And Now It’s Ken Starr’s Turn To Be Exposed

When I was running Salon back in the 1990s, our little media startup decided to turn our investigative guns, such as they were, on the special prosecution apparatus of Kenneth Starr, who was trying to bring down the Clinton presidency over a consensual, if sleazy, affair with intern Monica Lewinsky. The editors of Salon, including me, had no great affection for Bill Clinton, whom we regarded as too centrist and too slick. But we knew that Starr’s endless inquisition was deeply politicized and that the Republican alternatives to Clinton — Newt Gingrich (!) — would’ve been far worse for the country.

Ever since then, I’ve loosely followed Ken Starr’s professional trajectory. I was not surprised when he got fired as president of Baylor University for protecting sexual predators on the football team. Nor was I shocked when Starr popped again as a character witness for Brett Kavanaugh during his Supreme Court nomination battle. (As a young aide to Starr during the Clinton investigation, Kavanaugh had devised some of the most sexually humiliating questions for the president.) Then there was Starr’s legal work on behalf of Jeffrey Epstein, the notorious rapist and trafficker of underage girls. I always suspected that Starr was a moral hypocrite and Republican attack dog… and the creepy details just kept piling up as the years went by.

And now there’s this. I must admit that this latest expose of Starr by former deputy and mistress Judi Hershman made even my eyes pop. “Judge” Starr — the man who set himself up as the moral arbiter of the immoral Clinton presidency — turns out to to be an even bigger scumbag than I thought.

It took Hershman much too long to figure this out. But now, as Starr maneuvers to put his man — Mike Pence — in the White House, she is at last telling all. Can the pillars of the Republican Party get any more debased? Or, as President Biden just put it, have they “no shame?”

Clearly not.

Kennet Starr and Judi Hershman in happier days