#starr report

[lets-talk-about-politics]

New York Times: Brett Kavanaugh Is Trump’s Pick for Supreme Court

The nomination will set off a furious confirmation battle, as the retiring Justice Anthony M. Kennedy has held the decisive vote in many closely divided cases.

Trump’s next pick for the Supreme Court is Brett Kavanaugh, best known for his work during the Starr investigation into Bill Clinton, and for his time as an aide to George W. Bush.

Kavanaugh is certainly a conservative partisan, and his time working for Bush catapulted him to a nomination to the US Court of Appeals, where he dealt with contentious confirmation hearings and credible assertion that he was “too partisan.” It took 3 years to confirm him.

Many of his positions are boilerplate conservatism. He opposes net neutrality and consumer protections, arguing against labor rights. But his more radical positions are rather shocking. He believes that assault-weapons bans are unconstitutional, something that even a conservative like Scalia didn’t believe. Incredibly troubling is his history as “an unrelenting, unapologetic defender of presidential power.” Considering that Trump is being investigated, those beliefs will likely be front-and-center as he goes through the confirmation process.

His position against voting protections is especially jarring, as he wrote the opinion upholding the GOP voter ID law in South Carolina. He will certainly contribute to more voter disenfranchisement in the future.

Also worth noting, for all that see Kavanaugh as a genuinely good guy, that during the Starr investigation he wanted to ask Bill Clinton about the specific places he ejaculated onto during his affair with Lewinsky. Seriously.

[factcheckdotorg]

[porterdavis]

Try this mental exercise

Orin Kerr‏Verified account @OrinKerr

Imagine if the Starr Report had been provided only to President Clinton's Attorney General, Janet Reno, who then read it privately and published a 4-page letter based on her private reading stating her conclusion that President Clinton committed no crimes.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

View from the Left: It's not over till it's over, and it ain't over

Reading the Daily Kos comment threads since the delivery of Robert Mueller's report to the Justice Department, I am seeing a profound sense of dismay from many readers who hoped to see Donald Trump and a cadre of his associates dragged out of the White House in cuffs. That irresistible fantasy has now been put to rest as we await information on Mueller's findings short of criminality. But viewing Mueller's report as the endgame, which was easy to do, was probably never the correct application of his mandate.

Kerry Eleveld at Daily Kos: 

Reading the Daily Kos comment threads since the delivery of Robert Mueller's report to the Justice Department, I am seeing a profound sense of dismay from many readers who hoped to see Donald Trump and a cadre of his associates dragged out of the White House in cuffs. That irresistible fantasy has now been put to rest as we await information on Mueller's findings short of criminality. But viewing Mueller's report as the endgame, which was easy to do, was probably never the correct application of his mandate. Indeed, as we watched the investigations spun off from Mueller's work to other jurisdictions such as the Southern District of New York, it became clearer by the month that the special counsel and his report were the starting point for the process of justice, not the end point.

Based on the rules governing past independent counsels such Kenneth Starr during Bill Clinton's presidency, we have tended to view the investigations of those counsels as distinct and conclusive. When they were finished, the investigation was over and the conclusions were resolute. They either violated laws or they didn't, and their ethical transgressions were laid out in written form for Congress to weigh their impeachability. But precisely because the independent investigation into Clinton began in 1994 focused on a real estate deal known as Whitewater and ended with perjury and obstruction of justice accusations lodged against Clinton four years later for his efforts to cover up an unethical but not criminal affair, Congress changed the terms of how independent investigations would be conducted in the future. Attorneys general were given much more control over the process, and the way Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein used that authority appears to have resulted in a process that kept Mueller focused more narrowly on the collusion and obstruction of justice probes related to Trump, while spinning off ancillary findings of potential criminality to other federal prosecutors.

