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    ‘Trump’s not a good sport’: Chris Cillizza on presidents at play

    From The Big Lebowski to Alice on The Brady Bunch, depictions of bowling abound in American pop culture. The sport’s real-life adherents included Richard Nixon, who installed bowling lanes in the White House and was known to play between seven to 12 games late at night. Characteristically, he played alone. This is one of many athletic accounts from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in a new book, Power Players: Sports, Politics, and the American Presidency, by the longtime political journalist Chris Cillizza.Bowling solo personified “Nixon the loner”, Cillizza says. “He didn’t play tennis or golf with friends. He did enjoy bowling by himself. It’s a powerful image, a telling image.”Tricky Dick’s love of bowling also helped with a crucial voting bloc: “Nixon viewed it as the sport of the Silent Majority – white, blue-collar men who sort of made up his base. He was very aware of this.”A Washington journalist for four decades, most recently for CNN, Cillizza pitched the book as about “the sports presidents play, love, spectate, and what it tells us about who they are and how they govern. That was the germ of the idea, the seed going in.”Power Players surveys 13 presidents of the modern era, from Dwight Eisenhower to Joe Biden. Some of its narratives are well-known – think Ike’s extensive golf-playing, John F Kennedy’s touch football games or Barack Obama’s pickup basketball on the campaign trail. The book explores less-remembered sides of these stories, including a scary moment on the links for Eisenhower.While golfing in Colorado in 1955, he fielded multiple stressful phone calls from his secretary of state, John Foster Dulles. After eating a hamburger with onions and getting yet another call from Dulles, Ike felt too angry to keep playing. Chest pains followed that night. The White House initially claimed indigestion but an electrocardiogram found something more serious – a heart attack. At the time, there was no 25th amendment specifying the chain of command if a president became incapacitated. Fortunately, Ike never lost consciousness during the episode.Golf was a popular sport for many presidents, as reflected in a previous book about White House athletics, First Off the Tee by Don Van Natta Jr, whom Cillizza interviewed. Yet the list of presidential pastimes is long and diverse, from Nixon’s bowling to Jimmy Carter’s fly fishing to George HW Bush’s horseshoes. Yes, horseshoes. In addition to Bush’s well-known prowess on the Yale University baseball team, he was a pretty good horseshoes player who established his own league in the White House, with a commissioner and tournaments. The White House permanent staff fielded teams; Queen Elizabeth II even gifted Bush a quartet of silver horseshoes.In the greatest-presidential-athlete discussion, Cillizza lands in Gerald Ford’s corner.“No debate, he’s the best athlete ever, I think, with [George HW] Bush a distant second, among modern presidents.”Ford sometimes lived up to the bumbling stereotypes made famous by Chevy Chase and Bob Hope – including when he accidentally hit people with golf balls. Yet he was an All-American center on the national-champion University of Michigan football team and received contract offers from two NFL squads, the Detroit Lions and Green Bay Packers.In addition to the sports presidents play, Cillizza’s book examines how presidents use sports to connect to the public.Calling sports “a common language that lots and lots and lots of Americans speak”, Cillizza says: “I think politicians are forever trying to identify with the average person … I think sports is a way into that world for a lot of presidents.”There’s the practice of inviting championship teams to the White House, which Cillizza traces to Ronald Reagan, although instances date back decades. While not much of a sports fan, Reagan came from a sports radio background, played the legendary Gipper in the film Knute Rockne, All American and understood the importance of proximity to winners, Cillizza says.There’s also the tradition of presidential first pitches at baseball games, arguably the most iconic thrown by George W Bush at Yankee Stadium during the 2001 World Series, in the wake of the September 11 terror attacks. Cillizza notes Dubya’s baseball pedigree as president of the Texas Rangers, and that he reportedly contemplated becoming commissioner of Major League Baseball.Of the presidents surveyed, Cillizza says George HW Bush had the most sportsmanship, thanks to early lessons about fair play from his mother, Dorothy Walker Bush, a strong tennis player herself. The least sportsmanlike, according to the author? Lyndon Johnson and Donald Trump. Cillizza cites an account of Trump’s time on the Fordham University squash team. After a loss to the Naval Academy, he drove to a department store and bought golf equipment. He and his teammates vented their frustration by hitting golf balls off a bluff into the Chesapeake Bay, then drove away, sans clubs.“That’s Trump, in a lot of ways,” Cillizza says. “He’s not a good sport who’s going to be genteel.”The author notes similar behavior throughout Trump’s career, including bombastic performances in World Wrestling Entertainment storylines and a whole recent book about his alleged cheating at golf, as well as a recent news item about the former president going to Ireland to visit one of his courses.“He hit a drive, and said Joe Biden could never do this,” Cillizza recalls. “It went 280ft right down the middle of the fairway. He talks about his virility, his health, through the lens of sports.”Not too long ago, two ex-presidents from rival parties teamed up as part of a golf foursome. George HW Bush joined the man who beat him in 1992 – Bill Clinton – en route to an unlikely friendship. Rounding out the foursome were the broadcasting legend Jim Nantz and NFL superstar Tom Brady.“It’s remarkable what sports can do to bring presidents together,” Cillizza says. “This day and age, it’s hard to consider … I don’t think Donald Trump and Joe Biden will be playing golf together anytime soon.”
    Power Players is published in the US by Twelve More

