Betsey Wright, gubernatorial chief of staff to Bill Clinton back in the day, has sent me a comment relative to Whitewater Prosecutor Kenneth Starr’s positive remarks about the former president quoted today in the New York Times.
Wright was among the Arkansans hailed before Starr’s five-year investigation. His quoted words were no balm for the experience. She writes:
I have been crying ever since I read the article in today’s New York Times which carried Kenneth Starr’s words of praise for Bill Clinton. Those words brought back memories of the Clinton years in the White House that were all a very dark period for me, not because of anything the Clintons did, but because of Mr. Starr’s witch hunt. They should have been celebratory years for me, but they were pure misery. I spent them receiving subpoenas… being fingerprinted by the FBI… testifying before the grand jury and a Senate investigation committee…being forced to be custodian of hundreds of boxes of Clinton papers….being deposed endlessly…even receiving ‘spinoff’ subpoenas from lawyers for Gennifer Flowers and Paula Jones…being treated as a pariah by top White House aides, even some fellow Arkansans, e.g. Bruce Lindsey and Mack McLarty, who refused to return my phone calls…being prohibited from communicating about anything with the President because I might be accused of obstructing justice…racking up several hundred thousand dollars in legal and travel bills which were not eligible for reimbursement because I was not a federal government employee…being quoted for years and years in dozens of books by hateful authors I never talked to, and who made up things attributed to me…all while I was struggling to overcome clinical depression. There was no acknowledgement by Mr. Starr of the countless numbers of us who were Starr’s collateral damage. (At least I didn’t have to serve time in prison like Susan McDougal did.) Mr. Starr’s words in the NYT article today smashed into me with horrible memories of the years he ruined.
Wright, 72, lives in Texas, the state of her birth.
It may be cold comfort: But news is breaking that the Texas blogger I quoted earlier apparently was right. Starr is going to be fired as president of Baylor amid the football sex scandal.
