Starr: Sorry 'Bout That
Former independent counsel Kenneth Starr says he regrets he didn't keep the public better informed of his investigation that led to President Clinton's impeachment.
The Senate acquitted Mr. Clinton in January of charges of perjury and obstruction of justice that Starr developed and forwarded to the House, which returned articles of impeachment.
During the investigation, Starr was criticized for partisanship and for leaking information damaging to the president to the news media.
Asked Sunday on CNN's Late Edition what he would have done differently, Starr said he would have met more often with journalists to "try to explain to the American public during the height of the investigation what it is that we were doing."
"I think it was a mistake not to be informing the American people of certain basic facts, and to reiterate those facts," he said.
Starr wasn't suggesting that blockbuster information should have been released. The facts he would have hammered home, he said, were that his investigation was authorized by the attorney general, and that the Justice Department had the same information he had about alleged violations of federal law.
"Those were important facts that I should have let the American public become more aware of," he said.
Jim Kennedy, spokesman for the White House counsel's office, suggested that Starr owed the public more of an explanation for his office's tactics.
"Perhaps he'll inform the public why his deputies handed a tape over at midnight in a HoJo's (Howard Johnson's), which ended up at Newsweek a half-hour later," Kennedy said.
Kennedy was referring to the disclosure in a Maryland court last week that representatives of Starr's office granted a request by a lawyer for Linda Tripp - currently on trial on charges she broke the state's wiretap law - to return one tape recording they had received from the lawyer in the day. That tape subsequently ended up at Newsweek shortly after handover, court records show.
In the CNN interview, Starr indicated he believes the immunity deal Tripp struck with his office should have protected her against prosecution on state illegal-taping charges.
"It is unusual for an individual who has been assisting a federal investigation to then find herself, or himself, caught up in a state criminal prosecution," he said.
Starr said his office did not err when it allowed a month to pass between receiving tapes of Tripp's secretly recorded telephone conversations with Monica Lewinsky and the time it filed its immunity agreement with a judge. A Maryland judge cited the delay as grounds to deny Tripp immunity from the state charge.
"Our understanding of the law," he said, was that "there was, in fact, immunity in the act of production" and that the filing of the deal was merely an administrative task.