During independent counsel Kenneth Starr’s tumultuous investigation of President Bill Clinton in the 1990s, there were loud objections and even lawsuits filed over Clinton’s complaints that information meant to be kept secret was being leaked to the press by Starr’s staff.
Among those guiding the journalists and authors was a young lawyer named Brett Kavanaugh, now a federal judge and President Donald Trump’s nominee to the Supreme Court.
Interviews with those who dealt with Kavanaugh at the time and documents relating to his confirmation show the nominee to be a savvy Washington source — a go-to member of Starr’s team who parried with conspiracy theorists about the Clintons and the death of aide Vincent Foster and found ways to defend the investigation’s integrity against broadsides from the White House.
Now Senate Democrats are exploring whether Kavanaugh crossed a line in his private communications with outsiders and revealed grand-jury testimony related to Foster’s suicide or other matters then under scrutiny in Starr’s wide-ranging investigation of Bill and Hillary Clinton.
This week, they contacted an author who said Kavanaugh was offered as a confidential source by Starr’s deputies, and they were part of a successful effort to convince a judge to order the release later this week of a sealed 1999 report into alleged grand-jury leaks by Starr’s office.
Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee is scheduled for Sept. 4.
The White House declined to comment.
Senior U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth of the District of Columbia Wednesday afternoon granted the request of the watchdog organization American Oversight to release the 62-page report, which was written by Judge John Kern III, acting as a special master. Lamberth said the report should be released by the National Archives as quickly as possible, but no later than 3 p.m. Friday.
“There have been 20 years of rumors and speculation about who was doing the leaking on the Starr commission, and just a week after American Oversight asked for this report to be unsealed, we may finally get an answer,” said American Oversight Executive Director Austin Evers, “If Judge Kavanaugh was involved in improper leaking of confidential information, the Senate Judiciary Committee and the American people have a right to know before he is confirmed to a lifetime position on the Supreme Court.”
Justice Department lawyer Elizabeth J. Shapiro had written earlier in the day that the report “investigates allegations of wrongdoing but ultimately finds no violations of anything within the Special Master’s investigative mandate.”
Kavanaugh, in a questionnaire submitted to the Judiciary Committee last month, acknowledged that he had been a source for several books written about the Starr investigation. In addition, “I have also spoken to reporters on background as appropriate or as directed,” he said.
One of the reporters he talked with was Dan Moldea, who told The Washington Post that Kavanaugh “was the designated person whom the (Office of the Independent Counsel) puts with people like me.” Moldea wrote a book called A Washington Tragedy: How the Death of Vincent Foster Ignited a Political Firestorm.
Moldea contrasted the ease with which reporters were able to get inside information about the Starr probe with the strict secrecy widely attributed to special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of Trump and Russian interference in the 2016 election.
“I doubt that Robert Mueller’s people are doing that,” Moldea said.
In meetings with The Post, Moldea played 20-year-old recordings of his conversations with Starr deputies. He said he also played the recordings for Judiciary Committee lawyers Saturday in a meeting they requested.
The recordings suggest that Starr’s top deputies referred Moldea to Kavanaugh for answers to questions about the Foster matter.
Moldea said that Kavanaugh called him and that they arranged to have lunch on Jan. 19, 1998, at the Old Ebbitt Grill near the White House.
Moldea said he did not record that conversation, and he declined to discuss it in detail. “I am not going to describe the substance of my off-record conversations with Brett Kavanaugh,” he said.
At the time of their meeting, Kavanaugh had left Starr’s office after concluding an investigation of Foster’s death, which was ruled a suicide, and was working at a law firm. He later returned to the independent counsel’s office to work on other aspects of the Clinton investigation.
Moldea said he has no evidence that Kavanaugh broke any laws, such as sharing information that was presented to a grand jury.