What in the world does Monica Lewinsky have to do with Whitewater? It’s a question that’s puzzling a lot of Americans, and for good reason.
Too bad it’s not one Whitewater special prosecutor Kenneth Starr is asking as he plants his already oversized boots firmly in the muck of the latest allegations about presidential sexual misconduct.
But Starr doesn’t have to consider such a question, and that’s one of the critical flaws in the rules governing the institution of the independent counsel, or special prosecutor. Such prosecutors are free not just from routine Justice Department restraints but from virtually all restraints.
What’s more, with unlimited time and resources, the special prosecutor’s mission may be expanded to include issues only tangentially related (if that) to the subject of the original investigation.
So it is that Monica Lewinsky, a 24-year-old former White House intern who may have had an affair with Bill Clinton, has become the focus of an independent counsel appointed to investigate potentially shady land dealings involving the president and Mrs. Clinton when he was governor of Arkansas. About that time, Monica Lewinsky was a teenager in California.
It’s a mind-boggling stretch. But stretching has become a mainstay of special prosecutors in general and of Starr in particular. Since 1994, his office has tried to pin something–apparently anything–on the Clintons. So when Linda Tripp showed up with tapes purported to implicate Clinton not just in a sexual affair but in the far more serious business of perjury, it must have been an offer Starr couldn’t refuse.
Apologists have suggested a couple of “links” to justify his involvement: If Clinton tried to influence Lewinsky’s testimony in the Paula Jones case (for which she was deposed), he might try it with Whitewater witnesses, and the fact that Vernon Jordan is connected (in altogether different roles) to both cases.
Neither of those will wash. It is far more likely that after more than three years and $30 million, Kenneth Starr is feeling the pressure to produce something big–and this could turn out to be as big as it gets.
The office of special prosecutor was created in the wake of the Watergate scandal to de-politicize cases involving threats to the fundamental constitutional order. It has become instead a tool for expensive “fishing expeditions,” often as politically tainted as the process it was intended to replace.
Starr’s Lewinsky probe is just the latest–and the most glaring–example of why the independent counsel law was a bad, bad idea. And the best argument for doing away with it.