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    ‘Market rules should benefit the majority of the citizenry’: historians Naomi Oreskes and Erik M Conway

    For the last decade, historians Naomi Oreskes and Erik M Conway have been digging into the history of the idea that freedom only thrives if businesses are left unbothered by governments. It’s a philosophy that has touched every corner of American life, they argue, even though it has long been proven deeply flawed.In their new book – The Big Myth – How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market – Oreskes and Conway document the rise of what’s more politely called “market fundamentalism” over the last century, from corporate propaganda and fringe academic theory to mainstream ideology.The book is both a sequel and a prequel to their groundbreaking book Merchants of Doubt, which is about a handful of prominent scientists who obfuscated clear scientific findings to oppose climate regulation. At the heart of their beliefs, Oreskes and Conway argue, was the big myth.The Guardian spoke to Oreskes and Conway about The Big Myth and how it came to dominate how Americans think about government regulation. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.The Guardian: How do you define “the big myth”?Oreskes: In a way, the myth isn’t just one thing; it’s a set of interconnected concepts that together support this larger ideology of market fundamentalism.The first part of the myth is the notion of the free market, the idea that you could even meaningfully talk about “the free market” as a thing that exists. In reality, people make markets. Markets are human institutions.So that leads to the second part of the myth, which is the idea that markets have wisdom, that the invisible hand guides us and that if we all do our own thing, our own self-interest will somehow lead to this productive, efficient and happy outcome. And therefore, we should just trust markets, that the government distorts markets and interferes with the wisdom of the marketplace.Then the third part of the myth is, in a way, the most damaging – it’s the piece that really informed Merchants of Doubt. It’s this idea of the inextricable link between capitalism and economic freedom as a bulwark against totalitarianism.What are the origins of the big myth?Conway: We pick up the story with business leaders fighting against the regulation of child labor and workplace safety. We’ve all forgotten that there was a crisis of workplace accidents in the United States in the late-19th and early-20th century that killed and maimed hundreds of thousands of peopleBusiness leaders in the United States were absolutely dead-set against doing anything about these twin crises.Oreskes: It’s pretty hard to come up with a good argument to defend the employment of children as young as two in textile mills, which we know happened. How do you defend something that’s clearly, on the surface, really quite appalling? Come up with some kind of argument that appeals to something that we do care about, that we value: freedom.We saw this in Merchants of Doubt, when we talked about the tobacco industry and how it mobilized this whole argument about the freedom to smoke, that you don’t want the government telling you what to do. We actually thought the tobacco industry invented that strategy. But they didn’t. What we show in this new book is that it goes back much further.In the 20th century, one of the things the market fundamentalists did was rewrite US history to invent a story about how free enterprise was embedded into the very foundations of American society, economy and culture.They do this in the 1930s through a metaphor they came up with called the “Tripod of Freedom.” This was pushed by the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), which at the time was the largest trade organization in the United States. They claimed that the United States was founded on three essential principles that were like a tripod – if any were to be compromised, the whole structure would fall. The three pillars were representative democracy, the Bill of Rights and free enterprise. The third part was a complete invention because, actually, free enterprise appears nowhere in the Constitution or in the Bill of Rights. Nowhere in the Declaration of Independence.The book covers the extensive propaganda campaign from NAM and companies like General Electric to sway the American public against government regulation of businesses. Why were these campaigns so effective?Conway: They disguised propaganda as entertainment, it was not obviously partisan or political. That was the whole idea. Propagandists need a kernel of truth in order to be successful. The best lies are ones that are built on something