Ken Starr, Whose Probe Led to Clinton Impeachment, Dies

Ken Starr, a former federal appellate judge and a prominent attorney whose criminal investigation of Bill Clinton led to the president’s impeachment and put Starr at the center of one of the country’s most polarizing debates of the 1990s, has died at age 76, his family said Tuesday.

Starr died at a hospital Tuesday of complications from surgery, according to his former colleague, attorney Mark Lanier. He said Starr had been hospitalized in an intensive care unit in Houston for about four months.

For many years, Starr’s stellar reputation as a lawyer seemed to place him on a path to the Supreme Court. At age 37, he became the youngest person ever to serve on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, where Chief Justice John Roberts and justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia also had served. From 1989-93, Starr was the solicitor general in the administration of President George H.W. Bush, arguing 25 cases before the Supreme Court.

Roberts said Tuesday: “Ken loved our country and served it with dedication and distinction. He led by example, in the legal profession, public service, and the community.”

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell remembered Starr Tuesday as “a brilliant litigator, an impressive leader, and a devoted patriot.”

Despite his impressive legal credentials, nothing could have prepared him for the task of investigating a sitting president.

In a probe that lasted five years, Starr investigated several scandals in the Clinton presidency. Each of the controversies held the potential to do serious, perhaps fatal, damage to Clinton’s presidency.

As Clinton’s legal problems worsened, the White House pilloried Starr as a right-wing fanatic doing the bidding of Republicans bent on destroying the president.

“The assaults took a toll” on the investigation, Starr told a Senate committee in 1999. “A duly authorized federal law enforcement investigation came to be characterized as yet another political game. Law became politics by other means.”

In a bitter finish to his investigation, Starr filed a report, as the law required, with the U.S. House of Representatives. He concluded that Clinton lied under oath, engaged in obstruction of justice and followed a pattern of conduct that was inconsistent with the president’s constitutional duty to faithfully execute the laws. House Republicans used Starr’s report as a roadmap in the impeachment of the president, who was acquitted in a Senate trial.

In 2020, he was recruited to help represent Trump in his first impeachment trial. In a memorable statement to Congress, Starr said “we are living in what I think can aptly be described as the ‘age of impeachment.'”

Putting the investigation behind him, Starr embarked on a career in academia, first as dean of the law school at Pepperdine University where he taught constitutional issues and civil procedures, then as president of Baylor University in his home state of Texas. He also became an author, writing “First Among Equals: The Supreme Court in American Life.”

Starr was born in Vernon, a small Texas town near the Oklahoma state, and raised in San Antonio. He earned his B.A. from George Washington University in 1968, his M.A. from Brown University in 1969 and his J.D. degree from Duke University Law School in 1973. He was a law clerk to Chief Justice Warren E. Burger from 1975 to 1977.

As a young attorney at the law firm of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher in Los Angeles, Starr worked with William French Smith, who became attorney general in the administration of President Ronald Reagan. Starr became counselor to Smith, and from there was nominated by Reagan to the federal appeals court.

Reporting by AP