Ken Starr was a former judge and lawyer who is best known for his work on the Whitewater investigation, which resulted in the 1998 impeachment (and subsequent impeachment) of Bill Clinton. Starr died Tuesday at the age 76.
Starr’s death was confirmed in a statement from his family Baylor UniversityFrom 2010 to 2016, he was president of the,
The Texas native most recently served as one of former president Donald Trump’s personal lawyers during his second impeachment trial in the U.S. Senate in February 2021.
The impeachment of Clinton is most closely associated with the long-serving lawyer. He was the independent counsel who initially investigated a failed Arkansas real property investment by Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton, along with business associates tied to a failed savings loan and loan.
Starr, a former federal appellate judge who had also served as President George H. W. Bush’s solicitor general, soon expanded his inquiry into other matters, including the death by suicide of deputy White House counsel Vince Foster, the firing of staffers in the White House travel office, Paula Jones’ sexual harassment lawsuit against Bill Clinton and eventually the president’s affair with intern Monica Lewinsky.
It was the Lewinsky matter — and the president’s insistence in a sworn deposition that he did not have “sexual relations” with the young staffer — that eventually led Starr to conclude that Clinton had committed perjury. (In a later statement to Starr’s grand jury, the president said that he believed the definition of “sexual relations”(The deposition does not mention receiving oral sex.)
Starr’s investigation led to the 1998 impeachment of Clinton, who was acquitted the following February following a trial in the U.S. Senate as all 45 Democrats and 10 Republicans voted in the president’s favor.
One of Starr’s deputies on the investigation, Brett Kavanaugh, was later appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Starr was elected president of Baylor University after his term as independent counsel. He also continued to work on selected legal cases. In a case involving the private military company Blackwater, he represented them in the 2004 deaths of four civilians in Fallujah. He also argued for the upholding of a 2008 California ballot initiative that would have prohibited same-sex marriages. Starr was also a member the defense team for Jeffrey Epstein in 2007 on Florida statutory sexual assault charges that involved many underage girls.