderate, though due to the rightward shift of the court, is widely considered part of the liberal wing of the court along with David Souter, John Paul Stevens, and Ruth Bader Ginsberg. Breyer will vote with the minority in the 2000 Bush v. Gore case. (Wikipedia)
Starr named Whitewater special prosecutor
- August 5: Special prosecutor Robert Fiske, after finding no evidence of wrongdoing in Whitewater, is replaced by independent counsel Kenneth Starr.
Whitewater / Lewinsky and related "scandals"
The rationale of the three-judge, Republican-led panel that named Starr is to "reflect the intent of the [Independent Counsel] Act that the [independent counsel] be protected against conflicts of interest.... The Court therefore deems it in the best interest of the appearance of independence...that a person not affiliated with the incumbent administration be appointed." Fiske, a moderate Republican with impeccable judicial integrity, is anything but "affiliated with the incumbent administration," but his report exculptating the Clintons for any wrongdoing related to Whitewater is unacceptable to Republicans. - In contrast, Starr is the former solicitor general for the Bush administration, a member of the conservative Federalist Society, and a board member of the Scaife-funded Washington Legal Foundation, also funded by several tobacco companies, including those Starr is defending against a Justice Department lawsuit. (A side note: Starr, like so many of his conservative colleagues, is a staunch supporter of the military who himself failed to serve, in Starr's case claiming psoriasis as a debilitating condition.) Fiske is not retained in the position because of the "perception of a conflict of interest:" he was appointed by Clinton attorney general Janet Reno. Starr's own flagrant and extensive conflicts of interest are widely ignored: aside from the above, he is a partner in the law firm Kirkland & Ellis, which is involved in defending tobacco companies against government prosecution, and he is heavily, if covertly, involved in pushing the Paula Jones lawsuit. Starr's firm is also being sued by the Resolution Trust Company, a government agency in charge of liquidating failed savings and loan institutions; Starr will be required to investigate the RTC as part of his duties as Whitewater independent counsel. He is also an active Republican who contemplated a run for the US Senate in 1993, and later contributed over $5000 to six Republican candidates before the 1994 elections. Starr will also continue contributing to Republican PACs even after his appointment as independent counsel, a flagrant breach of ethics and a tremendous conflict of interest. He even will give numerous speeches to anti-Clinton organizations while running his "independent" investigation. Starr refuses to take a leave of absence from his law firm, and will continue to represent tobacco companies and private concerns against the same administration he is investigating.
- Some media commentators note Starr's abject unsuitability for the position: the New York Times editorializes that Sentelle "violated the court's own standard of purity of appearances by meeting with a Senator [Lauch Faircloth] eager to have the court dump Mr. Fiske as counsel;" the paper calls the late July meeting, detailed above, an example of "flamboyantly bad judgment" and calls for Starr to resign. Five former heads of the American Bar Association call for Starr to step aside. He, of course, does not. Conservatives are delighted with Starr's naming as independent counsel; he is at once a deeply partisan, fundamentalist Christian judge with strong Washington credentials and an (unearned) reputation for judicial excellence. His mild, often ingratiating manner cloaks a steely ambition to sit on the Supreme Court; the best way to do that, he feels, is to nail Clinton so thoroughly that the president will either be forced to resign, be impeached and removed from office, or so thoroughly discredited that a Republican will be sure to follow him as president, and that future president will remember Starr's contributions and reward him appropriately. He extolls his belief that he can function with "complete fairness" in his public acceptance of the post, but, judging from his conduct in the position, the idea of "merely" searching for the truth behind the Whitewater allegations never crosses his mind. And there is no legal recourse for the naming of such an inappropriately partisan counsel; as Justice Scalia wrote in his dissent against the law during the Iran-Contra investigation, when his own side was feeling the heat, "What if [the Special Division is] politically partisan, as judges have been known to be, and select a prosecutor antagonistic to the administration...? There is no remedy for that, not even a political one."
