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Put Klein in the Star Chamber

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Hillary at the U.N.

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6/09/00 2:15 p.m.
Put Klein in the Starr Chamber
Stop him before he sues again…

By Dan Mindus, NR editorial intern

here’s the vast right-wing conspiracy when you need it? Where’s the bizarro, right-wing version of James Carville? Someone has emerged who richly deserves the hot seat in the Starr Chamber.

Joel Klein, the U.S. Assistant Attorney General in charge of the Justice Department’s antitrust division, and Microsoft tormentor-in-chief, has committed nearly every supposed crime of Ken Starr, and worse. First, consider the superficial parallels. Both men found themselves accountable to Janet Reno. Both men were charged with going after a powerful guy named Bill. And each confronted the issue of splitting his respective Bill in two: For Starr, it was the question of separating the President’s personal behavior from his public performance; for Klein, it’s the question of separating Gates’s baby, Microsoft, into two distinct entities.

It has been suggested on this site that Klein is the instrument of jealousy for — and obsession with — Bill’s wealth. Likewise, Starr was routinely accused of being obsessed with-and sometimes jealous of-Bill’s sex life.

As with any well-known government bureaucrat, both men have been subjected to charges that they are merely pawns of private interests. Starr was the front man for the vast right-wing conspiracy; Klein takes orders from much more powerful, and much more wealthy, heads of industry like Scott McNealy of Sun Microsystems and Larry Ellison of Oracle.

Speaking of wealth, Starr was continuously attacked for spending too much money-about 40 million dollars. But the Clinton administration proposed that Joel Klein control a budget of $114 million for the 2000 fiscal year alone. One might defend Klein by noting that this expenditure would be unnecessary if Gates had just cooperated. Of course, Clinton’s stalls, obstructions, and obfuscations are rarely mentioned in regard to Starr’s supposedly budget-busting operation.

Klein’s case against Microsoft, like Starr’s investigation of the President, may be viewed as a well-funded bureaucracy looking for a problem. Remember when the issue was illegally bundling Microsoft Explorer with Windows? Rather than going after one well-defined offense, the list of charges grew once the investigation began. So, too, has the proposed penalty. Impeachment following the investigation of Ken Starr? Unthinkable! In 1994. The break-up of Microsoft proposed by Joel Klein? Ridiculous! In 1997.

But, while Starr never wanted the job of independent prosecutor and tried to resign before impeachment proceedings got under way, Klein loves his work. He thinks of himself as on a crusade, and he’s not afraid to share that information. Nor is he afraid to spin it: “People say we are regulators,” Klein laments. “But that is not the case. We are strong believers in free market [sic] and competition.”

It should not be forgotten that Starr and Klein went actually head to head once before. After Vince Foster’s suicide, Klein replaced him as deputy White House counsel. In that office, he defended the Clintons in the scandal that originally brought Starr to the office of the independent counsel: Whitewater.

What makes Klein so dangerous is that Microsoft is only the beginning. His assistants generally go on to do antitrust work for private companies, and they’ll find plenty of work there, for the Assistant Attorney General has proudly announced that he’s planning many more taxpayer-funded suits. Joel Klein is responsible, in large measure, for making antitrust litigation a growth industry.

Defenders of Clinton against Starr deftly employed public opinion as a rhetorical technique. The topic was never the offenses of the President; it was always his popularity, and the unpopularity of Starr. Carville et al. weren’t pretty, but they were effective. Why has no one on the Right taken up that same technique, and applied it to the reasonably popular Gates and belatedly Borkable Klein?

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