people already believe.They basically doubled down after the second world war when corporations could control their own advertising again. They keep doing it for decades. If you’re hammered through every outlet with the same message over and over again, eventually you start to believe it. Even if, once upon a time, you realized it was garbage.You have a whole chapter on Little House on the Prairie, Laura Ingalls Wilder’s best-selling books that became a hit TV show. I imagine many people didn’t know it was largely written with the help of her daughter, Rose Lane Wilder, a staunch libertarian. Though the books are supposed to be about Ingalls Wilder’s true childhood, Lane Wilder fictionalized much of it to expound on the ideals of individualism.Oreskes: There are people out there who are mad at us for bursting that bubble. My defense? Actually, we didn’t burst the bubble. Other historians, Caroline Fraser and Christine Woodside burst that bubble, and we’re drawing from their work.In the first chunk of the book, market fundamentalism is fighting an uphill battle. At what point did market fundamentalism start taking hold and becoming mainstream?Oreskes: A key figure in this story, obviously, is Ronald Reagan. Most Americans know that Reagan was an actor before he became a politician, but what they don’t know is how he affected that transition.Reagan’s career was not doing all that well, but he was still a Democrat. He was the president of the Screen Actor’s Guild. But then he gets this job with GE, and the job has two parts: hosting General Electric Theater and promoting General Electric ideology through speeches. It’s pretty clear that during this period, his political outlook shifts to be very, very aligned with GE. So he comes out of GE with this new political ideology, quite different than what he had before he went in. Also critically, he comes out with a set of wealthy corporate backers who then finance his run for governor of California.But you make the point that it wasn’t just Reagan.Conway: When Jimmy Carter becomes president, he brings into office a new generation of economists, many of whom have now been educated with the ideas of free markets that have been pushed into academia by the Chicago School of Economics. They begin shifting the way the government manages the economy. They are the regulators Carter brings into office, the first people we now associate with Reagan and ending with Bill Clinton, who finishes the job of deregulating banks in the late 1990s.Orenskes: We see how this language, rhetoric and ideology gets taken across the board politically so that when Bill Cinton gives his State of the Union address in 1995, he says: “The era of big government is over.” And that’s a Democrat, right?So how does that happen? Milton Friedman said one of the jobs of intellectuals is to be standing ready with ideas. And you just work on your ideas and you get laughed at for a long time. But one day, the world is ready and then you’re there. So when the crisis, the postwar 1970s stagflation develops, nobody really has an explanation for why this has happened. There are probably multiple factors – but the right wing is now standing ready saying: “Oh, the problem is too much government. The problem is big government. The problem is overregulation.” That gains traction, in part because it’s a simpler explanation to a complex problem.Does it seem like market fundamentalism’s grasp is loosening? Are the tides changing?Oreskes: After the Silicon Valley Bank failure, there’s this big conversation taking place right now about how much of that was allowed to happen by weakened regulation, particularly because there were specific regulations that were weakened during the Trump administration.I think most people still see regulation as a necessary evil – even liberals and progressives. So they’re sort of apologetic about it. “Yeah, I know it’s bad. But you know, we have to do it.” I would like to try to change that conversation, to make people think much more in terms of regulations as the rules of how markets operate.At the end of the book, we make a point about biological regulation. Without biological regulation, all life would cease to exist because an organism cannot operate unless it can regulate its internal chemistry. Biological regulation makes life possible. I think that’s true of society as a whole. The right set of rules and regulations supports a vibrant economy where people can “live well and prosper” (you know, Star Trek).Conway: The question is, who are the rules set up to benefit the most? Business leaders want the rules of the road to benefit them, and we’re arguing that no, the rules of the market should benefit the majority of the citizenry, not just the business leaders. More