- Hillary Clinton will write in 2003, "...it was clear that Starr was replacing Fiske not to continue an independent investigation, but for partisan purposes. ...It appeared from the beginning that Starr's goal was to keep the issue alive at least through the 1996 election." This is proven factual by a comment made by White House counsel C. Boyden Gray during the after-wedding party of Theodore and Barbara Olson, when Gray cracked that "since it looked as if Kenneth Starr was not going to come up with the goods before the election, it was up to me to derail the Clinton juggernaut." Clinton will also write about the atmosphere of the investigation: "If you believed everything you heard on the airwaves in 1994, you would conclude that your President was a Communist, that the First Lady was a murderess and that together they had hatched a plot to take away your guns and force you to give up your family doctor (if you had one) for a Socialist health care system." Starr will end up spending over $70 million tax dollars in a fruitless search for criminal activity. Democratic political consultant James Carville characterizes Starr as "an abusive, privacy-invading, sex-obsessed, right-wing, constitutionally insensitive, boring, obsequious, and miserable little man who has risen further in this life by his willingness to suck up to power than his meager talents and pitiful judgment ever would have gotten him." Carville, a Democratic partisan in his own right, is harsh but essentially accurate. (CNN, Executive Intelligence Review, Washington Post, Snopes Urban Legends, H.R. Clinton, Susan McDougal, James Carville, Washington Post/Roll Call/Esquire/James Carville, Joe Conason and Gene Lyons)
- Kenneth Starr's staff is peculiarly well-chosen for his particular brand of investigating:
Whitewater / Lewinsky and related "scandals"
- Starr's deputy Jackie Bennett is characterized as abusive and unprofessionally aggressive by Arkansas Times editor Max Brantley, who says Bennett "screams and berates witnesses," and calls Bennett "a schoolyard bully. Just about any defense attorney in Little Rock came away from Bennett feeling they'd been abused or worse. Bennett and his people sent FBI agents to a high school to get a yearbook picture of somebody. They brought in Jim Guy Tucker's stepson to rake him over the coals about what he'd heard at the dinner table." Bennett's tactics of harassment and intimidation were known as far back as 1992, when he was accused by the former president of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers of "trampling on an individual's rights." In that '92 case, the case judge accused Bennett of mounting a "witch hunt." (Washington Post/Minnesota Star-Tribune/James Carville)
- Hickman Ewing, a West Tennessee prosecutor with a reputation as a right-wing religious zealot, told the New Yorker in 1996 that he joined the Whitewater investigation having already pre-judged the Clintons as beng guilty. Ewing's most famous prosecutons involve two unsuccessful attempts to convict black Democratic representative Harold Ford for conspiracy, and a conviction of former Democratic governor Ray Blanton for improperly selling liquor licenses. He is a close friend and colleague of the Religous Roundtable's Ed McAteer and the Reverend Donald Wildmon's American Family Association. Ewing is also a direct link between Starr and the infamous Arkansas Project, having met numerous times with Rex Armistead, the Scaife-funded private investigator. One federal investigator said of one meeting, "This [meeting] was either the worst case of judgment, or something worse. But whatever it was, it needs to be looked at." (Joe Conason and Gene Lyons, New Yorker/Chattanooga Times/James Carville)
- Starr deputy Bruce Udoff has a history of illegal prosecutorial behavior, as in a 1985 case where he was found liable for a $50,000 civil judgment after locking up an innocent witness on bogus gun charges without benefit of bail or an attorney. (James Carville)
- Former Los Angeles US attorney Michael Emmick, who will put together the Linda Tripp entrapment of Monica Lewinsky and try to browbeat an agreement to testify against Bill Clinton out of Lewinsky before her lawyer would be allowed in the interrogation chamber, suffered defeat at the hands of a federal judge in 1995. That judge threw out a case brought by Emmick, saying that Emmick's "threats, deceit, and harassment techniques" were " callous, coercive, and vindictive." (New York Daily News/James Carville)
