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A 52-year-old native Texan, Starr is a former minister's son. He spent two years at Harding College, a Church of Christ school in Searcy, Ark., before transferring to George Washington University. He received a law degree from Duke University, served as a law clerk for Warren Burger when Burger was chief justice of the Supreme Court and joined the Washington office of the law firm Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher. Starr was an acolyte of Ronald Reagan's first attorney general, William French Smith, for whom he went to work at the Justice Department in 1981. Reagan then appointed Starr as a federal appellate judge, after which Starr served as solicitor general in the Bush administration. On a special assignment for Congress in 1993, Starr read and evaluated the diaries of then-Sen. Bob Packwood (R-Ore.), who resigned after allegations of sexual misconduct.

Bittman came under criticism in the spring when he went to court to try to enforce a subpoena of Lewinsky's book purchase records, arguing that prosecutors had examined the reading habits of Oklahoma City bomber Timothy J. McVeigh and Unabomber Theodore J. Kaczynski. The fifth child of prominent former federal prosecutor William O. Bittman, who as a young prosecutor in the 1960s convicted Teamsters head Jimmy Hoffa and Lyndon B. Johnson's close friend Bobby Baker, Bittman spent six years as an assistant state's attorney in Anne Arundel County. One of his most high-profile cases came in 1993, when he prosecuted an Anne Arundel schoolteacher who allegedly had oral sex with a 14-year-old boy. The teacher was acquitted on counts of child abuse, unnatural and perverted offenses and fourth-degree sexual offense, and jurors criticized the prosecutor's case.

Bittman attended the University of Maryland and law school at Catholic University.

Wisenberg attended the University of Texas law school.

In a 1992 failed prosecution of a San Antonio businessmen, Bennett was criticized by U.S. District Judge Lucius Bunton, who called the case "a waste of time." Bunton wrote an article this year in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram calling Bennett an "overzealous prosecutor."

A former football player from a blue-collar background, Bennett attended Hanover College and the Indiana University School of Law at night. He also had a three-year stint as an assistant U.S. attorney in Indianapolis before moving to Washington as Justice's senior trial attorney in the public integrity division.

– By Jeff Glasser

© Copyright 1998 The Washington Post Company

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