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    The man who connected Bill Clinton and Gerry Adams: Politics Weekly America podcast

    Next week, Joe Biden and Bill Clinton will arrive in Northern Ireland to join commemorations of the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday agreement. Clinton is now celebrated as one of the key players behind the agreement, but he didn’t do it alone. It took years of background efforts – of secret meetings, discreet lobbying and high-risk shadow diplomacy, by people whose names we’ve never known – to convince the United States to get involved.
    This week, Jonathan Freedland speaks to one of those people, Niall O’Dowd, who tells the extraordinary story of how he built a secret channel between Clinton and the Irish republican movement

    How to listen to podcasts: everything you need to know More

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    Michael Cohen’s lawyer compares Trump to Clinton-Lewinsky case

    A lawyer representing a key witness in the investigation into Donald Trump over hush money payments has drawn comparisons between the case and the sex scandal that embroiled Bill Clinton, as it became clear there would be no indictment in the Trump investigation until next week at the earliest.Lanny Davis, who represents Michael Cohen, Trump’s former fixer, hypothesized about what might have happened if Clinton had handled his affair with Monica Lewinsky differently.Clinton was impeached in his second term after lying about his relationship with Lewinsky while he was president. Davis, who served as a special adviser to Clinton, speculated about how the Democrat might have been perceived if a representative had paid money to Lewinsky.Cohen, who was Trump’s lawyer and fixer for more than a decade before he turned on his former boss, paid $130,000 to Stormy Daniels to prevent her from going public with allegations that she and Trump slept together a decade before he won the White House.“I won’t mention the name of the former president I worked for,” Davis told Politico in an interview.“But can you imagine if … he had written personal checks as part of that controversy?“Can you imagine if I had personal checks out of a checking account of a sitting president that reimburses a hush money scheme, and then I used a legal argument to say why he should get off: because New York state law doesn’t apply to federal law? Good luck!”Cohen, who was sentenced to three years in prison for ​​tax evasion and campaign-finance violations related to the Daniels payment, has been a key witness in the investigation into Trump.The now-disbarred lawyer paid Daniels through a shell company, and was then reimbursed through Trump, whose company logged the reimbursements as legal expenses. The Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, is leading the investigation into potential wrongdoing by Trump.Davis, a lawyer and longtime political operative, claimed in the Politico interview that he himself had triggered that investigation by speaking to Cyrus Vance, Bragg’s predecessor.“Cyrus Vance Sr was the secretary of state under Jimmy Carter – I’m showing my age now […] I was in my 20s when President Carter was elected,” Davis told Politico.“And I got to know Mr Vance. So his son, being the DA of [Manhattan], I called after Michael was sent to prison.”Davis said he believed “the evidence of financial fraud was on the record in the [congressional] hearings and that Vance’s office should interview Michael”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“They came to Otisville [the prison where Cohen served some of his sentence] … They did manage to get a visit, and then two and then three separate visits at the beginning,” Davis said.“And that’s how it began.”Davis’s interview came as the investigation into Trump rolled on in New York. Reports had suggested Trump would be indicted this week – Trump himself claimed, wrongly, last weekend that he would be arrested on Tuesday – but the grand jury hearing the case is not due to meet again until Monday.In the meantime Trump, who is the subject of multiple other legal inquiries, warned on Friday of “potential death and destruction” should he be charged in the case.In a rambling, idiosyncratically punctuated message posted on Truth Social, a niche rightwing social media network that he owns, at 1am, Trump wrote:“What kind of person can charge another person, in this case a former President of the United States, who got more votes than any sitting President in history, and leading candidate (by far!) for the Republican Party nomination, with a Crime, when it is known by all that NO Crime has been committed, & also known that potential death & destruction in such a false charge could be catastrophic for our Country? Why & who would do such a thing? Only a degenerate psychopath that truely [sic] hates the USA!” More

