Ken Starr spent years investigating President Bill Clinton, leading to his eventual impeachment in the House and trial in the Senate.
The former independent counsel now says President Trump has enough to be worried about that he’ll need good lawyers around him as he decides whether to sit down with special counsel Robert Mueller.
“If I’m on his criminal defense team, I would be very concerned,” Starr told Politico. “I don’t know what President Trump knows, but there have been a number of guilty pleas. Some of those guilty pleas go to false statements, so I would just be cautious” before answering questions from Mueller.
Starr says he’d advise this even while he believes that Trump has a duty to answer investigators’ questions under oath, just as Clinton did 20 years ago.
“He is the president of the United States, and I think that carries with it an obligation to cooperate with duly-authorized federal investigations. You’re not above the law. You think you’ve got a timeout based upon your service as president. We respect you, you are occupying the presidency, you have a very important job. But there’s no timeout. You have to respond when you’re summoned to the bar of justice. That’s the way I respond to all this. You have to be a rule of law person if you’re going to occupy a position of trust.”
As he promotes his new memoir, “Contempt,” Starr says Trump would be “well-advised” to read the book, or at least listen to the audio version, and take a lesson from it: “Facts will come back to haunt you eventually,” said Starr. “The truth ends up coming out, and so you better deal with those facts.”
Mueller’s team has now indicted or gotten guilty pleas from 32 people and three companies.
That group is composed of four former Trump advisers, 26 Russian nationals, three Russian companies, one California man, and one London-based lawyer. Six of these people (including now all four former Trump aides) have pleaded guilty.
If you also count investigations that Mueller originated but then referred elsewhere in the Justice Department, you can add plea deals from two more people to the list.