This Daily Kos piece rightly sums up the Mueller Investigation as the starting point (or the appetizer), while the State of New York, EDVA, and SDNY form the meat and taters, and Congressional investigations are the dessert of this. #MuellerReport #MuellerInvestigation

[royaltyisshe64]

Wait so people didn’t know about the blowjobs before the starr report came out? I thought it would’ve come out in the testimony then. Also what do people really constitute as cheating? For Hillary I doubt that she would leave sex off the table unless bill told her otherwise. She might’ve had an inkling or was in denial about the whole thing

Yeah, I’m trying to sort out the actual timeline here myself. Bill had a sample of his DNA taken (on August 3rd, information that only became publicly known on August 19th) for comparison with the semen stain on The Blue Dress (which was turned over to investigators in late July of 1998) and, obviously, testified before the grand jury in mid-August. The content of his testimony was not, I believe, made public until those tapes, as well as other material, were released during the buildup to the impeachment trial in the Senate that fall and winter. There was considerable debate as to whether or not the affair had happened and what it consisted of until Bill’s admission on August 17th. The Starr report was sent to Congress on September 9th and released to the general public on the 11th and, in the following days, the video of Bill’s testimony was made available and broadcast - on September 21st, as far as I can determine. So, beyond rumors, neither Hillary nor anyone else not either a party to the relationship or someone who had been explicitly told by a person who was had any way of knowing about the blowjobs. If Bill didn’t include that in his confession to Hillary, she’d be totally in the dark. Her comments to Diane Blair seem to suggest that she was under the impression that the indiscretions were limited to making out and heavy petting, given her exclusion of oral sex specifically. But that may well be a misinterpretation. Supposing that Bill said they didn’t have sex (operating under his definition, which did not include oral sex) and Hillary accepted this as truth, if her definition of sex included oral, as the Blair papers indicate, then, whatever her suspicions may have been, as far as she was concerned Bill had told her that there were no blowjobs involved. Did Bill know about these differing parameters and exploit them intentionally? Perhaps. Or did he just play a game of “two truths and a lie” that didn’t pan out? I’ve no idea. Either way, it seems entirely possible that Hillary had little to no idea about the full extent of the sexual relationship until everybody else did. Which… is really, really shitty.

As to what constitutes cheating, I guess that’s up to the individuals involved. Above I hypothesized that Bill and Hillary were operating under different assumptions about what “sex” meant - whether that was just an epic failure of communication or Bill being canny is unclear. That doesn’t provide any answers regarding when either of them believes the line into infidelity has been crossed, and I don’t think I could even begin to speculate.

[royaltyisshe64]

Everything YKW says is contradictory bc the report also said that bill wanted to spend the rest of his life with Hillary and that he loved her. There’s a lot to unpack in this even 20 years later😭

Tell me about it! That’s how history is, though: a whole mess of tangled perspectives, most of which are inaccurate in some way and some of which are outright fabrications. Piecing together some semblance of objective truth can be extremely challenging. YKW had a lot of issues and motivations of her own that impacted her version of events - and that’s not a condemnation, just a statement of fact.

[royaltyisshe64]

The thought of Hillary reading the Starr report still just devastates me. I’m sure she must have read it and everything she must have been feeling reading all those intimate details is just so unimaginable it breaks my heart, especially the part you highlighted in Gravity about him not having had oral in a really long time. I seriously hope she confronted him about that

My personal opinion is that she did read it, although she says she hasn’t. It is still possible, of course, that she takes a denial, what-I-don’t-know-can’t-hurt-me approach, which is perfectly reasonable. If she didn’t go through the whole thing, she may have tried to pick out the most salient points or heard enough details second-hand that she got the gist. No matter what, it’s awful to think about how it must have made her feel. The worst bit - in a veritable treasure trove of worst bits - is that “who knows what will happen in four years”. It’s chilling. Now, that (as well as the part about not having had oral in a long time) might have been a detail manufactured by YKW. Or Bill might have really said it, either to flatter YKW or because he was being a total fucking asshole. Some of those options are more horrible than others, but there’s no “good” scenario there.

[royaltyisshe64]

I hate talking about the scandal but how do you know Chelsea read the Starr report?

It was in an article somewhere - so, of course, it may not be true. However, it strikes me as something Chelsea might actually do. Think about it this way: she’s at Stanford. The Starr report is published, including on the fledgling internet, for everyone to read. And I’m sure that lots of kids on campus did, both out of the prurient interest that was gripping the nation and because, hey, the First Daughter totally goes here! I think it’s entirely possible that she decided that she wanted to know what people were whispering and sniggering about behind her back (or possibly to her face on occasion). Presumably having been sheltered almost completely from her father’s indiscretions growing up, thanks to mama!Hillary working overtime, there could have been an element of curiosity, too - of wanting to know the truth, however awful and painful it was.