Ken Starr, whose investigation led to the impeachment of Bill Clinton, has died at age 76.

Ken Starr, a former federal appeals judge and prominent attorney whose criminal investigation into Bill Clinton led to the president’s impeachment, died Tuesday at age 76, his family said.

In 2020, he was transferred to the legal team representing President Donald Trump in the impeachment trial of the nation’s third president.

For many years, Starr’s stellar reputation as a lawyer seemed to put him on the Supreme Court’s path. At age 37, she became the youngest person to serve on the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, where President John Roberts and Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia. From 1989 to 1993, Starr was attorney general in the administration of President George W. Bush and defended 25 cases before the Supreme Court.

Despite his impressive legal credentials, nothing could have prepared him to investigate an incumbent president.

In a five-year investigation, Starr investigated fraudulent real estate deals involving a former Clinton associate, examined documents taken from the office of White House Deputy Counsel Vincent Foster after his suicide, and gathered evidence of Clinton’s sexual encounters. Monica Lewinsky, former White House intern. Each controversy had the potential to do serious, perhaps fatal, damage to the Clinton presidency.

As Clinton’s legal troubles worsened, the White House branded Starr a right-wing fanatic who was doing the bidding of Republicans bent on destroying the president.

In 1999, Starr told a Senate committee that “the attacks hampered” the investigation. Law became politics by other means.”

At the bitter end of the Lewinsky investigation, drawing further criticism, Starr, as required by law, submitted a report to the US House of Representatives, concluding that Clinton lied under oath, engaged in obstruction of justice, and engaged in a standard of conduct inconsistent with the president’s constitutional duty to faithfully enforce the laws. Republicans used the Starr report as a roadmap for impeaching the president, who was acquitted in a Senate trial.

In 2020, he was hired to help represent Trump in the nation’s third impeachment trial. In a memorable statement to Congress during Trump’s impeachment trial, Starr said, “We live in what I think can be described as the ‘age of impeachment.’ The prosecution is hell.”

Clinton’s legal troubles began during the 1992 presidential campaign. Questions were raised about the candidate’s ties to the owner of a bankrupt Arkansas savings and loan company. The problem quickly disappeared. But it caught the attention of federal regulators, who began investigating whether S&L money had been diverted to a real estate company called Whitewater, in which Bill and Hillary Clinton and S&L owner Jim McDougall shared financial interests.

Under intense political pressure from Republicans and some in his own party, Clinton asked for the appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate Whitewater. A three-judge appeals court of independent attorneys chose Starr.

On the Whitewater front, Starr’s prosecutors investigated Ms. Clinton for Jim McDougal’s S&L. Both he and the president were questioned by Starr’s prosecutors, and their videotapes were shown to jurors in the criminal trials of McDougall and his ex-wife Susan. Clinton was never charged in connection with Whitewater.

The Clinton investigation with Lewinsky was a spectacle in Washington.

In 1995, Lewinsky began working as an intern at the White House. During the government shutdown later that year, he and Clinton had sex in a hallway near the Oval Office, the first of 10 sexual encounters over the next year and a half. Lewinsky confided the matter to a co-worker, Linda Tripp, who recorded some of their conversations and took the tapes to Starr’s prosecutors. Lewinsky was granted immunity from prosecution and became Starr’s main witness against the president, who denied having a sexual relationship with Lewinsky.

Outside of investigations, Starr began an academic career, first as dean of Pepperdine University School of Law, where he taught constitutional affairs and civil procedure, and later as president of Baylor University in his native Texas. He also became an author, writing “First Among Equals: The Supreme Court in American Life”.

Born in Vernon and raised in San Antonio, Starr earned a bachelor’s degree from George Washington University in 1968, a master’s degree from Brown University in 1969, and a Doctor of Laws from Duke University School of Law in 1973. He was Chief Justice Warren E. Hamburger from 1975 to 1977.

As a young attorney at the Los Angeles law firm of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, Starr worked with William French Smith, who became attorney general under President Ronald Reagan. Starr became Smith’s attorney, and from there, Reagan appointed him to the federal appeals court.