Ken Starr, known for his investigation of President Bill Clinton in a series of scandals, has died of complications from surgery at Baylor St. Luke's Medical Center in Houston. He was 76.
Kenneth Winston Starr was born near Vernon, Texas and raised in Centerville. After graduating from Sam Houston High School in San Antonio, he attended Harding University in Searcy, Arkansas. He transferred to George Washington University in Washington, D.C. and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1968. He earned a Master of Arts degree from Brown in 1969 and a law degree from Duke in 1973. In 1970, he married Alice Mendell.
Starr worked as a law clerk at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit and later at the Supreme Court for Chief Justice Warren Burger. Afterwards, he worked for the law firm Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher in Los Angeles and as a counselor for Attorney General William French Smith. In 1983, President Reagan appointed Starr to a seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, which he held until he resigned in 1989. He served as the U.S. solicitor general from 1989 to 1993 under President Bush the Elder.
In 1994, a three-judge division of the D.C. Circuit appointed Starr as an independent counsel to continue the Whitewater investigation, started under previous counsel Robert Fiske. The investigation expanded to include the death of White House counsel Vince Foster, the firing of White House Travel Office personnel, possible abuse of FBI files ("Filegate"), the savings and loan firm Madison Guarantee, the Rose Law Firm, the lawsuit filed against President Clinton by Arkansas state employee Paula Jones, and the alleged perjury and obstruction of justice used to cover up Clinton's relationship with White House intern Monica Lewinsky.
After his work as independent counsel, Starr returned to practice as an appellate lawyer and was a visiting professor at the law schools of New York University, Chapman University and George Mason University. In 2004, he was appointed dean of Pepperdine University Law School, serving until 2010. He served as president and chancellor of Baylor University from 2010 to 2016. In 2020, he was on President Trump's legal team for his first impeachment.
Starr is survived by his wife Alice and their three children.
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