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Starr's use of his subpoena powers also strikes some critics as overkill. The parade of witnesses that Starr hauled before a grand jury last week included sympathetic figures like Betty Currie, Clinton's personal secretary. On Friday Starr also forced Bob Weiner, a spokesman for Clinton's drug czar Barry McCaffrey, to testify about phone calls Weiner made from his home to Maryland Democrats who want an investigation into whether Tripp broke the law by her secret taping of phone conversations with Lewinsky. "It's Big Brother at its worst," Weiner declared angrily on the steps of the Washington courthouse. Starr is also seeking to compel Secret Service agents to testify about what they saw while guarding the Commander in Chief. The Secret Service persuaded Judge Susan Webber Wright last week to block such questioning in the Jones case, on the grounds it would put the President's safety at risk, and it is arguing that Starr's subpoenas should be quashed on similar grounds.
Starr's air of personal probity--he teaches Sunday school in Virginia--can also strike people as self-righteousness. He believes very much in his own moral rectitude--that's why he was so stunned last year over the outcry when he briefly decided to quit the independent-counsel job and take a deanship at Pepperdine University, which is funded by Richard Mellon Scaife, the billionaire super-Clinton hater. Then there are the problems created by Starr's continuing private law practice. It earned him more than $1 million last year but also repeatedly put him in a position to deal with various departments of the Clinton Administration on behalf of his clients, even as he held a threat of prosecution over Clinton and his associates--a nice persuader for any lawyer. Notably, Starr has been doing lucrative legal work for cigarette giant Brown & Williamson. In one role he helps the tobacco industry to fend off a threat emanating largely from the White House; in the other he decides how hard to put the screws to that same White House.
Because the White House has decided for now on a no-comment strategy on most of the Clinton and Lewinsky details, the President's team will be barking all the louder about Starr in the days to come. Their motive may be pure spin, but Starr's probity and judgment are important all the same because the independent counsel is unusually free of the checks on his power that restrain other officers of government. Even if the pressure on Clinton subsides for a while, Starr can still force the issues against him much further, perhaps even to the point of impeachment. Which is why, with the stakes having climbed so unimaginably high, everyone will be looking more closely now for assurances that the independent counsel is a man whose own methods and motives are unimpeachable.
--Reported by Sally B. Donnelly, Viveca Novak and Mark Thompson/Washington and S.C. Gwynne/Little Rock