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Mark Barrett Leads
Independent Counsel,
Ken Starr's Team
Against Susan McDougal

Barrett fields questions from reporters on the steps of the Federal courthouse in Little Rock, Arkansas, during the trial.

"How many of you have had an acquittal?" asks Mark Barrett to a room full of career prosecutors before whom he had been asked to speak. Most of the prosecutors raise their hands. "How many of you, after that acquittal, have had the President of the United States publicly congratulate your defendant?" No one stirs. Barrett then raises his hand. "That'll give you some idea of the political dynamic at work in my case," he says.

What would be unthinkable in the mind of a veteran prosecutor was what happened to Barrett, whom Special Prosecutor Ken Starr had asked to represent the Office of Independent Counsel (OIC) in proceedings against Whitewater figure Susan McDougal. "Prosecutors always wear the white hats going into a courtroom," says Barrett. "Here, the tables got turned on us."

Barrett has a sanguine view of the matter, even though the Little Rock, Arkansas jury returned an acquittal of one charge of obstruction of justice and dead-locked on two other charges. "We knew going into this case it would be an uphill battle," he said. "But we really didn't know what kind of blood-bath this would be until we got our jury questionnaires back."

In conducting voir dire of the 400 members in the McDougal jury pool, Barrett's team found a disturbing consensus: Most of the jurors had good feelings about the defendant and bad feelings about Ken Starr. As one of the pro-prosecution jurors confirmed to Starr's team after the trial, a solid block of jurors were looking for anything to acquit McDougal on. And it was Ken Starr's negative image, as crafted by the White House spin team and Clinton supporters, that gave McDougal's attorney the hook.

"This was extremely hard for me to take," said Barrett. "Ken Starr is a man of extreme great faith, and I don't say that lightly. He is unfailingly courteous and deferential to others. Here we are in defense of a very serious law, and McDougal's lawyer is comparing us to the Nazis! I couldn't believe that people would say these things, much less that they would believe them. But the jurors took the bait. They were looking for anything to acquit her on."

As a prosecutor of the U.S. Department of Justice, Mark had had many assignments including ones in Washington, D.C., Texas and Miami, and had already built a solid reputation prosecuting complex white-collar cases. He became expert in drug prosecutions and high tech crime detection and handled one of the biggest investment fraud cases in Colorado history. In 1997, while serving as an Assistant U.S. Attorney in Denver, a friend recommended him to Starr's team. He was assigned to the OIC's office in Little Rock where he was instrumental in getting a felony criminal plea from former Arkansas Governor, Jim Guy Tucker and his co-defendant.

Barrett was then assigned to the Susan McDougal matter. McDougal had spent 18 months in jail for refusing to testify to a Federal grand jury about her dealings with her former business partners, Bill and Hillary Clinton. Barrett had been her examiner on her second and final grand jury appearance in April, 1998, and was lead counsel to try her on the obstruction of justice charges last March.

Most attorneys on Starr's team served one year. Barrett stayed on for 25 months. "I couldn't just leave in the middle of the case; I really owed it to Ken to stay on. The case kept getting continued and I had to ride with it," he said.

While Barrett was working up to 16-17 hours a day in Little Rock -- and at times in Washington, D.C. -- his wife Nan (Class of '78) was forced to raise their four daughters home in Colorado alone and wait until weekends to see him.

The Mark Barrett family with Special Prosecutor Kenneth Starr

Would he have done it all over again? "Probably not, because of the impact on the family," he said, now back in the U.S. Attorney's Office in Denver. "I don't regret the trial result for a minute. I was terrifically honored that Ken had entrusted it to me. They say you learn more from your losses than your victories," said Barrett who until then had been undefeated in two dozen federal criminal jury trials.

"I'm still trying to unpack the whole experience. The people I worked with were of exceptional high quality, both in legal acumen and character. These were people who genuinely saw this as a very serious matter affecting the public interest and were working under extremely difficult conditions. It was a real honor to be working with them. For me, dealing with the historic issues involved and seeing what was at stake was remarkable. I'm glad I had a ring-side seat to it all."