Very Concerned

Ken Starr: Trump’s Defense Team Should Be ‘Very Concerned’

The former Whitewater prosecutor says that he understands Trump’s reluctance to cooperate with Mueller, but believes that the president has an obligation to do so.

By EDWARD-ISAAC DOVERE

Ken Starr would love to hear from Donald Trump. He thinks he could help.

The former independent counsel whose investigation into President Bill Clinton led to Clinton’s impeachment says President Trump has enough to be worried about that he’ll need good lawyers around him as he decides whether to sit down with special counsel Bob Mueller.

“If I’m on his criminal defense team, I would be very concerned,” Starr said in an interview for the latest episode of POLITICO’s Off Message podcast. “I don’t know what President Trump knows, but there have been a number of guilty pleas. Some of those guilty pleas go to false statements, so I would just be cautious” before answering questions from Mueller.

Starr says he’d advise this even while he believes that Trump has a duty to answer investigators’ questions under oath, just as Bill Clinton did 20 years ago. “He is the president of the United States, and I think that carries with it an obligation to cooperate with duly-authorized federal investigations,” Starr said.

“You’re not above the law. You think you’ve got a time-out based upon your service as president. We respect you, you are occupying the presidency, you have a very important job,” Starr said. “But there’s no time out. You have to respond when you’re summoned to the bar of justice. That’s the way I respond to all this. You have to be a rule of law person if you’re going to occupy a position of trust.”

As he promotes his new memoir, “Contempt,” Starr—who says he probably wouldn’t have written the book if Hillary Clinton had won, reasoning that it would have damaged her presidency unfairly—says “President Trump would be well-advised” to read the book, or at least listen to the audio version and take a lesson from the book: “Facts will come back to haunt you eventually,” said Starr. “The truth ends up coming out, and so you better deal with those facts.”

Twenty years after the Clinton impeachment saga, Starr is amazed at the continued relevance of these issues. And he’s fascinated by the mechanics of how to mount a legal defense of Trump, a man Starr reluctantly voted for in 2016 (he says he cast his ballot not because of a grudge against Hillary Clinton, but due to a commitment to limited government).

If Starr were to join Trump’s legal team, one condition is that the president would have to listen to his legal advice—an achievement that eluded Trump’s former attorneys.“I would not want to take on a representation with it reasonably foreseeable that the advice would not be followed,” Starr said.

One way or the other, Starr thinks that despite the president’s obligation to answer investigators’ queries, it’s a settled legal question that Trump could just fire Mueller and be done with the whole thing—with or without Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein on the job. “By my lights—and I don’t think there’s any serious dispute among constitutional lawyers and scholars—he has the raw power to direct his firing,” Starr said.

That’s not the only investigation on Starr’s mind. Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh was on his team of Whitewater investigators. And with Kavanaugh’s prospects rocked by sexual assault allegations just as Starr was passing through Washington on his book tour, the former independent counsel came prepared to his Off Message interview, with a legal pad page full of preformulated praise for the Supreme Court hopeful.

Does Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, the woman accusing Kavanaugh of drunkenly attempting to rape her when she was 15 and he was 17, deserve to have her allegations heard by the Senate? “Of course,” said Starr, who also said the accusation merits a full investigation.

Based on his experiences in the Clinton probe, Starr said that if he were investigating the accusations against Kavanaugh, he would “absolutely pursue relentlessly every possible fact”—just as he did in the Clinton investigation 20 years ago, with the current nominee’s help.

But he was vigorous in his defense of the nominee, and believes that the Ford allegation is, at best, a case of “mistaken identity.”

Starr indicated that he’s inclined to believe Juanita Broaddrick, the woman who accused Bill Clinton of raping her in 1978 and alleged that Hillary Clinton threatened her to stay quiet. Those allegations, said Starr, fit with what he argues was “the metanarrative that I saw there: [The Clintons think] they’re above the law, and they will simply use Saul Alinsky “Rules for Radicals” tactics to take out anyone.”

He sees a different metanarrative for Kavanaugh.

“I believe when Brett Kavanaugh says nothing [happened],” Starr said. “Now, there are these issues of inebriation and so forth, but Brett says it did not happen, and I believe Brett. … Character counts, and you kind of learn pretty quickly what a person’s character is when you’re in the trenches with him, right, day in and day out—and for me, year in and year out.”

There aren’t many people who can have an actual window into what Mueller’s life must be like day to day, but Starr does. He’s been there. He’s lived it. And though he writes and speaks admiringly of Bill Clinton’s political skills—he likes to quote the title of David Maraniss’ Clinton biography, “First in His Class”—he is a man with a sure sense of what’s right, and is just as sure now that he was right as he was then.

Having lived through years of being trashed by a White House spin machine and attacks from the press—peaking in September 1998, when New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd described him as a “helpless victim of his cravings for ecstasy”—Starr understands why Trump and his aides so frequently mock their opponents in personal terms, or attempt to delegitimize them. He just can’t stand it.

“It’s terrible. It’s absolutely terrible,” Starr said. “I definitely disapprove of that kind of behavior on the part of anyone.”

Like many Republicans, Starr says he backs most of what the Trump administration is doing in the policy realm, though he’s dismayed by what Trump himself does day to day. He also wishes Trump would stop the tweets, despite the two approving ones he got after a Fox News appearances in February in which Starr said he didn’t think firing FBI Director James Comey constituted obstruction of justice.

He says it’s too early to say whether he’d vote for Trump again in 2020.

In the meantime, Starr says he takes solace in the recent New York Times op-ed by an anonymous senior Trump administration official, in which the author “vowed to thwart parts of [Trump’s] agenda and his worst inclinations.”

That piece “reminds us that we elect a government. The president presides over the government,” Starr said.

It’s not that he’s comfortable with that set-up, Starr explained. It’s that to him, it’s a better option than electing most Democrats.

“It depends,” Starr said, “on who the Democrat is.”