Kenneth Starr vs. Robert Mueller - One Was A Career Prosecutor. One Was a Lifelong Hack
You will see a lot of comparisons between the Ken Starr's $60 million probe of Bill Clinton, which started with an investigation of an old real estate deal and ended with a focus on an extramarital affair, and Bob Mueller's current investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election and collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians. On its face, one investigation has an attenuated relationship with the Presidency, and one has everything to do with who is President.
Still, it is interesting how there is no comparison between who was selected to lead the investigation into Bill Clinton versus who leading the investigation into Trump.
Ken Starr was not a career prosecutor. He was a lifelong partisan. After graduating from law school and clerking, Ken Starr began work at the large law firm Gibson, Dunn, & Crutcher in 1977. After serving on President Reagan's transition team, Judge Starr served as counselor to Attorney General William French Smith from 1981 to 1983. In 1983, at age 37, President Reagan nominated him to serve as a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, and he was confirmed by the Senate in a move reminiscent of Trump's current efforts to pack the courts with your right wing activists with little practical legal experience. Judge Starr served on the DC Circuit until 1989, when President Bush nominated him to be the solicitor general of the United States. As solicitor general, Judge Starr was responsible for representing the United States before the Supreme Court. Notably, Starr was a Republican who investigated a Democratic President.
Bob Mueller, went to the University of Virginia Law School where he served on the Law Review and earned his J.D. in 1973. Unable to achieve his initial goal of a position with the United States Attorney's office, Mueller joined the San Francisco firm of Pillsbury, Madison & Sutro out of law school. He fulfilled that goal by becoming assistant U.S. attorney for the District of Northern California in 1976, rising to chief of its criminal division in 1981. Mueller then moved east to become assistant U.S. attorney for the District of Massachusetts in 1982, and served as the district's acting attorney from 1986 to '87.
Following a year at the Boston firm of Hill and Barlow, Mueller joined the U.S. Department of Justice in 1989 to spearhead the prosecution of Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega. He took charge of the DOJ's criminal division in 1990, where he oversaw the Lockerbie bombing case and formed the agency's first cyber-dedicated unit.
Mueller returned to private practice in 1993 as a partner at Hale and Dorr (later known as WilmerHale). However, unable to get prosecution out of his blood, he took on a lower-level job in the homicide division of the U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of Columbia in 1995, soon rising to the post of homicide chief. He resumed a more orthodox career path as U.S. attorney for the Northern District of California from 1998 to early 2001, before serving as acting deputy attorney general for the new George W. Bush administration.
In July 2001, President Bush nominated Mueller to replace outgoing FBI Director Louis Freeh. Unanimously approved by the Senate, Mueller officially took his post as the sixth FBI director on September 4, 2001, just one week before the September 11 terrorist attacks. In the following months, Mueller acknowledged that the attacks might have been prevented had FBI headquarters followed through on tips from field offices. He then set about dramatically reorganizing the bureau, uprooting its domestic crime-fighting culture to install a high-tech global operation designed to head off terrorist threats.
The director pressed for expanded surveillance powers, but he also nearly quit over what he viewed as abuse of that power. In 2004, after Attorney General John Ashcroft was hospitalized, Bush administration officials attempted to override acting Attorney General James Comey to gain an extension for an illegal wiretapping program. Mueller, Ashcroft and Comey all intended to resign, before cooling down when a compromise was reached.
Lauded for his success in modernizing the FBI, Mueller in 2011 accepted President Barack Obama's offer to remain an additional two years in his post, and again was confirmed unanimously by the Senate. Finally, Mueller was a Republican who is investigating a Republican President in Donald Trump.
The point is that Starr made his career through political appointments, seeking out highly political positions such as Presidential transition teams, Senate committees, and gaining a judgeship as a RW idealogue. In short, Starr specialized in catering to right wing Republicans. Mueller, on the other hand, was a career-long front-line prosecutor. The difference between the two is that Starr was trying to achieve a political goal of hobbling Clinton even if that meant turning an extramartial affair into an impeachable offense. Mueller is trying to prosecute a high profile crime involving the circumvention of the U.S. political system with the assistance of a hostile foreign government.
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