Your coverage of Ken Starr’s subpoena of President Clinton is woefully deficient from a legal perspective. The point that you should be making with your readers is not the great dramatic constitutional confrontation between the executive and judicial branches of government, but the arrant disregard of prosecutorial propriety in Starr’s subpoena of not only a subject, but a target of his investigation.
Before the advent of the grand jury, the King of England used to charge suspected criminals in what was called the “Star Chamber.” Ken Starr has given new (double) meaning to this device by grossly exceeding the bounds of prosecutorial decency.
Department of Justice and United States Attorney’s Manual guidelines clearly circumscribe a federal prosecutor’s power to subpoena the target of an investigation. Only the most dastardly of my former colleagues in the U.S. Attorney’s office here in Chicago (of whom I can think of none) would dare subpoena the target of their investigation for live testimony before a grand jury. The only times a target would ever appear before a grand jury was when he or she insisted on it (most of the time foolishly) in a vain attempt to clear his or her name, and to try to convince the grand jury not to return an indictment.
Usually such targets would just dig their hole even deeper by incriminating themselves, or at the very least pinning down their testimony for prosecutors to cross-examine them with at trial. As a defense lawyer, I would never allow a client to testify before a grand jury absent some kind of immunity agreement or an assurance that they were not a target or subject of the investigation.
