Monica Lewinsky has weighed in on Donald Trump’s newly announced legal team, which notably includes former independent counsel Ken Starr.

This “is definitely an ‘are you f*****g kidding me?’ kinda day,” Ms Lewinsky wrote on Twitter.

Ms Lewinksy, a former White House intern who is now an anti-bullying activist, became a household name in the US when details of her affair with then-president Bill Clinton were made public and became a central feature of his impeachment trial.

Although extramarital affairs are not considered to be impeachable offences, Mr Starr and Republicans in Congress targeted Mr Clinton for perjury after he lied about his relationship with Ms Lewinsky under oath.

In the investigation that followed, Ms Lewinsky and Mr Clinton were the subject of intense tabloid and press scrutiny. In recent years, Ms Lewinsky has re-emerged in the public arena, and has weighed in on her past as well as the American culture of public shaming that she said she personally endured.

Ms Lewinsky also spoke about her feelings towards Mr Starr in a 2018 essay for Vanity Fair, in which she detailed a chance encounter with Starr at a restaurant, years after Clinton’s impeachment trial had taken place.

“Ken Starr asked me several times if I was ‘doing O.K.’. A stranger might have surmised from his tone that he had actually worried about me over the years. His demeanour, almost pastoral, was somewhere between avuncular and creepy. He kept touching my arm and elbow, which made me uncomfortable,” she wrote.

Mr Trump’s Senate impeachment trial is due to begin in earnest on Tuesday, when Mr Starr and the rest of the president’s legal team — which includes lawyer Alan Dershowitz, who counts OJ Simpson, Jeffrey Epstein and Harvey Weinstein among the clients he has defended, and former Florida attorney general Pam Bondi — will address the president’s behaviour.

All the president's lawyers: The team fighting Trump's impeachment Show all 6 1 /6 All the president's lawyers: The team fighting Trump's impeachment All the president's lawyers: The team fighting Trump's impeachment Alan Dershowitz Dershowitz is a controversial American lawyer best known for the high-profile clients he has successfully defended. Those clients have included OJ Simpson, Jeffrey Epstein and Harvey Weinstein. One longtime Harvard Law associated told the New Yorker Dershowitz "revels in taking positions that ultimately are not just controversial but pretty close to indefensible." Getty All the president's lawyers: The team fighting Trump's impeachment Ken Starr Starr became a household name in the 1990s as the independent counsel who led the investigation that led to Bill Clinton's impeachment. That investigation began as a look into a real estate scandal known as Whitewater, and eventually led to impeachment after Mr Clinton lied under oath about having an affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky. AP All the president's lawyers: The team fighting Trump's impeachment Jay Sekulow Sekulow is the president's longtime personal attorney, and, now, personal lawyer in the White House. He has been accused by former Rudy Giuliani associate Lev Parnas of being "in the loop" during the Ukraine scandal. Getty All the president's lawyers: The team fighting Trump's impeachment Pam Bondi Bondi is the former attorney general in Florida, and a longtime backer of the president's. She made a name for herself in Florida for taking hyper partisan stances on issues, and her penchant for publicity. She is likely to be a prominent public-facing figure during the trial. AFP/Getty All the president's lawyers: The team fighting Trump's impeachment Pat Cipollone Cipollone is the White House counsel, and leading the president's defence team. Getty All the president's lawyers: The team fighting Trump's impeachment Rudy Giuliani While not officially named as one of the president's impeachment lawyers, it is hard to ignore Giuliani's outsized role in this process. The former mayor of New York has been making headlines for months as he defends his client, and for his apparent role in the effort to compel Ukraine to launch the investigation into Joe Biden. We'll see how he figures in the actual trial, which he has said he would like to be a part of. Reuters

Regardless of legal representation, it is widely accepted that Mr Trump is likely to be acquitted by the Senate, due to the high vote threshold needed for a president’s removal from office and the fact that Republicans control the majority of the legislative body’s votes.