Donald Trump isn’t the first president to go to war against a federal prosecutor scrubbing his past.

Some 20 years ago, Bill Clinton and his allies wrote the playbook for discrediting an investigator— in that case, independent counsel Kenneth Starr, who probed everything from Clinton’s investments to his affair with a White House intern.


“There’s going to be a war” against Starr, the Clinton strategist James Carville declared in early 1998. An unnamed White House aide told The New York Times that a recent spate of political attacks had been “part of our continuing campaign to destroy Ken Starr.”

Another Clinton operative, Paul Begala, blasted Starr as “corrupt,” “out of control” and mounting a “witch hunt.” “I think we need a truly independent investigation of the investigation itself,” Begala added.

"This is a partisan political pursuit of the president, and it's time for Ken Starr to start wrapping up pieces of his investigation and get to the bottom of it,” then-White House strategist Rahm Emanuel said in February 1998.

Clinton lawyers blasted Starr for leaking. They openly questioned his personal motives and cast aspersions on his team of prosecutors. They said his probe was taking too long and costing too much. Clinton’s attorney general actually did investigate the investigator, launching an inquiry into allegations of misconduct by Starr’s team. Clinton’s wife even famously insisted that her husband had become the victim of a “vast right-wing conspiracy.”

None of which is news to Trump and his advisers, who have used Clinton’s response to guide their own counterattack against the Russia special counsel, Robert Mueller. In private conversations, Trump has asked his advisers how Clinton survived the onslaught of scandals that hounded his presidency. Trump aides and lawyers have in turn sought insights from both Republican and Democratic veterans of the Clinton-Starr wars. For his new White House counsel, Trump even tapped lawyer Emmet Flood, who worked on Clinton’s defense team during his impeachment proceedings.

POLITICO Playbook newsletter Sign up today to receive the #1-rated newsletter in politics Email Sign Up By signing up you agree to receive email newsletters or alerts from POLITICO. You can unsubscribe at any time. This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

Democrats insist that this time is very different. Trump and his allies, they say, are punching harder, more recklessly — and with less regard for the truth — than the Clintonites ever dared. Where Trump constantly lambastes Mueller and Justice Department officials, Clinton himself was tempered in his remarks about Starr and other federal officials. Where Trump repeatedly threatens to shut down Mueller’s operation, Clinton allies didn’t go there. (Asked in 1998 whether Starr should resign, Emanuel replied: “Politically, that’s ridiculous for us to say so.”)

The president’s team has developed a “Trump-hybrid model” building off those Clinton examples, said David Bossie, a former deputy Trump campaign manager who was also an investigator for House Republicans as they probed Clinton’s record.

“I have no doubt the president’s team has studied what Bill Clinton’s team did and is emulating what they believed worked,” said Bossie, who met with senior White House officials soon after Mueller’s appointment to share his Clinton-era experiences. “You always are going to make your own tweaks and adjustments for time and circumstance, but generally it’s the same approach at this point,” Bossie said.

Trump officials have also sought help from Democrats like Lanny Davis, a former Clinton White House legal adviser who spent countless hours defending Clinton on television in the late 1990s. Davis said he has spoken with Steve Bannon, the former White House senior strategist, and several other Trump associates and lawyers about his experience, answering questions about how attorneys and White House staff should interact with each other and where the line should be drawn for challenging the investigators.

Davis said he advised Trump’s team to avoid directly attacking Mueller’s motives — something Davis now says he regrets having done himself. Davis has recalled that Republican Sen. John McCain refused in 1999 to shake his hand for “attacking Mr. Starr’s motives,” including Davis’ assertions that Starr had unseemly personal ties to right-wing anti-Clinton figures.

“The more you argue the law and you don’t get personal, the better off you are,” Davis said in an interview.

Kenneth Starr testifies before Congress during a Clinton impeachment hearing. Starr recently said there was “no question” of the parallels between how Clinton treated him and how Donald Trump’s team was handling Robert Mueller. | Luke Frazza/AFP/Getty Images

Under Clinton, the attacks often were personal: Michigan Rep. John Conyers, the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, trashed Starr as a “federally paid sex policeman spending millions of dollars to trap an unfaithful spouse.”

In 1998, Sidney Blumenthal, then a Clinton White House strategist, blasted Starr deputy Hickman Ewing as “a religious fanatic who operates on a presumption of guilt.”