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    Leo Varadkar meets Biden after apparent Clinton-Lewinsky joke

    Ireland’s taoiseach, Leo Varadkar, has apologised for making an apparent joke about Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky, during an event in Washington on the eve of St Patrick’s Day celebrations.Varadkar’s comment on Thursday risked overshadowing his meeting with Joe Biden at the White House on Friday for the traditional handing over of a bowl of shamrock to the US president, the most important day in the Irish-American political calendar.The taoiseach departed from a prepared script on Thursday when speaking to people involved in the Washington Ireland programme, which teaches career skills to young people. Reminiscing about his stint as a US House of Representatives intern in 2000, the last year of Clinton’s presidency, Varadkar said it was a time “when some parents would have had cause for concern about what would happen to interns in Washington”.The comment was widely viewed as a reference to Clinton’s affair with Lewinsky while she was a White House intern in the mid-1990s. Hours earlier, Varadkar had shared a stage with Hillary Clinton at a separate event.A spokesperson for Varadkar apologised on his behalf.“He made an ill-judged, off-the-cuff remark which he regrets. He apologises for any offence caused to anyone concerned,” they said.The taoiseach is to meet and share platforms with the Clintons when the couple visit Ireland next month to mark the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday agreement. Biden also plans to visit.Senior Democrats this week urged Democratic Unionist party (DUP) figures visiting Washington to restore power-sharing in Northern Ireland in the wake of the Windsor framework, saying it had addressed the party’s concerns over post-Brexit trading arrangements.Nancy Pelosi, the former speaker of the House of Representatives, expressed hope that the Stormont institutions would be swiftly revived. Chuck Schumer, the Senate majority leader, said the DUP should “get to the people’s business, the business of power-sharing and self-governing”.The DUP leader, Sir Jeffrey Donaldson, rebuked Schumer, telling Sky: “I would urge the senator to read some history books. Maybe he’d learn a little bit more about what really happens and the reality of the situation.”Hillary Clinton increased the pressure on the DUP when she urged assembly members who opposed the Windsor framework to resign and allow others to revive Stormont.On Friday, Varadkar met Biden’s vice-president, Kamala Harris, at her residence in Washington. Varadkar’s apparent gaffe over Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky was not mentioned but the Windsor framework was.The agreement, the taoiseach said, “has the potential to restore very good relations between Ireland and the UK and to restore the relations and institutions of the Good Friday agreement” while opening a new chapter in EU-UK relations.“We’re not quite there yet,” Varadkar said. “But I think with good faith on all sides, we’ll have that and the help of our … friends here in America.”Varadkar also thanked Harris and her husband, Douglas Emhoff, for hosting him and his partner, Matthew Barrett. They had been “inspired”, he said, both as doctors and members of the LGBTQ+ community, by Harris’s advocacy for marriage equality as a California prosecutor and senator, and now as vice-president.Varadkar said: “From Stonewall [the riots in New York in 1969 that sparked the modern gay rights movement] to Sacramento to San Francisco, America has led the way when it comes to LGBTQ+ equality. I don’t think I would be here today were it not for what America did.”From there, the taoiseach went to the White House to meet Biden.Before the Oval Office meeting, the president sent out a St Patrick’s Day tweet in which he proudly introduced himself as “the great-great-grandson of the Blewitts of County Mayo and the Finnegans of County Louth who boarded a coffin ship to cross the Atlantic more than 165 years ago” and as “the proud son of Catherine Eugenia Finnegan Biden”.Coffin ships were vessels that took Irish immigrants to America during the Great Famine of the 1840s, so called, in the words of the writer Philip Hoare, “because so many of their human cargo died of disease or malnutrition en route, or shortly after arrival”.In front of the press on Friday, Biden referred to a recent meeting in San Diego with Rishi Sunak, the British prime minister, saying: “I very much, very strongly supported the Windsor framework, which I know you do too.”Varadkar thanked Biden “for your help and support and understanding for our position on Brexit in recent years”, which he said “really made a difference.“And we’ve got to a good place now, I think, with the Windsor framework where we can have an agreement that lasts, which is important for Northern Ireland, and also important for British-Irish and European relations.” More

