Robert Mueller, Ken Starr and the ‘witch Hunt’ narrative
As President Trump began characterizing special prosecutor Robert Mueller’s investigation as a “setup,” a “hoax” and a “witch hunt,” leading Democrats and ruling media elites experienced a collective meltdown.
Nancy Pelosi called on House Speaker Paul Ryan to “protect” Mueller from the president’s “proven disdain for the rule of law.” Brent Budowsky, a longtime Democratic operative on Capitol Hill, wrote that the Justice Department’s inspector general should “condemn” Trump.
The chorus of media voices who described Trump’s attacks on Mueller’s investigation as an “assault on the rule of law” became so numerous that in acronym-happy Washington it could have been rendered in all-caps: AOTROL. Other familiar phrases keep showing up, too. The headlines tell the story:
“How Trump’s ‘War’ on the ‘Deep State’ Is Leading to the Dismantling of Government” (NPR)
“Trump’s Fear of Deep State Coup Has Become Full-Blown Hysteria” (Vanity Fair)
“Trump Weaponizes ‘Deep State’ to Investigate His Investigators” (NBC News)
“Trump’s Go-To Strategy Remains: Undermining Our Institutions” (Fiscal Times)
“Trump Is Helping to Undermine U.S. Democracy. That’s Just What Russia Wants” (CNN)
“Trump’s Attack on the FBI is an Attack on the U.S. Constitution Itself” (The Guardian)
The source of all this outrage has been the effort by Trump and his Republican allies to undermine confidence in Mueller’s investigation by impugning his supposed partiality. Democrats and the media are shocked, shocked, anyone would stoop so low. To that claim, a fair-minded American with even a smidgen of historical memory might say, “Ken Starr, call your libel lawyer.”
Twenty years ago, Starr was the independent counsel appointed to probe the sketchy business dealings of another U.S. president. Like Mueller, Starr came across other stuff, some of it sexual in nature. Also like Mueller, Starr didn’t feel constrained to limit his inquiry to the original allegations. Clinton and his defenders found this unjust and decided to methodically take the bark off Ken Starr.
“There’s going to be a war,” James Carville told the media. Just to be clear what that meant, an unnamed White House official told The New York Times that this war was “part of our continuing campaign to destroy Ken Starr.”
Most of the anti-Starr campaign was conducted in plain sight, as apparent to the world as Donald Trump’s tweeting habits. Five days after Whitewater exploded into an investigation about sex with a White House intern — and the president’s possible perjury in trying to cover it up — Carville sidekick Paul Begala called Starr’s probe “a scuzzy investigation” based on “leaks and lies and manufactured evidence.”
Two weeks later, Begala told NBC’s “Meet the Press” that Starr was “corrupt” and “out of control.” Begala demanded another special counsel to investigate the leaks, as Trump has done, and he, too, used the term “witch hunt.”
“There are serious questions of wrongdoing here, and I think we need a truly independent investigation of the investigation itself,” Begala added.
As Washington awaited Starr’s report, Clinton’s team was so confident of their strategy that they shared their stage directions with journalists. “I’m going to be there to diminish the political impact of the report,” Carville said flatly. “That’s been my strategy from Day One.”
White House spokesman Joe Lockhart decried “a campaign of misinformation and intimidation that a person could only reasonably conclude comes from the independent counsel’s office.” As things turned out, however, Clinton was the one who had lied: to his family, to his cabinet, to his attorney — and to people like Carville and Begala who were defending him so passionately. By the time those facts were revealed, however, the plan to discredit the independent counsel had worked: Before his final report was released, Ken Starr was damaged goods.
If you don’t remember the ensuing media frenzy about how the president’s loyalists had destroyed the republic by undermining faith in America’s institutions, that’s because it didn’t happen. And, if you’re hazy on how this launched the #MeToo movement, well, that didn’t happen either.
Some of the same feminists who find Trump’s treatment of women so grotesque that they want him removed from office were busy defending Clinton in 1998, when they weren’t taking political money and professional advice from Harvey Weinstein, who even then was bullying and preying on women.
Is 20 years a long time ago? Perhaps, but some women recognized the hypocrisy at the time. Time magazine’s Barbara Ehrenreich pointed out what should have been obvious to anyone. “If sexual harassment is a crime — and it was feminists who fought to make it one,” she noted, “then it’s just as much a crime when nice-guy Democrats do it to right-leaning women with the wrong kind of hair.”
Another feminist journalist, Marjorie Williams, was even tougher. She spotlighted a series of dodges by prominent Democratic officeholders, from Nancy Pelosi’s creative inversion (she questioned Ken Starr’s “humiliation” of the women he dragged before the grand jury) to Sen. Carol Moseley-Braun’s fanciful twist: “Not so many years ago, a woman couldn’t be a White House intern.” The most sinister deflection came from Gloria Steinem, whose New York Times op-ed disparaged Clinton’s female accusers and dismissed serial sexual harassment charges against him as a man making “passes” at women – and showing himself to be a guy who took “no” for an answer.
This wasn’t 1798, mind you, it was 1998 — seven years after feminists rallied around Clarence Thomas accuser Anita Hill for the simple reason that millions of American women had experienced harassment themselves. The excuses proffered on Clinton’s behalf made a mockery of feminist teaching on sexual misconduct in the workplace and exposed contemporary feminism, in the words of writer Caitlin Flanagan, “as a weaponized auxiliary of the Democratic Party.”
Was there any limit to what these women would tolerate? In a conversation with Marjorie Williams, Steinem offered two: if Clinton had beaten up his wife or raped women. A low bar, but not low enough as it turned out. Later that year, Juanita Broaddrick leveled a credible accusation of forcible rape against Clinton. The sisterhood still stood behind their president; the media, by and large, cooperated.
While on the subject of hypocrisy, let’s not forget the House Republicans who denounced Clinton as a serial creep while sidestepping the numerous sexual picadilloes among their own congressional leaders. We didn’t impeach him for sex, they replied; it was for the lying. Really? So you’re saying Trump is telling the truth about the many women who’ve described sexual encounters with The Donald? Leave Bob Mueller out of it for a moment and say that with a straight face.
Here, the Republicans have fallen into the same trap Democrats did 20 years ago. We need Bill Clinton in office, said feminists and other party liberals, to protect Roe v. Wade and other progressive initiatives. Clinton pushed this narrative himself, claiming Republicans were attempting “a coup” — a word you hear from Trump’s defenders today — and were trying to overturn the results of the election. This was nonsense, then, and it’s nonsense today. The Republicans who tried to remove Bill Clinton from office weren’t attempting to replace him with Bob Dole. They were trying to make Al Gore president.
If Donald Trump’s enemies drive him from office, Hillary doesn’t get to be president. Mike Pence does. Republicans might want to start thinking about that.
Carl M. Cannon is executive editor and Washington bureau chief of RealClearPolitics.
https://www.ocregister.com/2018/06/02/robert-mueller-ken-starr-and-the-witch-hunt-narrative/
