Liberal Forum

Starr’s account went into intimate and prurient detail about Clinton’s encounters with Monica Lewinsky, to a degree that exceeded anything necessary to support the essential claim that he had lied about his sex life in a sworn deposition in an unrelated case, and later in grand jury testimony, as one sober observer later explained:

The Starr Report, however, went far beyond establishing that the President lied when he denied having sexual relations with Lewinsky, and included sexual details of various encounters that suggest the Report also had as its purpose to embarrass Clinton and thus limit his effectiveness as President.

Perhaps no detail revealed in the Starr Report better illustrates this prosecutorial overkill than the decision to include a description of Clinton putting a cigar in Lewinsky’s vagina, then putting it in his own mouth and saying that it “tastes good” (3-31-96).

The cigar incident would inspire countless jokes by late-night comics and greatly weakened the ability of the President to ever again be seen as “presidential.”

Much later it became a matter of considerable interest that at least one Starr staffer who argued for the humiliating level of sexual detail was a young attorney named Brett Kavanaugh.

http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/04/ ... eport.html