Ken Starr Quotes
When we had highly sensitive information, the DNA on the dress, that was held within our office and the FBI. There was no dissemination of that information.
Starr, Kenneth W. Testimony. Impeachment Inquiry: William Jefferson Clinton, President of the United States: Hearing Before the Committee on the Judiciary, House of Representatives, One Hundred Fifth Congress, Second Session, Presentation by Independent Counsel Kenneth W. Starr, November 19, 1998. U.S. Government Printing Office, 1998.
This instruction referred to the illegal COINTELPRO program whereby FBI Director Hoover not only ordered the FBI to illegally spy on African American organizations, but actually interfere with their operations and by leaking personal sexual information and trying to ruin the reputations of numerous Black leaders including Rev. Martin Luther King. See {584581}. This illegal program actually specifically named and targeted the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Congress of Racial Equality, and the Nation of Islam. Hoover ordered that the program be kept secret. However, in what is a humorous historical twist, a civil rights organization organized a “black bag” burglary—the same kind of illegal break in that the FBI had been practicing against Black groups and others—broke into an FBI field office and stole this and other documents which they then made public. Otherwise the contents of this program might never have come to light.
The SBU’s were invented by executive agencies without any congressional authorization and used to keep things from public view that did not meet the criteria of the security classification system. Many just saved the agencies from answering many questions but many were just cover ups for embarrassing government actions or incompetence.
Glaxo issued Avandia a drug for diabetes, but the company began receiving reports of heart attacks and other cardio-vascular problems occurring with the drug. A team gathered the data and summarized it for the Senior Management. Drug companies are required by law to inform the FDA of any adverse data that they may know about relative to any of their drugs. Glaxo did not. Further, the Senior management ordered the data “suppressed” and it was so for a decade. Finally the e-mail was leaked to a Congressional Committee when there were other data coming in about the problems with Avandia. The FDA began a new review of the safety of Avandia, but the company had the profits for a decade. Some people had dead friends and relatives. It was generally thought that this sort of thing would never happen in an industry where all the companies are very substantial and a loss of income of any drug would not bankrupt the company, but more and more incidents began coming to light in the early 21st century.
Kenneth Winston Starr is an American lawyer who served as a United States circuit judge and 39th solicitor general of the United States. He is best known for heading an investigation of members of the Clinton administration, known as the Whitewater controversy.