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    ‘Sulking and moping is not an option’: Obama campaigns with Biden ahead of US midterms

    ‘Sulking and moping is not an option’: Obama campaigns with Biden ahead of US midtermsDemocrats roll out political heavyweights to deliver closing arguments, warning that democracy itself is at risk

    Explainer: Why the US midterms matter – from abortion rights to democracy
    The Democratic party’s most powerful voices warned that abortion, social security and democracy itself are at risk as they laboured to overcome fierce political headwinds over the final weekend of the 2022 midterm elections.“Sulking and moping is not an option,” former president Barack Obama told several hundred voters in Pittsburgh on Saturday. “On Tuesday, let’s make sure our country doesn’t get set back 50 years.”Republicans appear better positioned than ever ahead of midtermsRead moreLater in the day, President Biden shared the stage with Obama in Philadelphia, the former running mates campaigning together for the first time since Biden took office. In neighbouring New York, former president Bill Clinton – largely absent from national politics in recent years – was also out defending his party.Before arriving in Pennsylvania, Biden was dealing with a fresh political storm after upsetting some in his party for promoting plans to shut down fossil fuel plants in favour of green energy. While he made the comments in California the day before, the fossil fuel industry is a major employer in Pennsylvania.Senator Joe Manchin, a Democrat from West Virginia and chair of the Senate energy and natural resources committee, said the president owed coal workers across the country an apology. He called Biden’s comments “offensive and disgusting”.Former president Donald Trump was also campaigning on Saturday, finishing the day at a rally in south-western Pennsylvania where he claimed Biden had “resumed the war on coal – your coal”.The White House said Biden’s words were “twisted to suggest a meaning that was not intended – he regrets it if anyone hearing these remarks took offence”. He was “commenting on a fact of economics and technology”.Biden, Trump, Obama and Clinton – four of the six living presidents – focused on north-eastern battlegrounds on Saturday, as the parties sent out their biggest names to deliver a critical closing argument. Polls across America will close on Tuesday, but more than 36 million people have already voted.Democrats are deeply concerned about losing their narrow majorities in the House and Senate, amid surging inflation and widespread economic concerns. History suggests that Democrats, as the party in power, will suffer significant losses in the midterms.US midterms 2022: the key racesRead moreThe attention on Pennsylvania underscores the stakes in 2022 and beyond for the tightly contested state. The Senate race could decide the overall Senate majority, and with it, Biden’s agenda and judicial appointments for the next two years. The governor’s contest will determine the direction of state policy and control of the state’s election infrastructure heading into the 2024 presidential contest.Biden’s speech in Pennsylvania ran through a grab bag of major legislative achievements, while warning that abortion rights, voting rights, social security and Medicare are at risk should Republicans take control of Congress this week.The president highlighted the Inflation Reduction Action, passed in August by the Democratic-led Congress, which includes several health care provisions popular among older adults.TopicsUS midterm elections 2022US politicsBarack ObamaJoe BidenPennsylvaniaDonald TrumpBill ClintonReuse this content More

