[PEN-L:414] Kenneth Starr and the tobacco connection (fwd)

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The Los Angeles Times 				Tuesday, July 28, 1998

COLUMN LEFT

Setting Fire to Tobacco Legislation

Kenneth Starr lives in a glass house when it comes to conflicting duties.

	By ROBERT SCHEER

They should name a new cigarette brand after Kenneth Starr. One aimed at
adolescent smokers who might thereby be better able to recall the
independent counsel when they get lung cancer.

Whatever his motives, and they may be as varied as they are murky, the
gutting of anti-tobacco legislation has been the main achievement of Starr's
constant efforts to undermine Bill Clinton. No group has benefited as much
from the weakening of this president as the tobacco industry, which
employs Starr as a legal hit man.

Clinton is the first president to seriously try to bring the tobacco
industry to
heel, particularly in its seduction of the young. The failure of that
effort at
the hands of the GOP is his most stunning defeat.

It's unconscionable that Starr, while so aggressively pursuing the president,
represents Big Tobacco when its very fate is being decided in the battle
between the president and the pro-tobacco, Republican-controlled
Congress.

The toadying of the Republican leadership can be explained by the huge
contributions of the tobacco lobby, which treats the Democratic Party as its
worst enemy. Recently, Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Los Angeles), Big
Tobacco's most indefatigable foe, revealed that the tobacco companies
routinely make their corporate jets available for leading Republicans,
including House Speaker Newt Gingrich and Senate Majority Leader Trent
Lott. When I asked Waxman to explain Congress' failure to pass tobacco
regulation, he replied:

"The tobacco industry is Washington's most powerful special interest. It
gives millions more in campaign contributions than any other industry. Its
fleet of private jets has become the official airline of the Republican Party.
And when the companies wanted to be sure to get President Clinton's
attention, Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corp. hired Ken Starr--the one
man with unlimited power to investigate the president--to be their lawyer."

Starr's conflict of interest is long-standing. In 1995, when he was
investigating Clinton's involvement in Whitewater, he represented Brown &
Williamson in a lawsuit against Waxman and Ron Wyden (D-Ore.). The
members of Congress had revealed that Brown & Williamson had known
for 30 years that nicotine was addictive but had concealed that information
from the public.

Joseph A. Califano Jr., who was Health secretary in the Carter
administration, testified that had that information been known at the time,
"the 1979 surgeon-general's report would have found cigarettes addictive,
and we would have moved to regulate them." The surgeon-general did not
rule that cigarettes are addictive until 1988. Smoking causes 400,000 deaths
a year; I leave it to readers to do the depressing math here.

Not at all contrite, Brown & Williamson took the offensive and said that
internal company documents were leaked by a paralegal employee which,
Starr argued unsuccessfully before an appellate court in 1995, violated
attorney-client privilege. This is the same Starr who seeks to bring Clinton's
lawyer before a grand jury, attorney-client privilege be damned.

If Starr had been on the other side of the tobacco debate, it's doubtful that
he would have gotten the special prosecutor appointment at all. He was
chosen by a three-judge panel led by David B. Sentelle, a hometown
protege of North Carolina Sen. Jesse Helms, Big Tobacco's most loyal
soldier; Helms had sponsored Sentelle, a former county Republican
chairman in North Carolina, for the federal bench.

Just prior to Starr's appointment, Sentelle had lunch on Capitol Hill with
Helms and Lauch Faircloth, another pro-tobacco senator from North
Carolina. It was Faircloth who had led the attack on Robert Fiske, Starr's
predecessor as Whitewater independent counsel. Fiske, a Republican and a
respected leader of the American Bar Assn., who unlike Starr took a leave
of absence from his law practice, was removed on the grounds that his
appointment by Atty. Gen. Janet Reno created the appearance, though not
the fact, of a conflict of interest. Clearly, Starr has both.

Shortly after Starr's appointment, Sentelle's wife went to work in
Faircloth's Senate office. It is Sentelle who has since approved the
ever-expanding scope of Starr's investigation.

Helms and Faircloth are the two leading recipients of tobacco money in the
Senate and have voted consistently to scuttle any serious legislation holding
Big Tobacco responsible for its assault on the health of the American
public. How convenient to have their man Starr tormenting the president at
the very moment when Clinton was doing battle with Big Tobacco. Am I
alone in thinking that there is something deeply disturbing about this
picture?


Robert Scheer is a Times contributing editor.
E-mail: rscheer@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx




--
Michael Perelman
Economics Department
California State University
Chico, CA 95929

Tel. 530-898-5321
E-Mail michael@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx