When he was the special counsel investigating Bill Clinton's relationship with then-White House intern Monica Lewinsky, Ken Starr allowed Brett Kavanaugh to ask the president a series of "prurient" sexual questions. Now, Starr believes the Supreme Court nominee should not be subjected to the same treatment in regards to sexual assault allegations made against him by multiple women. In a Tuesday MSNBC segment, host Ari Melber played video of Clinton being asked extremely detailed and probing questions drafted by Kavanaugh about Lewinsky. The president was asked whether he had the intern insert a cigar into her vagina or ever masturbated into his secretary's trash can in the clip. Melber noted that Kavanaugh was reportedly "frustrated" while answering prep questions that he thought were "too personal" about his sex life and drinking habits. He then revealed later that in an interview with Politico's "Off Message" podcast, Starr defended the nominee. "I believe when Brett says it did not happen, and I believe Brett based upon my seeing him," the Clinton special counsel said. "You kind of learn pretty quickly what a person's character is when you're in the trenches with them, right, day in and day out. For me, year in and year out." Watch the segment below via MSNBC:<doc-sep>(CNN) — Recently released documents reveal that when Brett Kavanaugh worked for independent counsel Ken Starr investigating President Bill Clinton, he grappled with a key question that currently faces special counsel Robert Mueller and congressional lawmakers: What to do when a president won’t rule out a pardon for a critical person in the investigation? A concern of Starr and Kavanaugh in 1997 was whether Clinton would pardon Susan McDougal, who they wanted to be a witness in their investigation of the Whitewater real estate deal. In one exchange with Clinton’s lawyers, for instance, Starr criticized Clinton for alleging “misconduct” on the part of the independent counsel, and in another he accused the President of attempting to dangle a pardon before McDougal. At the bottom of one document Kavanaugh scrawled: “Totally inappropriate and has practical effect of impeding investigation.” The question of whether a president would pardon someone involved in an investigation is newly relevant, given that President Donald Trump has declined to rule out whether he would issue a pardon for Paul Manafort, his former campaign chairman who was convicted of eight financial crimes last week and faces a second trial in late September. Kavanaugh, Trump’s nominee for the Supreme Court, will face questions next week during his confirmation hearings about whether legal positions he took in the past should apply to Trump. Democrats will push Kavanaugh to explain whether and why some of his legal conclusions have evolved between the time he was investigating one president to the present day when he is the Supreme Court nominee of another. “The president has the absolute discretion to pardon individuals at any time after commission of the illegal act,” Kavanaugh said in 2016 before the Marquette University School of Law. Trump has declined to rule out a pardon for his former adviser Manafort. A day after he was convicted, the President tweeted that he “felt badly” for Manafort and his “wonderful family.” Starr pointed out that McDougal had criticized his investigation and that Clinton in a PBS interview “appeared to endorse” McDougal’s criticisms. The documents at issue reveal that back in February 1997, Starr contacted then White House lawyer Charles F.C. Ruff to express concern that Clinton, “through his public statements,” was reinforcing Susan McDougal’s “unlawful intransigence” in refusing to answer questions regarding Starr’s Whitewater investigation. In a follow up letter in the next month, Starr noted that during the same PBS interview Clinton had declined to rule out a pardon for McDougal. Starr said he recognized that the “Constitution grants the President sole and final authority over pardons” but he argued that the “lingering uncertainty about President Clinton’s intentions may be a factor influencing Ms. McDougal’s behavior.” McDougal was eventually held in contempt and incarcerated for her refusal to answer questions. Clinton issued her a pardon just before leaving office in January 2001. In his letter, Starr suggested that the President should “publicly urge Ms. McDougal to testify.” On April 4, Ruff responded. He called Starr’s request “unprecedented” and rejected the suggestion that the President had “somehow encouraged Ms. McDougal to violate the law.” He said it would be “entirely inappropriate” for the President to “offer advice” to McDougal concerning her legal rights or obligations. He did not mention the pardon issue. Kavanaugh scrawled on the bottom of Ruff’s letter. “Totally inappropriate and has practical effect of impeding the investigation” he wrote. A person close to Kavanaugh, who reviewed the documents, believes they reflect that Kavanaugh was taking notes on the direction of someone else, likely Starr, and that Kavanaugh had plans to speak to Starr’s deputy, Hickman Ewing, about a response to Ruff. The source said the notes may not have reflected Kavanaugh’s personal position on Clinton’s conduct. “It would be a stretch,” the source said, “to try to attempt to divine Brett Kavanaugh’s views on today’s issues from notes that may not reflect his views on a case decades ago.”