‘Are you f*****g kidding me?’: Monica Lewinsky responds to Trump putting Ken Starr on impeachment team

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Monica Lewinsky has weighed in on Donald Trump’s newly announced legal team, which notably includes former independent counsel Ken Starr.

This “is definitely an ‘are you f*****g kidding me?’ kinda day,” Ms Lewinsky wrote on Twitter.

Ms Lewinksy, a former White House intern who is now an anti-bullying activist, became a household name in the US when details of her affair with then-president Bill Clinton were made public and became a central feature of his impeachment trial.

Although extramarital affairs are not considered to be impeachable offences, Mr Starr and Republicans in Congress targeted Mr Clinton for perjury after he lied about his relationship with Ms Lewinsky under oath.

In the investigation that followed, Ms Lewinsky and Mr Clinton were the subject of intense tabloid and press scrutiny. In recent years, Ms Lewinsky has re-emerged in the public arena, and has weighed in on her past as well as the American culture of public shaming that she said she personally endured.

Ms Lewinsky also spoke about her feelings towards Mr Starr in a 2018 essay for Vanity Fair, in which she detailed a chance encounter with Starr at a restaurant, years after Clinton’s impeachment trial had taken place.

“Ken Starr asked me several times if I was ‘doing O.K.’. A stranger might have surmised from his tone that he had actually worried about me over the years. His demeanour, almost pastoral, was somewhere between avuncular and creepy. He kept touching my arm and elbow, which made me uncomfortable,” she wrote.

Mr Trump’s Senate impeachment trial is due to begin in earnest on Tuesday, when Mr Starr and the rest of the president’s legal team — which includes lawyer Alan Dershowitz, who counts OJ Simpson, Jeffrey Epstein and Harvey Weinstein among the clients he has defended, and former Florida attorney general Pam Bondi — will address the president’s behaviour.

Regardless of legal representation, it is widely accepted that Mr Trump is likely to be acquitted by the Senate, due to the high vote threshold needed for a president’s removal from office and the fact that Republicans control the majority of the legislative body’s votes.

Mr Trump has claimed that he did nothing wrong in his attempts to compel Ukraine to initiate an investigation against Joe Biden.