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    Kenneth Starr obituary

    Kenneth Starr obituaryAmerican lawyer whose 1998 Starr report led to the impeachment of Bill Clinton Kenneth Starr, who has died aged 76 after complications from surgery, was the independent prosecutor whose investigation of Bill and Hillary Clinton’s investment in a real-estate project called Whitewater began in somewhat pious partisanship and descended into prurience. It led to President Clinton’s impeachment for perjury based on his lying about his relationship with a White House aide, Monica Lewinsky.The Clinton impeachment was an American watershed. Following the OJ Simpson trial of the mid-1990s, it established scandal as the fuel that powered television news, but more importantly it pointed the way to use congressional investigation in order to disrupt a presidency, a tactic followed repeatedly against the Barack Obama administration, including six House investigations, lasting more than two years, of the secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, over the assault on the US embassy in Benghazi, Libya.His proteges, including the supreme court chief justice, John Roberts, and justice Brett Kavanaugh, Starr’s key Whitewater aide, spoke highly of him following his death. His career was inexorably bound to sex scandals, starting with his 1993 review of the Republican Senator Bob Packwood’s diaries in Senate ethics committee hearings over accusations of sexual abuse and assault.As part of Jeffrey Epstein’s legal team, Starr crucially lobbied federal authorities to drop their sex-trafficking prosecution and allow Epstein to plead guilty, in 2008, to lesser state charges with a far lighter sentence in Florida.Towards the end of his career, in 2016, Starr was forced to step down as president of Baylor University over that institution’s failure to pursue rape charges against football players.And while supporters rejected accusations of partisan hypocrisy, the man whose Whitewater mantra was “there’s no excuse for perjury – never, never, never. There is truth and the truth demands respect,” wound up defending the then president Donald Trump during his first impeachment trial, in 2020, having already, as an analyst on Fox News, advised that Trump’s impeachment would be “bad for the country”.Starr’s Washington career had its roots in his religious upbringing. Born in Vernon, Texas, he grew up in small towns in the state’s panhandle where his father, Willie D Starr, was a barber and sometime minister in the Churches of Christ; his mother, Vannie (nee Trimble), was a homemaker. They moved to San Antonio, where Kenneth was voted “most likely to succeed” in his high school.Following two years at what is now Harding University in Arkansas, he transferred to George Washington University in DC, graduating in 1968 with a BA in history. In 1970 he took a master’s in political science at Brown University, Rhode Island, and married Alice Mendell, who worked in public relations, before getting his law degree from Duke University, North Carolina, in 1973.After working as a clerk for the supreme court chief justice Warren Burger, in 1977 Starr joined the law firm Gibson Dunn. He went on in 1981 to become chief of staff to William French Smith, Ronald Reagan’s attorney general; two years later Reagan appointed Starr to the US court of appeals for the district of Columbia.In 1989 Starr left the bench to become George HW Bush’s solicitor general; Roberts was his assistant. The following year Bush considered Starr for a place on the supreme court, but Republicans in Congress feared Starr was not conservative enough. Ironically, Bush’s appointee, David Souter, turned out to be far less conservative than they had hoped. Two years later, Starr’s review of Packwood’s diaries convinced the ethics committee chair, Mitch McConnell, of Starr’s deft conservativism.So, when the original Whitewater independent counsel, Robert B Fiske, issued his interim report clearing the Clintons of fraud and of any involvement in the suicide of the White House lawyer Vince Foster, Fiske was ousted and, in August 1994, Starr appointed.By 1997, despite plea bargains and imprisoning witnesses who refused to implicate the Clintons, Starr had done little but endorse Fiske’s findings about Foster. He wanted to leave and become dean of public policy at Pepperdine College, but was convinced to stay until the 1998 elections.In January 1998, Clinton gave a deposition in a civil suit for sexual harassment filed by Paula Jones, saying he had never had a workplace affair; one of the women included in his denial was a White House staffer named Monica Lewinsky.Ken Starr: ‘There are eerie echoes of the past’Read moreTwo days later, Starr, who had advised Jones’s lawyers, was given tapes made secretly of Lewinsky admitting her affair with Clinton. This led to the orgy of coverage about semen-stained dresses and inserted cigars, as Lewinsky’s grand jury testimony set up a perjury trap for Clinton sprung by Kavanaugh, who aimed “to make his pattern of revolting behaviour clear, piece by painful piece”.As the case grew steamier, Kenneth Starr was rebranded “Ken” in the media, in an effort to make his shock more like an average Joe’s. Clinton was forced to answer a series of graphically explicit questions about the details of his relationship with Lewinsky. The House duly impeached, but the Senate acquitted Clinton. Starr rejoined the corporate law firm Kirkwood and Ellis, best known for defending the tobacco group Brown & Williamson.In 2004 he finally went to Pepperdine, as dean of the law school. In later cases he argued for Blackwater mercenaries accused of murdering civilians in Iraq, claiming they had “constitutional immunity”, and against California’s legalisation of gay marriage.He became president of Baylor, in Waco, Texas, in 2010, and chancellor in 2013. Although at least 17 women had accused football players of rape since he became president, he claimed during an investigation that “never was it brought to my attention there were issues”.He was found to have mishandled the accusations of sexual assault against members of the football team and removed as president in 2016; he then resigned as chancellor and as a professor of law.In his 2018 memoir, Contempt, Starr wrote: “I deeply regret that I took on the Lewinsky phase of the investigation, but there was no practical alternative.”He is survived by Alice, their son, Randall, and two daughters, Carolyn and Cynthia, and by a sister, Billie Jeayne, and a brother, Jerry.TopicsUS newsBill ClintonHillary ClintonMonica LewinskyOJ SimpsonBrett KavanaughJeffrey EpsteinobituariesReuse this content More

