Woo vs. Harmon - Witness Kenneth Starr

David C. Farmer, Successor-Trustee vs. Harmon

(Formerly Woo vs. Harmon & Nicholson vs. Harmon)

CV05-00030 DAE KSC

U.S. District Court For the District of Hawaii

Judges: David A. Ezra; Kevin S. Chang

—

DEFENDANT’S WITNESS

KENNETH W. STARR

Kenneth Starr was the Solicitor General in the Ron Rewald case.

From wikipedia:

Kenneth Winston Starr (born July 21, 1946) is an American lawyer and former judge who was appointed to the Office of the Independent Counsel to investigate the death of the deputy White House counsel Vince Foster and the Whitewater land transactions by President Bill Clinton. He later submitted to Congress the Starr Report, which led to Clinton's impeachment on charges arising from the Monica Lewinsky scandal. He currently serves as dean of Pepperdine University School of Law in Malibu California.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_Starr

~ ~ ~

"America's Holy Warriors"

SourceWatch

Erik Prince is "the secretive, mega-millionaire, right-wing Christian founder of Blackwater, the private security firm that has built a formidable mercenary force in Iraq," Chris Hedges wrote December 31, 2006, in Truthdig

Prince "champions his company as a patriotic extension of the U.S. military. His employees, in an act as cynical as it is deceitful, take an oath of loyalty to the Constitution. These mercenary units in Iraq, including Blackwater, contain some 20,000 fighters. They unleash indiscriminate and wanton violence against unarmed Iraqis, have no accountability and are beyond the reach of legitimate authority. The appearance of these paramilitary fighters, heavily armed and wearing their trademark black uniforms, patrolling the streets of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, gave us a grim taste of the future. It was a stark reminder that the tyranny we impose on others we will one day impose on ourselves," Hedges wrote.

Starr defense

"The new 'counsel of record' for the North Carolina-based company is none other than former Whitewater investigator Kenneth Starr — the independent counsel in the 1999 impeachment of President Bill Clinton over the Monica Lewinsky sex scandal," Jeremy Scahill and Garrett Ordower reported online October 26, 2006, in The Nation.

"Starr was brought in last week by Blackwater to filemotions in front of the US Supreme Court in a case stemming from the killing of four Blackwater contractors in the Iraqi city of Fallujah on March 31, 2004."

"There are undeniable benefits to having Starr, the US Solicitor General under President George H.W. Bush, represent Blackwater—a highly partisan GOP company—in front of a Supreme Court stacked with Bush appointees.

Starr also has a personal connection to Blackwater. Starr and Joseph Schmitz, the general counsel and chief operating officer of Blackwater's parent company, the Prince Group, have both worked closely with the arch-conservative Washington Legal Foundation. Since 1993 Starr has served on the legal policy advisory board of the organization for which Schmitz has frequently acted as a spokesperson and attorney," Scahill and Ordower wrote.

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Blackwater_USA

~ ~ ~

From GNN: Grail News Now:

THE BUSH HARD DRUG EMPIRE EVIDENCE II

Kenneth Starr - Former special assistant to Reagan Attorney General William French-Smith who knew about, and helped author, the infamous memorandum removing CIA's responsibility for reporting drug trafficking by its agents and contract employees.

http://www.akasha.de/~aton/GNNBushHardDrugEmpire2.html

~ ~ ~

Joseph Verner Reed served as Chief of Protocol under George H.W. Bush. Reed's parents were friends of Bush's parents, Dorothy and Sen. Prescott Bush.

Brought Martha Stewart and Ken Starr to the 1999 Alfalfa Club dinner. Brought Katherine Harris in 2001.

http://www.nndb.com/people/614/000052458/

~ ~ ~

Joseph Verner Reed, Jr. is the grandson of Remington Arms chairman, Samuel Pryor.

~ ~ ~

From the book, “NO CONTEST - Corporate Lawyers and the Perversion of Justice in America”, by Ralph Nader and Wesley J. Smith:

Chapter 9

FINDING THE COURAGE TO CHANGE THE SYSTEM

In Chapter 1, we met Washington Attorney Lloyd Cutler, the consummate power lawyer and a master at manipulating the system to suit his ends while repeatedly proclaiming himself a “person of integrity.” But Cutler has passed his prime, and, as we saw, even he, in his brief tenure as President Clinton’s counsel, was unable to completely escape the tarring brush of the Whitewater controversy.

It is, in fact, Whitewater that confirmed the new king of corporate law practice, a man we have encountered briefly in previous chapters: Kenneth W. Starr, a partner in the Washington, D.C., office of 401 lawyer Kirkland & Ellis, Starr has not only passed Cutler in influence, he also exceeds him in sheer audacity.

Starr servered as a federal appeals judge from 1983 to 1989 and U.S. solicitor general from 1989 to 1993. Since leaving government, he has become the power lawyer of choice for corporate interests. He also became the Whitewater special prosecutor; the man in a position, if he found sufficient evidence, to bring down the president of the United States. Ignoring the standards set by the independent counsels in the other major investigations implicating presidential conduct – Leon Jaworski in the Watergate case, Lawrence Walsh in Iran-contra, and Robert Fiske, Starr’s predecessor as Whitewater counsel – Starr steadfastly refused to suspend his private practice while investigating Whitewater, as was his right under the independent counsel statute, even though his conduct raised troubling questions about the potential for misuse of power.

