Kenneth Winston Starr – WSJ

In 1994 he accepted the no-win job of independent counsel on the Whitewater investigation into the Clintons’ real-estate dealings. The same year,

Paula Jones

sued Mr. Clinton for sexual harassment. Eventually a judicial panel and Attorney General

Janet Reno

agreed to expand Starr’s remit. “I was assigned to do a job by the attorney general,” he said in 1998, “and that was to find out whether crimes were committed in this sexual harassment lawsuit.”

Democrats castigated Starr when his report revealed the tawdry details of Mr. Clinton’s tryst with

Monica Lewinsky.

Liberals are still upset and this week are even blaming Starr for somehow giving us

Donald Trump.

But those details wouldn’t have become public if Mr. Clinton hadn’t lied under oath. “I deeply regret that I took on the Lewinsky phase of the investigation,” Starr wrote in his memoir. “But at the same time, as I still see it 20 years later, there was no practical alternative to my doing so.” Perjury is serious, and President Clinton was impeached. His law license was suspended for five years.

Starr’s critics also forget the work he did as independent counsel in putting to rest the conspiracy theories on the right about

Vincent Foster.

A White House aide for Mr. Clinton, Foster was found dead of a gunshot wound in a Virginia park. The QAnons of the era argued that the Clintons probably had something nefarious to do with it. Starr helped debunk that theory with an investigation concluding that Foster had killed himself.

Ken Starr later served as a dean of the law school at Pepperdine and then President of Baylor University. But his mark on history was in the 1990s, and the first draft ought to put the wrongdoing where it belongs, on Mr. Clinton, and not the man who investigated it.