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    Ken Starr, who investigated Bill Clinton over Monica Lewinsky affair, dies at 76

    Ken Starr, who investigated Bill Clinton over Monica Lewinsky affair, dies at 76Starr’s Whitewater investigation, which uncovered Clinton’s affair with Lewinsky, led to US president’s impeachment in 1998 Ken Starr, the lawyer who relentlessly pursued Bill Clinton over his affair with Monica Lewinsky, has died at the age of 76, according to a statement issued by his family.Starr was a prosecutor whose Whitewater investigation led to the impeachment of former Democratic president Clinton, in 1998. He died on Tuesday at Baylor St Luke’s medical center in Houston, of complications from surgery, the statement said.A Reagan judicial appointee and US solicitor general under George HW Bush, Starr presented many arguments before the US supreme court.Starr also served as independent counsel, president and chancellor of Baylor University and dean of the Pepperdine School of Law, the family statement said, and described their loved one as having had “a distinguished career in academia, the law and public service.”He was later stripped of that university chancellorship, however, after the institution under his watch failed to take appropriate action over a sexual assault scandal involving 19 football players and at least 17 women.In January 2020, Starr served as a member of Donald Trump’s legal team in the then president’s first impeachment trial over dealings with Ukraine.Starr came to national prominence as the special prosecutor who investigated the sex-and-perjury scandal that led to only the second impeachment of a president in US history, against the at-the-time hugely popular Democratic president.The investigation into Clinton’s affair with Lewinsky when she was a White House intern produced a book-length official document for the US Congress that became a bestseller when commercially sold as The Starr Report.Offering startling and lurid glimpses of sexual trysts intermingled with the densest legalese, the report found Clinton’s attempt to cover up the affair offered grounds for impeachment.The impeachment charges stemmed from Clinton’s false denial of the relationship in his 1998 grand jury testimony and in a deposition in a sexual harassment case filed against him by Paula Jones of Arkansas, where Clinton had been governor.On December 19, 1998, the US House of Representatives voted to impeach Clinton, following which a subsequent Senate trial failed to remove him from office.Starr is survived by his wife Alice Starr, to whom he was married for 52 years, his three children and nine grandchildren, the family statement added. Starr will be buried at the Texas state cemetery in Austin.Kentucky Republican and Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell issued a statement saying: “I am very sorry to learn of the passing of my friend Judge Ken Starr. He was a brilliant litigator, an impressive leader, and a devoted patriot.”Republican congressman Pete Sessions, representing Starr’s native Texas, tweeted that he was saddened, and called Starr “a great man”.Last year it was reported that Starr had waged a “scorched-earth” legal campaign to persuade federal prosecutors to drop a sex-trafficking case against the late sex offender and billionaire financier Jeffrey Epstein relating to the abuse of multiple underaged girls, according to a book by the Miami Herald reporter Julie K Brown who uncovered how the law had gone soft on Epstein, before his arrest in 2019 on federal sex trafficking charges.TopicsBill ClintonUS politicsnewsReuse this content More