Harold Koh Gets a Boost From Ken Starr

Here’s an unlikely endorsement:  former Independent Counsel Ken Starr — who spent much of the 1990s investigating President Bill Clinton — is backing Harold Koh, Obama’s nominee for legal adviser to the State Department.

Greg Sargent at The Plum Line has the letter Starr sent to Sens. John Kerry (D-Mass.) and Richard Lugar (R-Ind.), in which Starr calls Koh “the very essence of the American dream” and a man of “irreproachable integrity.”

So will Starr  be successful in calling off the attack dogs?  Koh, who’s been highly critical of the Bush administration’s legal policies that allowed interrogators to torture detainees, has been under heavy attack by the right, essentially because he believes in the value of international law.

Starr apparently doesn’t think that should disqualify him. On the contrary, he writes approvingly that Koh embraces “a vision of the goodness of America, and the ideals of a nation, ruled, abidingly, by law.”