Former Clinton Special Prosecutor, Ken Starr, has died at the age of seventy-six.
“Ken Starr, a former federal appellate judge and a prominent attorney whose criminal investigation of Bill Clinton led to the president’s impeachment and put Starr at the center of one of the country’s most polarizing debates of the 1990s, has died at age 76, his family said Tuesday.
Starr died at a hospital Tuesday of complications from surgery, according to his former colleague, attorney Mark Lanier. He said Starr had been hospitalized in an intensive care unit in Houston for about four months.
For many years, Starr’s stellar reputation as a lawyer seemed to place him on a path to the Supreme Court. At age 37, he became the youngest person ever to serve on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, where Chief Justice John Roberts and justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia also had served. From 1989-93, Starr was the solicitor general in the administration of President George H.W. Bush, arguing 25 cases before the Supreme Court”. -Jake Bleiberg, AP
Starr denounced states for changing their election laws prior to the 2020 presidential election, arguing that they violated Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause.
“I think that Bush v. Gore stands for this basic proposition, you cannot have changes in election laws after the fact, you must in fact, be faithful to what the state legislature has done. That’s also what Justice [Samuel] Alito said in his opinion, I think essentially condemning, but certainly identifying as a huge issue, what had happened in Pennsylvania. I think all-in-all Bush v. Gore is just a reiteration of our constitutional structure”. -Kenneth Starr
Starr repeatedly said that no one, not even the U.S. president, was above the law.
He drew criticism for representing the billionaire financier Jeffrey Epstein when he was accused of sex crimes against young girls in Florida and eventually reached a plea agreement accepting only minor charges and a light sentence.