Starr himself in an interview last month with CBS News said there was “no question” of the parallels between how Clinton treated him and Trump’s team was handling Mueller. “Anytime a president is under attack, the president, or at least the president’s partisans and supporters, will likely go on the attack,” the former independent counsel said.

Today, Democrats argue that the attacks on Mueller amount to obstruction of justice. But in February 1998, Carville dismissed the idea that the Clinton camp’s assault on Starr amounted to interference with his probe.

“What is it that says if you criticize Ken Starr, you’re creating an obstruction of justice?” the Democratic operative asked the Dallas Morning News as Starr’s team battled with the Clinton White House over its attempt to force grand jury testimony from Blumenthal about his work spreading opposition research about the independent counsel’s prosecutors.

Amid the parallels are some role striking reversals.

Joe diGenova, who now serves as an informal Trump legal adviser and frequent defender on cable television, told the Los Angeles Times in December 1996 that Carville’s attacks on Starr were legal but “unseemly.”

“It is a very aggressive campaign and it is making it look like they have something to hide,” diGenova added.

In the 1990s, Newt Gingrich, then the Republican House speaker, also indignantly denounced Democratic attacks against Starr. "I am frankly sickened at the degree to which there has been a deliberate politicizing and a deliberate smear campaign against a former federal judge," the Georgia lawmaker said in March 1998.

But in his defense of Trump, Gingrich has variously called Mueller “out of control” and “the deep state at its very worst” and likened the FBI’s Mueller-instigated search warrant on Trump’s personal lawyer Michael Cohen to “Gestapo” tactics.

Gingrich also recently sparked outrage by openly suggesting that Trump might pardon associates swept up in the Russia investigation. Trump has not ruled out that option. Neither did Clinton — not even after his 1996 presidential campaign rival, Bob Dole, challenged him in a debate “to say tonight he's not going to pardon anybody he was involved in business with who might implicate him later on.”

Clinton wound up issuing one pardon related to the investigations into his conduct: In the final hours of his presidency, he pardoned Susan McDougal, a former business partner who was jailed for 21 days for refusing to testify against him in the federal Whitewater probe, which focused on an Arkansas real estate investment Clinton made in the 1970s. The probe was officially closed by the time of McDougal’s pardon.

When Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani recently demanded action to “investigate the investigators” — claiming bias and misconduct at the Justice Department and on Mueller’s team — he may have been aware of a Clinton-era precedent for that. In March 1999, a federal appeals court upheld Attorney General Janet Reno’s call for the Justice Department’s public integrity section to examine whether Starr’s office had leaked to the media and whether his prosecutors improperly tried to negotiate an immunity deal with former White House intern Monica Lewinsky without her lawyer present.

Trump lawyers have seized on other Clinton-era examples to bolster their own defense. In a June 2017 letter to Mueller, Trump personal attorney Marc Kasowitz argued the president cannot obstruct justice by firing an FBI director, noting the president’s constitutional power to pick his own staff and referencing Clinton’s ousting of William Sessions from the top of the bureau in 1993 when it “had multiple open investigations implicating the Clintons.” In January, Trump personal lawyer John Dowd argued in a letter to Mueller that he hadn’t met the threshold for getting the president to sit down for an interview. He cited a 1997 federal appeals court decision stemming from an independent counsel investigation into Clinton Agriculture Secretary Mike Espy.

Another striking parallel is the one between the damage political attacks inflicted on Starr and the toll they are taking on Mueller. At one point, Starr’s favorable rating hit 11 percent.

Months of Trump-led attacks are having a similar, if less dramatic, effect on Mueller. POLITICO-Morning Consult polling shows the Russia investigator’s unfavorable ratings among Republicans, Democrats and independents have hit all-time highs since the poll started asking questions about him last summer.

“I think we’ve done a good job of flipping public opinion, at least for now,” said Giuliani, the former New York mayor now representing Trump as a personal attorney. He added that the lessons learned from the Clinton era — including its attacks on the investigator — have now become second nature to the Republican president and his legal team. Those lessons could serve Trump well should he face impeachment proceedings in Congress — a process Clinton survived, thanks in no small part to his campaign against Starr.

“It’s in our memory bank,” Giuliani said.