KEN STARR, PUSHOVER

After issuing a warning in February that Barack Obama's Supreme Court picks were likely to face GOP resistance, is Ken Starr now consorting with the enemy? Has he crossed the line? David Corn reports:

Kenneth Starr, the lawyer who chased after President Bill Clinton and his wife, said on Thursday that he supports President Barack Obama's first Supreme Court nominee, federal appeals court Judge Sonia Sotomayor.

Starr voiced his backing of Sotomayor while delivering the keynote speech at a luncheon held in Los Angeles for Loyola Law School's program for journalists who cover legal issues. He said that he "thinks very well of her." ... Starr said that he has told more than one US senator that he supports her nomination, but he wouldn't identify which senators he has spoken to about Sotomayor.

Corn adds:

... he's out of the closet as a Sotomayor booster. How will Rush Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich, and other conservatives who have tried to depict Sotomayor as a race-obsessed liberal activist take this news? ...

Well, Limbaugh, Gingrich, et al. could always take a cue from wingnut journalist Richard Poe, who published a book called Hillary's Secret War a couple of years ago in which he argued (as he explained in a FrontPage Magazine interview) that Starr was really just a mealy-mouthed appeaser of Democrats:

Poe: Well, as I explain in my book, there are two Ken Starrs. There's the imaginary Ken Starr conjured up by Big Media -- a ruthless, rightwing religious zealot, bent on toppling the Clintons. Then there's the real Ken Starr -- a timid bureaucrat, afraid of his own shadow, who shrank from investigating any of the truly serious Clinton scandals. On the contrary, Starr actively helped to suppress and whitewash evidence of Clinton wrongdoing.

Take the Vincent Foster case. In September 1994, Starr appointed Miquel Rodriguez to lead the grand jury investigation into Foster's death. Rodriguez resigned in protest less than four months later, charging that the investigation was rigged. Rodriguez accused Starr's people of pressuring him to announce that Foster committed suicide, despite evidence to the contrary.

After resigning, Rodriguez tried to go public. But Big Media shut him out....

FP: Why would Ken Starr cover for the Clintons?

It has been alleged that the Clintons had some sort of hold over Starr -- that, in fact, Starr was "fixed," either by threats, blackmail or perhaps mutual self-interest.

According to White House whistleblower Nolanda Hill, Starr's team was thoroughly infiltrated by Clinton loyalists. Even Starr's FBI investigators reported secretly to Janet Reno. This gave the Clintons enormous leverage to guide and manipulate the investigation their way.

Moreover, Starr had a conflict of interest. In his private legal practice, he represented a subsidiary of CITIC, a company owned by the People's Liberation Army of China, and led by arms dealer Wang Jun, a Chinese military intelligence operative and a key player in the Chinagate scandal....

And there's even more of this kind of thing here and here.

So I think Limbaugh and Gingrich and the rest can safely declare Starr a right-wing unperson and airbrush him out of all the photos....