Kavanaugh's judgment is troubling

The world waits for the GOP and FBI to quit dawdling and start really investigating the troubling accusation that, as a 17-year-old, Brett Kavanaugh, President Donald Trump's Supreme Court nominee, allegedly attempted to sexually assault a 15 year-old girl. But there is still one more concern that Senate Democrats and Republicans need to revisit and rethink.

Such as what really happened on "Prom Night."

And no, I definitely am not referring to the very troubling events of that night 36 years ago when Dr. Christine Blasey Ford (then 15 years old) says she was attacked at a house party in a bedroom by a 17-year-old who tried to undress her. Dr. Ford says her attacker that night was Brett Kavanaugh-and he absolutely denies that the incident ever happened and says he wasn't even at such a party.

But I am talking instead about a very different event. It occurred when Kavanaugh was an adult, a lawyer and prominent member of the staff of then-special prosecutor Kenneth Starr who set up and baited a trap-so a panicky President Bill Clinton would entrap himself by committing an impeachable offense of lying about sex under oath.

"Our team dubbed the operation 'Prom Night,'" Starr wrote in his new book, "Contempt: A Memoir of the Clinton Investigation." Starr detailed the night in 1998 when the Starr team and the FBI set up a sting at the Ritz Carlton Hotel, just across the Potomac River from the White House. That's where the FBI successfully tape-recorded a young former White House intern, Monica Lewinsky, while she talked to another woman, Linda Tripp, who was in on the taping and wore a wire. Lewinsky thought Tripp was her friend and talked with her about her sexual activities with the president. And most importantly for Starr, that Clinton wanted her to lie under oath by denying they ever committed any sexual activities-since the president and Lewinsky were both going to be testifying under oath in another case.

All of that is discussed in Starr's new book, which has just been released as the Senate is considering Trump's nomination of Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. Starr, of course, discusses the controversial decisions he made in his probe and notes Kavanaugh's role as a key member of his team.

Starr's long probe of the Arkansas land deal known as "Whitewater" had failed to produce evidence of an impeachable offense; his other probe efforts came up empty too. But then Starr, a conservative Republican, got word that Lewinsky had been telling Tripp all about the fact that Clinton was having sexual dalliances with Lewinsky in the Oval Office area. And they knew Clinton would eventually lie about sex under oath.

Starr wrote that at one point the FBI's high-tech monitoring equipment failed; the agents couldn't hear what Lewinsky and Tripp were saying in the courtyard. So they swooped in and led both women to separate areas for questioning.

"When they arrived upstairs, Monica turned on Tripp in a fury," Starr wrote, making no attempt to disguise his own contempt for the young woman he'd ensnared in his presidential trap. "She realized she'd been set up. For an hour Monica screamed, she cried, she pouted, and complained bitterly about her scheming, no-good, so-called friend." He condescendingly describes Lewinsky as a "Valley Girl" and a Beverly Hills type.

"We knew the stakes were at their highest level in the entire course of our long-running investigation," Starr wrote. "Potentially the presidency was at stake. Clinton had survived Whitewater but this time in his recklessness he appeared to be carrying on an active criminal course of conduct."

Luring, trapping and then successfully enticing the commitment of a crime is no way for a special prosecutor to promote justice.

Starr's judgment-and Kavanaugh's judgment in enthusiastically supporting it-should be grounds enough for opposing Kavanaugh's lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court.

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