Hillary’s memoirs take aim at Starr

Independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr overlooked “rules, procedures and decency” when leading a series of investigations against President Clinton and presided over “a low moment in American history,” according to Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s memoirs.

“I have not read the Starr report, but I’ve been told that the word sex (or some variation of it) appears 581 times in the 445-page report,” Mrs. Clinton, New York Democrat, wrote of Mr. Starr’s investigation, which she also categorized as “a Soviet-style show trial.”

In “Living History,” which was released yesterday, Mrs. Clinton lays out defenses to the various scandals, including Whitewater and Monica Lewinsky, that consumed her husband’s two terms in office and culminated in his impeachment.

She dismisses Mr. Starr, appointed by Congress to investigate Mr. Clinton, as “a man whose sense of moral superiority justified overlooking rules, procedures and decency” and said the probes he led from 1994 to 1999 produced nothing but a “dry hole.”

Whitewater — with Troopergate, Filegate and other Clinton scandals — is categorized as the product of a “culture of investigation” by Mrs. Clinton. She calls each “a weapon for political destruction” aimed at a fledgling power couple attuned to Arkansas, not Washington.

She says they weren’t quite up to White House speed, and all those investigations were the result of “faltering missteps of a new administration being literally turned into federal cases.”

“Bill and I failed to recognize the political significance of Whitewater’s sudden reappearances, which may have contributed to some public relations mistakes in how we handled the growing controversy,” she said.

The investigation into the Arkansas real estate deal known as Whitewater, which warrants a whole chapter in Mrs. Clinton’s book, “came to represent a limitless investigation of our lives … and never turned up any wrongdoing on our part.”

And while much of the press coverage of Mrs. Clinton’s memoirs has focused on her husband’s infidelity and domestic strife in the White House, Mrs. Clinton fights some old battles.

She says the removal of personal files related to Whitewater from aide Vince Foster’s White House office after his 1993 suicide was justified.

“Since Vince’s office was never a crime scene, these actions were understandable, legal and justifiable. But they would spawn a cottage industry of conspiracy theorists and investigators trying to prove Vince was murdered to cover up what he ‘knew about Whitewater.’”

During the Whitewater investigation, long-missing billing records from Mrs. Clinton’s Rose Law Firm were subpoenaed by the investigating committee. The records, according to press reports at the time, “mysteriously” turned up at the White House in late 1995.

Mrs. Clinton offers an explanation of this event in a lengthy narrative about David Kendall, the Clintons’ attorney during the Whitewater investigation.

Mr. Kendall received the records from Carolyn Huber, an aide charged with finding documents requested by the investigating committee. In the initial confusion of the Clintons’ move into the White House in 1993, Miss Huber found the records but was “unaware of their significance” and tossed them into a box to be sorted through in the future.

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