<doc-sep>There is no less excusable human being walking on the public stage than Kenneth Starr, the bed-sniffing yahoo who led the Great Penis Chase in 1998, and who then moved on to allegedly covering up sexual crimes on-campus at Baylor, where he lost his gig because he'd allowed the university to become universally despised. Now, it appears, he has a new book-like object out, a "memoir" of his days chasing Bill Clinton's penis all around the Beltway. Naturally, he's out shilling for his product in various friendly radio and television venues. Ironically, of course, this comes at the same time as the nomination of one of his minions, Brett Kavanaugh, to a lifetime position on the United States Supreme Court. This has prompted a number of people to recall that Starr's investigation was a complete sieve and that Kavanaugh, who later became one of the principal leakers in the office, according to several people, was hired because he had something of a reputation for being a ruthless ratfcker, as David Brock remembers in this column for NBC Think: Brett and I were part of a close circle of cold, cynical and ambitious hard-right operatives being groomed by GOP elders for much bigger roles in politics, government and media. And it’s those controversial associations that should give members of the Senate and the American public serious pause. Call it Kavanaugh's cabal: There was his colleague on the Starr investigation, Alex Azar, now the Secretary of Health and Human Services. Mark Paoletta is now chief counsel to Vice President Mike Pence; House anti-Clinton gumshoe Barbara Comstock is now a Republican member of Congress. Future Fox News personalities Laura Ingraham and Tucker Carlson were there with Ann Coulter, now a best-selling author, and internet provocateur Matt Drudge. So, yes, we are all going to have to think about those glorious days one more time. (One of the worst things about the current media elite is that so many of them came of age during this extended kabuki and became convinced that this is the way things are supposed to work, an attitude many of them brought with them into their coverage of Hillary Rodham Clinton's presidential campaign.) On Monday night, Starr dropped by the new hit show on Fox News, Tomorrow Belongs To Me With Tucker Carlson, to pump up his book's dismal sales numbers and to remind Americans why so many of us came to spit at the mention of his name. Cooper Neill Getty Images Starr brought the whole act, too. The smarmy self-righteousness. The smug, innuendo-laden description of what his investigation uncovered. The utter disrespect for the law and the truth. And the cowardly passive-aggressive "concern" about the "people around" Robert Mueller, who is an actual special counsel and not a jumped-up hack. And, for those of us who'd forgotten what an unforgivably indecent human this guy is, he managed to work poor, dead Vince Foster into the conversation as well. "As I describe in the book we were trying to get to the bottom of how, among other things, how Hillary Clinton's billing records at the Rose law firm mysteriously disappeared which was theft from the Rose law firm, and then mysteriously reappeared, in the book room where Hillary was writing a book. Now how did that happen? How did records, in those preelectronic records day, wind their way, not just out of the Rose law firm offices in Little Rock Arkansas, but to the private residence of the president and the first lady? And my -- I was haunted by what did Vince Foster do as the deputy counsel to the president, he took his own life. We knew that he was depressed, we had very significant evidence that he was clinically depressed. Why was he clinically depressed? Complex question but that's why I was haunted, why did this very successful, very bright lawyer take his own life within six months of the administration taking power. And, that haunts me to this day." My god, what a pissant. The Foster end of the investigation had been concluded by Robert Fiske, Starr's predecessor. In fact, that's part of the reason that some influential Republican senators, who saw political advantage in keeping alive the conspiracy nonsense about Foster's having been murdered, an advantage that Starr, being a hack, was more than willing to pursue. Ken Starr never gave any more of a damn about Vince Foster, or his family, which has consistently asked that Starr and people like him leave Vince Foster to rest in peace, than he allegedly did about those women at Baylor who came to the administration with grim stories about sexual assault. David Hume Kennerly Getty Images Elsewhere in his new tome, Starr, as is his custom, settles for indictment by insinuation because he couldn't get one in court. From Fox News: In it, Starr recounts a Jan. 22, 1995, deposition with both then-President Bill Clinton and the first lady about the suicide of White House adviser Vince Foster and other issues stemming from the Whitewater land deal investigation...The first lady, though, was a different story. “In the space of three hours, she claimed, by our count, over a hundred times that she ‘did not recall’ or ‘did not remember,’” Starr wrote. “This suggested outright mendacity. To be sure, human memory is notoriously fallible, but her strained performance struck us as preposterous...