Ken Starr Defends Elena Kagan as 'Very Qualified'

As Senate Republicans intensified their criticism Wednesday of Elena Kagan's qualifications to join the U.S. Supreme Court, the nominee got a vote of confidence from an unlikely source -- former independent counsel Ken Starr.

Starr led the investigation into then-President Bill Clinton's Whitewater real estate deals and the Monica Lewinsky scandal. He previously served as solicitor general under President George H.W. Bush, the same post that Kagan currently holds in the Obama administration.

In an interview Wednesday on MSNBC, Starr called Kagan "so smart and so able" and defended her lack of judicial experience by noting that a majority of the members of Supreme Court never served as a judge before joining the court.

Starr, who is the outgoing dean of Pepperdine University's law school, called Kagan "an outstanding teacher, a wonderful academic, a very successful dean at the Harvard Law School . . . so she's going to bring a lot of skills to bear."

He also praised her as intellectually honest and added, "She's so bright, everyone knows that. She's the smartest-kid-on-the-block kind of person."

As for the criticism that Kagan has received from Senate Republicans in the days after her nomination, Starr laughed off accusations that she is an activist or a radical. "That's politics, and unfortunately confirmation politics have been very ugly, with a few happy interludes, every since the nomination of Judge Robert Bork."

Starr did encourage senators to vigorously probe what he called "legitimate" issues, like Kagan's defense of Harvard's policy banning military recruiters from its career services process because of the ban on gays in the armed forces.

But overall, Starr said, "President Obama has chosen someone who is very qualified."