The Portland Lawyer Who Grilled Monica Lewinsky in the Starr Investigation Will Sail into Federal Judgeship

With presidential investigations in the news, Slate today reviewed the fascinating story of Karin Immergut. She was a Multnomah County Deputy District Attorney in 1998, when independent counsel Kenneth Starr recruited her to help with his investigation of then-President Bill Clinton.

As Slate recounts, Immergut interviewed Monica Lewinsky, the intern with whom Clinton had a relationship, the scope and definition of which was a matter of enormous controversy.

Slate's Mark Joseph Stern writes:

As Stern notes, writers including the author Jeffery Toobin and New Yorker reporter Rebecca Mead have judged the Lewinsky interview harshly: Mead called it an "assault" on Lewinsky. (It's-a-small-world factoid: Lewinsky graduated from Lewis & Clark College in 1995 and, after the scandal, briefly returned to live in the Pearl District.)

Although Immergut took heat for her role in the Starr investigation, her legal career did not suffer. She served as U.S. Attorney for Oregon, the state's top federal law enforcement position, from 2003 to 2009. When George W. Bush, the president who appointed her to that position, finished his second term, Immergut stepped down, as is customary, so the new president, Barack Obama, could appoint his own nominee.

Despite Immergut's work for Starr, she has earned the support of leading Oregon Democrats.

After she stepped down from the U.S. Attorney's office in 2009, then-Gov. Ted Kulongoski, a Democrat, appointed Immergut to a judgeship on the Multnomah County Circuit Court. She has served there since and now is on the brink of ascending to the federal bench, a lifetime appointment.

As Slate notes, to navigate the slow-moving Senate confirmation process all federal judges go through, Immergut won the support of both of Oregon's U.S. senators, Ron Wyden and Jeff Merkley, both Democrats.

In the highly partisan atmosphere in Washington, D.C., that support was no sure thing.

Both Oregon senators bitterly opposed another Trump administration federal judicial nominee, assistant U.S. Attorney Ryan Bounds, whose nomination to a position on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals (an even more desirable position) failed last year.

With her home state senators behind her and Republicans in control of the Senate, Immergut's confirmation, Slate notes, is highly likely.