Dave "Doctor" Gonzo is a former disgruntled senior executive of a large media company that went south when it was bought out by another large media company. He is now a high-priced consultant in the beer and communications industries. His political rants appear exclusively in American Politics Journal.

by Dave "Doctor" Gonzo

September 10, 1998 --- New York (APJP) -- You'd think that Ken Starr is trying to turn Congress into a landfill the way he dumped 36 crates of documents on them.

I hope they're covered under Superfund legislation -- these three dozen crates contain some of the most pernicious toxic waste we know of, poison which could prove harmful or fatal to democracy.

For more than four years, Starr had been hunting for something -- anything -- that could "bring down" Bill Clinton like an unregulated wildcat driller. He'd savaged the Whitewater landscape -- nothing on the Clintons but exculpatory evidence, but plenty of dirt on others that he could use to "tie' the Clintons to land-deal shenanigans. So he kept digging. So-called Travelgate -- nothing so far. So-called Filegate -- nothing so far.

But the collateral damage to the landscape -- smeared reputations, literally millions of dollars in legal bills as dozens of people scrambled to defend themselves against Starr and his wildcatters -- combined with uncorroborated (more accurately, uncorroborable) rumors of White House corruption -- further poisoned the reputation of the First Family in what people who could put two and two together could see clearly as a coordinated partisan attack. Seems the Prez's heartfelt support for little things like seeing to it that people get decent health care, a world-class public education, and some kind of financial cushion when they retire rubbed (and still rubs) so many hard-righters with the wherewithal to go after Clinton the wrong way.

No wonder Starr seemed to get so much tacit and not-so-tacit support from his network of conservative pals.

But Starr hit a noxious goldmine when he was able to manoeuver his investigation into the President's private life claiming that Bill "may have discussed his crimes during pillow talk."

Huh? Okay, folks, stop and think for a minute, kids... especially you guys... you've just scored. You're enjoying the afterglow. You want to talk about how you ripped off John Q. Dube in a land deal.

Right, Ken -- makes perfect sense.

Let's go back and review a few things about the set-up that look like a judicial Dioxin spill:

A bunch of conservative activists (including Jurassiconservative Sen. Lauch Faircloth) lobby a Conservative-dominated three-judge appeals panel supervising Robert Fiske's Whitewater investigation to replace Fiske with right-wing ex-judge Ken Starr, who was already advising attorneys for Paula Jones regarding her sex harassment suit against Clinton -- while earning two million bucks a year representing tobacco clients who loathe Bill!

Now, I could mention "conflict of interest" here -- something that surely crossed Kommisar Ken's mind. It's arguably worse than that: by taking the Independent Counsel job, Starr was already denying the President due process.

Sounds sorta like obstruction of justice.

Next, let's look at two of Starr's star witnesses. First, ex-judge discredited fraudmeister David Hale. Hale is suspected of accepting payoffs from neo-fascist rag The American Spectator as part of the Richard Scaife-financed "Arkansas Project" partly coordinated by Starr's buddy and spectator board member Ted Olson. Add to that Starr's own investigators having amassed a huge amount of evidence which contradicted Hale's testimony .

Perjury. And payoff to a star witness right under Starr's nose. That's either incompetence or another example of obstruction of justice for Bill and Hillary Clinton.

Then there's everybody's "best friend" in the White House, Linda Tripp. She has publicly claimed that she was not aware she was violating Maryland law when she taped phone conversations with Monica Lewinsky.

Surprise! Two Radio Shack employees have testified in a Maryland investigation that Tripp was told about the law! But then, what would they know?

Did she testify under oath that she was not aware of the law?

If so, that's more perjury. I hope Mr. Starr made a note of that somewhere in those 36 boxes of documents -- it would be awfully inconvenient to have tainted testimony presented to Congress.

Hey -- what about the alleged payoffs to Hale? It looks like a payback for testimony against Clinton, including an awful lot that's been contradicted. More subornation? Naaah... sounds more like witness tampering!

Back to Paula, folks -- Starr seems to have maintained close ties to the Jones case, monitoring its progress throughout his many investigations, and shifted his investigation into Clinton's personal life practically the minute the Supreme Court allowed the suit to go forward. Helping Jones and her new team -- why, Starr's pal Ted Olson!

Starr's shifting from political to personal scandals on such thin evidence -- with what appears to be the complicity of the three-judge panel, whose ruling was more than just questioned by legal experts -- using a case in which he had actively participated strikes us as just one example of abuse of power.

So does Starr's attempt to eliminate attorney-client privilege when the client has died. So does moving to eliminate the right of a client using government-paid attorneys -- is the President a "lesser citizen" not entitled to same?

This sort of abridgment of rights is nothing less than an abuse of power.

When Starr's investigators "stung" Monica Lewinsky, these people tried to deny Monica access to legal counsel. We haven't heard anything about Starr reprimanding these people. But then, abuse of power is something we've come to expect from Starr.

The press was already in a frenzy -- and would remain so for the next seven months, citing "sources close to the independent counsel," and passing on information that only the grand jury and Starr's prosecutors would know -- an attempt to circumvent rule 6(e) which makes such leaks illegal. Starr even admitted to Steven Brill in his now-legendary "Pressgate" article in the debut issue of Brill's Content that his staff spoke to the press about the case.

Funny how these comments always seemed to embarrass the President or implicate him in some kind of wrongdoing! Starr and his team succeeded in stealing the media for their own, hooking them on leaks the way your friendly neighborhood drug dealer goes after schoolkids as "repeat customers."

Now THAT's abuse of power! Plus, it puts the germ of "vast worngdoing" by the Prez in the public's mind -- not necessarily an obstruction of justice, but certainly an attempt to poison the jury of public opinion.

And the mainstream media has overlooked growing evidence of fraud on the part of Paula Jones's second set of attornies in their move to bring the case to discovery -- something that her first team was suspiciously reluctant to do! Seems almost like Starr was waiting for years for the Jones case to come to life so he could "tie" it to Whitewater. heck, he was in on the ground floor of the case! Just how much did he actually know about the now-Swiss-cheeselike Jones "time line" for the day the incident allegedly occurred?

Is Starr a party to fraud?

Or worse -- was Starr working with a network of judicial activists, right-wing think-tanks and "inside" figures to manipulate the spirit and letter of the Independent Counsel in an effort to provoke a de-facto Government coup?

If that's the case, perjury, subornation of perjury, obstruction of justice, abuse of power and fraud are moot.

We're talking sedition, even treason.

I once called Ken Starr a "dweeb turned bully."

I take it back -- his conduct, his pattern of abuse and collusion, and his turning of Congress into a Superfundsite with a 36 "dump" of poisoned testimony and conclusions makethe man and his allies are a clear and present threat to American democracy, deserving of a lifetime vacation in Supermax for doing what they are to a nation I love.

--Dave "Doctor" Gonzo