From the time of his appointment as Whitewater independent counsel in August 1994, critics have attacked Starr for brushing aside potential conflicts of interest arising from his role as a partisan conservative Republican.Starr served as a political appointee in the Reagan and Bush Justice Departments, had considered seeking the 1994 Republican nomination for the Senate from Virginia, and sits on the advisory board of the conservative Washington Legal Foundation...

While Starr, as independent counsel, by statute has the “full power and independent authority to exercise all investigative and prosecutorial functions and powers of the Department of Justice,” two months after his appointment he sought to convince the Supreme Court to review a criminal conviction and a $3.5 million fine obtained by the same Department of Justice against his client Hughes Aircraft. A federal jury in California had convicted Hughes of conspiring to defraud the Defense Department by falsely certifying that weapons components had bee adequately tested. (The Supreme Court, as it does 99 percent of the time, declined to hear the case.)

In February 1996, Starr again asked the high court for relief for Hughes, this time after an appellatae court had refused to dismiss claims against the company brough by a former employee who says Hughes committed fraud against the Air Force on the B-2 bomber program. Starr contended that a federal law allowing workers who blow the whistle on employers to keep a portion of taxpayer savings resulting from their actions is unconstitutional; the Clinton Justice Department had previously taken the opposite view. (Indeed, so had Starr when he served as solicitor general.)...

In 1996, Starr represented National Football League players in the Supreme Court in a suit against the league owners, notwithstanding a potential conflict. According to court papers, Jerry Jones, owner of the Dallas Cowboys NFL team, invested in properties related to the Whitewater affair. In this matter, the Justice Department argued before the Supreme Court alongside of Starr in support of his clients’ position. (Starr’s clients lost the case.)...

Among other items on Starr’s very full corporate law plate: representing Suzuki Motor Co. against findings by a federal appeals court that its lawyers had provided false and misleading answers in the discovery process; representing financier Victor Posner after a federal trial judge in Manhattan concluded that Posner had violated federal securities laws, “repeatedly abused [his] positions in public companies,” and “enriched [himself] at the expense of public shareholders”’ and representing controversial labor practices at a Delaware steel mill by the mills’ owner, the Peoples’ Republic of China. Other Starr clients included Amoco, Apple Computer, Chiquita Brands, Siemens Corp., and United Airlines.

In 1996 his firm was also representing: Dupont, after a federal judge fined the chemical giant $115 million for allegedly misrepresenting and “consciously, willfully, intentionally and deliberately” withholding key scientific test results in a lawsuit over the herbicide Benlate; Charles Keating, in his efforts to set aside his previous criminal convictions and avoid additional convictions for looting customer accounts he once controlled, Lincoln Savings; and Dow Corning Corp., in suits brought by women alleging injuries from the company’s silicone breast implants.

Avoidance of conflict of interest is a bedrock principle of the ethical and legal standards governing both the practice of law and the conduct of government officials. Under canons of ethics promulgated by the American Bar Association, “a lawyer shall not accept employment if the exercise of his professional judgment on behalf of the client will be or reasonably may be affected by his own financial, business, property or personal interests.”...

As independent counsel, Starr’s primary responsibility was that of any prosecutor: the “do justice,” i.e., to ensure that the guilty are punished and the innocent go free. One could fairly ask whether his private law interests could potentially have interfered with that duty.

~ ~ ~

From the United States Department of Justice Website: www.usdoj.gov:

MISSION STATEMENT

To enforce the law and defend the interests of the United States according to the law; to ensure public safety against threats foreign and domestic; to provide federal leadership in preventing and controlling crime; to seek just punishment for those guilty of unlawful behavior; and to ensure fair and impartial administration of justice for all Americans.

~ ~ ~

Kenneth Starr is expected to testify regarding his business, professional, and personal relationships with Ron Rewald, Barron Hilton, Lamar Hunt, James B. Nicholson, James B. “Jim” Nicholson, Diane Plotts, William J. Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Vince Foster, Robert Fisk, Janet Reno, Monica Lewinski, Vernon Jordan, Xerox, Maurice “Hank” Greenberg, Chubb Group, AIG, C.V. Starr, The Starr Foundation, Webster Hubbell, V.K. Durham, CIA, Gene & Nora Lum, John Huang, Paul Alston, Sam Pryor, Dan Case, Steve Case, Suzanne Case, Jeffrey Case, Aon, Walter Carpenter, Jr., Judith Neustadter Fuqua, William S. Richardson, George Ariyoshi, John Waihee, John Ashcroft, Alberto Gonzales, Linda Lingle, Mark Bennett, Earl Anzai, Hugh Jones, Ralph Boyd, Jack Abramoff, Robert Rubin, Henry Paulson, Goldman Sachs, Richard Rainwater, James Ahloy, Aloha Petroleum, Harken Energy, Chevron-Texaco, Gale Norton, The Nature Conservancy, Faye Kurren, Judge Barry Kurren, Dan Inouye, Daniel Akaka, John Peyton, John O’Neill, Frederick Black, Donald Hodel, Carol Muranaka, Curtis Ching, Gayle Lau, Carole Lam, Kyle “Dusty” Foggo, Robert Kihune, Harriet Miers, Bruce Babbitt, Norman Mineta, Nancy Pelosi, Judge Kevin Chang, Judge David Ezra, Bank of Credit & Commerce International, Mark McConaghy, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Blackstone Group, Ron Brown, Marc Rich, Helen Cullen, Quintanta Petroleum, Marsh & McLennan, James Baker III, Norm Brownstein, Gayle Norton, Island Insurance Company, Warren Price III, David Farmer, Eric Prince, Blackwater U.S.A., Joseph Verner Reed, Jr, Edwin Pauley, and others to be named upon discovery.