Politics & Power Quote by Kenneth Starr

A lawyer’s version of drawing a bright circle on the floor and daring everyone to step outside it. Starr’s line is procedural on the surface, but it’s really a power move: he frames the room’s purpose as already decided, then treats any deviation as unserious or evasive. The phrase “I thought we were to discuss” isn’t confusion; it’s a reprimand disguised as etiquette, a way to reassert control without sounding overtly combative.

The heavy lift happens in the compound phrase “substantial and credible information of potential impeachable offenses.” Starr stacks legal-adjacent qualifiers like sandbags. “Substantial” and “credible” signal evidentiary weight without revealing the evidence. “Potential” gives him strategic wiggle room: he can imply gravity while avoiding a claim that could be challenged on the merits. And “impeachable offenses” is the rhetorical jackpot. It’s constitutional language smuggled into a meeting as if it were merely a neutral category, even though it instantly escalates the stakes from misconduct to regime-level legitimacy.

Context matters: Starr is inseparable from the late-1990s impeachment ecosystem, when investigations became not just fact-finding missions but narrative engines. This sentence reflects that era’s prosecutorial theater, where the framing often mattered as much as the facts. It’s a reminder that impeachment debates are fights over vocabulary before they’re fights over verdicts; once you’ve successfully installed “substantial,” “credible,” and “impeachable” into the shared script, you’ve already moved the audience closer to the conclusion.