The one thing both sides would agree on, surely, is that he’s the best-known lawyer in the Chicago-based law firm of Kirkland & Ellis.
That said, it’s getting harder to find common ground on Whitewater independent counsel Kenneth Starr.
To his colleagues and supporters, the former U.S. solicitor general and federal judge is a driven workaholic of the highest integrity, a brilliant lawyer of unquestioned competence and propriety.
But to his critics–and the bandwagon is getting bigger by the day as the presidential campaign heats up–he’s a partisan player with conflicts of interest. He’s crossed an ethical line, they say, by maintaining his $1 million-a-year partnership and taking on controversial outside clients.
Those clients include perhaps the most controversial of them all, at least among legal enterprises: Big Tobacco. The conflict? Starr, they say, is compromising his role as independent prosecutor by representing an industry under investigation by the Clinton administration.
That and other supposed conflicts, the argument goes, jeopardize the appearance of fairness as he prosecutes the Whitewater case.
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Others, including former independent prosecutors such as Chicago’s Dan Webb, scoff at that, particularly since Starr doesn’t have a direct conflict of interest.
Still others say the complaints about Starr are pure politics, designed to undermine the Whitewater investigation in this political season.
Indeed, legally, Starr has done nothing wrong by juggling the Whitewater investigation with his other clients. But arguing in court on behalf of Brown & Williamson Tobacco Co., critics say, just looks bad.
One congressman, Marty Meehan (D-Mass.), has even called on him to drop his representation of the company, and for his firm to decline future tobacco business while he serves as independent prosecutor.
Meehan also took Starr, who works in the Washington office of Kirkland & Ellis, to task for the firm’s dealings with the Resolution Trust Corp., which sued it for negligent representation of a failed savings and loan association.
Though the firm paid a $325,000 settlement to the RTC, Meehan said it still “cast yet one more cloud” on Starr’s status as an independent counsel because of the RTC’s role in the Whitewater investigation.
And Starr has come under attack for contributing money to Kirkland & Ellis’ political action committee.
But Starr has no input on how the money is divvied up; in fact, it went to both Republicans and Democrats.
“I have never seen politics influence the decisions the (independent counsel’s) office made, and I’m speaking as somebody who was a career prosecutor before I went to the Whitewater investigation,” said attorney Brad Lerman, a former deputy chief of special prosecutions in the U.S. attorney’s office in Chicago, who left to work full-time on Whitewater.
For more than a year, Lerman was one of 10 or so lawyers investigating the failed real estate deal in the independent counsel’s office in Little Rock. Another five or so lawyers are working on the case full-time in Washington.
Lerman, now also a partner at Kirkland & Ellis, compared Starr’s role to that of an “active and participating” U.S. attorney. He participates in all key decisions, directs strategy and sets goals, Lerman said. He was in Little Rock at least one or two days a week, and always in touch by phone, he said. And all the lawyers have sky-pagers.
The controversy over Starr’s outside legal work rages against the larger backdrop of the Independent Counsel Act, which has many critics. The point of the statute is to have a non-biased person investigating the president or his friends. The theory is that the Justice Department, which is headed by an attorney general appointed by the president, would be under too much pressure to be, or at least appear to be, completely unbiased.
But critics of the statute say it gives investigators too much power and is unnecessary in most cases. Some have suggested changing the law to limit independent prosecutors’ outside legal work.
To some lawyers, that makes no sense.
“If you exclude someone who’s got a successful practice in the private world, you’ve excluded precisely the most qualified people for the job,” said Howard Pearl, a Chicago lawyer who investigated the Iran-contra affair.
Webb said there was “no question” Starr is “doing the same thing we’ve all done.” For example, when he handled the bribery case against former National Security Adviser John Poindexter, Webb also was defending former Cook County Judge David Shields on a bribery charge.