Kenneth Starr, the prosecutor whose investigation led to the impeachment proceedings of former US President Bill Clinton in 1998, has died in Houston at age 76 from complications following surgery. His family announced this on Tuesday.
Starr rose to prominence in the 1990s for his investigations into the Whitewater scandal involving real estate investments by Bill and Hillary Clinton, among others. His jurisdiction was later extended to investigate alleged perjury and obstruction of justice by then-President Clinton after it was revealed that he had been having an affair with intern Monica Lewinsky. This case gave Starr both national and worldwide exposure.
Based on his Starr report, which became a huge commercial success as a book after the investigation, the House of Representatives voted to impeach Clinton. It was the first impeachment attempt in the US in 130 years. The Senate failed to uphold that conclusion by the required two-thirds majority, which ultimately allowed Clinton to sit.
Starr then went on to pursue an academic career, including leading the law faculty at Pepperdine University, a Christian university in California. He reappeared in the press in 2020 as a lawyer for former President Donald Trump, strikingly speaking out against attempts to impeach incumbent presidents. “Like war, impeachment is hell,” said Starr.
In his memoir, published in 2018, Starr wrote that he regretted the way the investigation into Clinton’s real estate investments spilled over into a prosecution of the Lewinsky affair — though twenty years later he still felt that Bill Clinton had failed to respect the rule of law sufficiently. .
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