Excellent work...Julie's financial need should be electronically shouted to the far corners of the Internet.

Do you know if all of those folks that were willing to sign the petitions to have have Starr impeached, and those that wished to censure and move on, would be willing to donate $10 or more dollars to Julie's fund?

I will send $100 dollars by mail tomorrow...who will match me?

Jim Ward

Tuesday, February 4, 1999 -- As the Republican-controlled Senate continues its pose as a "bipartisan" body, Julie Hiatt Steele and her young son Adam sit in their Richmond, Virginia home paralyzed with fear.

They are the latest perverse targets of Kenneth W. Starr, a man irrefutably with no compassion, no decency and a frightening demeanor similar to a sociopathic serial killer. Starr, every morning, continues his sickeningly sweet smiling confrontation with the media. His Hefty trash bag in hand, he grins like a child in a candy store and says "No comment."

But Julie Steele waits in terror. She waits to see how long her money will hold out against the unbridled treasury of Inquisitor Starr. She waits to see how long her mind will hold against the sleepless nights, the nightmares and the nausea filled meetings planning her defense against Starr. It's not an American picture -- it shouldn't be. It's a picture that became all too common -- in Germany -- in Hitler's Germany.

Julie Steele made one mistake. She lied for her "friend" Kathleen Willey -- a woman who was herself already over the edge with greed. Willey asked Steele to back up her "story" that President Clinton had molested her in the Oval Office six years ago. In the early Spring of 1997 Steele did lie for Willey and told salivating Newsweek muckraker Michael Isikoff that Willey had indeed come to her home right after the solaced molestation. She did it for Willey, who she knew was falling apart at the seams. It was a stupid thing to do, admits Steele, but she corrected the record in August of the same year and told Newsweek she had lied to Isikoff. That was five months before the Lewinsky story broke.

She then steadfastly maintained that Willey was lying about her visit to Steele directly after the White House incident.

Without Steele, Starr had reached yet another dead end. He was furious, and so embarked on a campaign to destroy Steele in an effort to change her story to fit his.

Like Paula Jones, Willey, in my opinion, had it in her mind to cash in on her meeting with the President alone. It didn't work for a variety of reasons: first, the Republican right wing already had the queen in their Neo-Nazi assault on the White House -- Paula Corbin Jones -- and didn't need Steele; second, Willey had a background full of emotional potholes and negative credibility -- in short, even Richard Mellon Scaife wouldn't touch her.

Steele next had a visit from the FBI, who questioned her unmercifully in an attempt to elicit confirmation of the Willey delusion. In June of last year, she was subpoenaed by Starr's Grand Jury. She was told that if she spoke to her lawyer, she "might be obstructing justice."

Steele did call her lawyer the second time she was subpoenaed and Attorney Nancy Luque advised her to inform Starr that she would plead the fifth amendment against self incrimination. Unlike normal grand jury proceedings, where prosecutors never call witnesses who will plead the fifth, Steele was forced to sit before the Grand Jury and invoke it.

At that point, Starr, who has an abnormal hatred for Bill Clinton, told his grand jury -- a group filled with Starr's lies and brainwashed by typical prosecutorial propaganda -- that he had some new theories on how to get the President. He did this directly by continuing to impanel them, and indirectly by telling the House Judiciary Committee that he was still considering other, any, and all grounds for impeachment -- as it became clear that neither the Senate nor the American people would put up with much more from Big Tobacco lawyer Starr.

Starr then sent his storm troopers into Steele's neighborhood asking questions about her adoption of Adam, her 8-year-old Romanian-born son. Their line -- that the adoption may have been illegal. Starr was putting the clamps on Steele's skull and beginning to tighten the screws.

Steele knows what Starr did to Susan McDougal -- keeping her in prison for nearly two years under the worst conditions. She remembers what Starr did to Monica Lewinsky's mother. She knows full well what Starr did to Sarah Hawkins of Arkansas, menacing and threatening her openly in a skillful attempt to ruin her reputation.

Starr is simply indecent, a man obviously gripped by some genetic transmogrification that turns a man of first-rate intellect into a vicious menace to society.

And Steele has no money. She is alone. Starr and his army seem to have a thing for lonely penniless women: they like to abuse them.

As Anthony Lewis characterized him in a New York Times Op-Ed piece, Starr, like Hamlet's uncle, seems "remorseless, treacherous, lecherous, kindless."

Let me add this line from the same play: "Something is rotten in Denmark."

If we don't do something about it now -- and we mean now -- we will see our children growing up in a totalitarian America.

-- The Editors

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to help Julie Hiatt Steele.