“[P]roving that someone knowingly lied when they said ‘I don’t recall’ or ‘I don’t remember’ is extremely difficult...What was clear was that Mrs. Clinton couldn’t be bothered to make it appear as if she were telling the truth.” It is also difficult proving someone knowingly lied when that someone is under oath before a Senate committee seeking confirmation to a seat on the highest court in the land. Jesus, these really are the fcking mole people. Respond to this post on the Esquire Politics Facebook page here. Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976. This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io<doc-sep>
The Republican members of the Senate Judiciary Committee have engaged Rachel Mitchell, an experienced sex crimes prosecutor from Arizona, to question Brett Kavanaugh and Christine Blasey Ford on Thursday about Ford’s allegations of sexual assault. Presumably the male GOP senators on the committee have chosen a woman to question Ford because they are wary of interrogating an alleged victim of sexual abuse. But less attention has been paid to what kind of treatment Kavanaugh himself will receive. Just what kinds of questions should Kavanaugh be required to answer about the serious, and now multiple, accusations that have been lodged against him in the last few weeks? During a Sept. 24 appearance on Fox News, Kavanaugh declared that he has “never sexually assaulted anyone, not in high school, not ever” and has “always treated women with dignity and respect.” He has expressed more than a little annoyance, however, at the prospect that these broad assertions might be tested through a detailed and factual inquiry into his reportedly heavy drinking or his relationships with and treatment of women during his high school, college, and law school years. During the Fox News interview, Kavanaugh declared, “I did not have sexual intercourse or anything close to sexual intercourse in high school or for many years thereafter,” and then stated, “I’ll leave it at that.” According to the Washington Post, Kavanaugh expressed the same view while preparing for Thursday’s hearing and “grew frustrated when it came to questions that dug into his private life, particularly his drinking habits and his sexual proclivities.” The message seems clear: Kavanaugh considers it improper and unseemly to undertake a searching and potentially embarrassing inquiry into his sexual history and potential abuse of alcohol. Kavanaugh has also suggested that such an inquiry is unnecessary, particularly given that, during high school, he was a model citizen, “focused on academics and athletics, going to church every Sunday at Little Flower, [and] working on my service projects.” Yet when he was a prosecutor on Ken Starr’s independent counsel staff, Kavanaugh had no such reticence about asking intrusive, deeply embarrassing questions about sexual matters. In 1998, when Starr’s team was preparing to question Bill Clinton under oath regarding his relationship with Monica Lewinsky, Kavanaugh wrote an internal memo titled “Slack for the President?” in which he said that he was “strongly opposed to giving the President any ‘break’ in the questioning regarding the details of the Lewinsky relationship” unless the president resigned or “confess[ed].” In his memo, Kavanaugh proceeded to advocate for what he described as “ ‘full and complete’ testimony” from Clinton and proposed a number of specific questions in order to “gather[] the full facts regarding the actions of [the] President.” Among the queries Kavanaugh suggested: Did Clinton have phone sex with Ms. Lewinsky 15 times? Did Clinton ejaculate in a White House sink? Did the president masturbate into a trash can in his secretary’s office? As Helaine Olen recently observed in the Washington Post, while the Starr team’s actual questioning of Clinton was highly graphic, it was arguably less intrusive than what Kavanaugh had advocated for. Based on the reasoning of prosecutor Kavanaugh, it should be wholly proper for Supreme Court nominee Kavanaugh to be “forced to account for” his actions before the nation. I’d imagine that prosecutor Kavanaugh would ask Supreme Court nominee Kavanaugh questions including the following: • Whether, as alleged by Christine Blasey Ford, during a drinking binge, Kavanaugh forced her into a room, put his hand over her mouth, tried to remove her clothes as she struggled to get away, and treated her so roughly she reasonably feared for her life; • Whether, as alleged by Deborah Ramirez, Kavanaugh, again while highly inebriated, pulled down his pants before Ramirez and presented his penis to her while others laughed and one onlooker taunted her to “kiss it”; and • Whether, as alleged by Julie Swetnick, Kavanaugh, while drunk, repeatedly “ground” himself against women and attempted to fondle and grab them without their consent, as well as whether he was present while a drugged and debilitated Swetnick was gang raped.