Special counsel during Monica Lewinsky scandal suggests DOJ assess Stormy Daniels’ claims

The independent counsel who investigated President Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky said this week the Department of Justice (DOJ) should weigh the credibility of Stormy Daniels’s claim that she was paid to keep quiet about an alleged affair with Donald Trump ahead of the 2016 election. 

In an interview with the Yahoo News podcast “Skullduggery,” Kenneth Starr said the DOJ should decide if Daniels’s claims warrant an investigation by another independent counsel. 

“I do think there are difficult and serious questions that have been raised by what we know or what has been reported,”  Starr said.

Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen has admitted to personally paying Daniels $130,000 ahead of the election, raising questions about whether the payment constituted an illegal campaign contribution and if Trump knew about it.

But since the allegations did not come to light as a result of special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation, Starr said it’s up to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein to decide whether it needs to be investigated and if Mueller is the right one to do it. 

“Rod Rosenstein might very well say, you know, ‘You need to stick to the issue … let’s get through with this issue of collusion. You stick to that and let’s now appoint, you know, Mary Roe as special counsel,’” he said, referring to a fictional investigator.

Stormy Daniels went public with her story of the affair on “60 Minutes” Sunday night.

“I’m not going to do Rod Rosenstein’s job and I’m not going to agree with any conclusion that something has got to be done other than you follow the law,” he said.

“The regulations provide the authoritative approach. You trigger those regulations if you think they’ve been triggered, and that’s a judgment call for Rod Rosenstein and or the attorney general of the United States. I can’t put myself in their place.”