Muddying Whitewater
Kenneth Starr should resign as independent counsel in the Whitewater affair. If he doesn't, Attorney General Janet Reno should consider invoking her authority to fire him. This is strong medicine not lightly prescribed. Starr's serious and secret conflict of interest, revealed by Joe Conason and Murray Waas in this issue, puts more at risk than just the credibility of the Whitewater inquiry.
Twenty-three years ago a corrupt White House fired a special prosecutor of rectitude, Archibald Cox. The resulting firestorm helped bring down the Nixon Administration and led to reform of the "independent counsel law" to insulate the office from similar interference. Now Starr, through Nixonian arrogance and slipshod ethics, has turned the Watergate story bizarrely on its head, treating the office of independent counsel as if it is unaccountable by conventional standards.
The mingled odors of opportunism and hypocrisy permeating the G.O.P. pursuit of Whitewater are one reason the affair has yet to wound the Clinton Administration seriously. There are substantial questions about the Clintons' role in the complex financial scandal, and about a possible cover-up since [see Doug Ireland, "Hot Water," February 19]. But it is difficult to take very seriously a Congressional inquisition whose loudest voice is the ethically challenged Senator D'Amato. As for Starr, he has seemed remarkably flip about his job from the outset, especially considering that he was appointed to replace a Whitewater counsel cited for minor conflicts of interest. In fact, Starr's predecessor, Robert Fiske, left his law firm to avoid any appearance of conflict. So did Lawrence Walsh, the scrupulous Iran/contra prosecutor. Starr, by contrast, has maintained his lucrative law practice as a senior partner at Kirkland & Ellis -- hard to justify, given the complexity and political sensitivity of Whitewater. Starr has also continued to represent highly partisan G.O.P. clients and causes. (He certainly can't claim he needs the work; in 1994 his partnership draw exceeded $1.1 million.)
But Starr's conflict of interest in a suit against his law partnership by the Resolution Trust Corporation, involving some of the same R.T.C. officials at risk of prosecution in Whitewater, is of a different order altogether. His failure to report his firm's money-saving settlement of the action represents a far more serious ethical breach than anything so far proven against Hillary Rodham Clinton or the President. Key questions are unanswered. Did Starr disclose his conflict to the federal judges who appointed him? Why have D'Amato and his colleagues kept their knowledge of the case secret?
On the simplest level, any report Starr issues, whether to indict White House people or elevate Hillary to sainthood, is hopelessly tarnished. Indeed, any Starr conclusions, far from resolving key questions, will simply add another layer of corrosive and confusing discord to Whitewater.
But there is more at stake than the fate of the First Couple and their associates. The independent counsel statute was created to restore some measure of trust in the Constitution at a time of flagrant abuse by the executive branch. If Starr remains in office, his disregard for ethics and the law will breed further cynicism about the government's policing of itself. It's time for Starr to go.
