Longtime CNN Pentagon correspondent Barbara Starr is leaving the network, reports CNN media reporter Oliver Darcy.
—@barbarastarrcnn has announced to colleagues that she will be leaving CNN in the coming days after her contract expires: “I have made the decision to move on.”
— Oliver Darcy (@oliverdarcy) December 9, 2022
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Starr joined CNN from ABC News in 2001 where she had worked for the previous three years as a Pentagon producer contributing across ABC News’ slate of programming.
Over her roughly 20 years at CNN, Starr made repeated trips to Iraq, Afghanistan and the Horn of Africa, where she has been embedded with U.S. military. She traveled to Beirut in 2006 with U.S. Marines tasked with evacuating Americans during Israel’s war with Hezbollah. Starr has also reported directly from the Persian Gulf, Russia, Central America and the Chinese-North Korean border.
Throughout her career, Starr has profiled wounded troops, the plight of homeless vets and reported on the fallen regularly from Section 60 at Arlington National Cemetery, the final resting place for Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans.
“24 hours a day, somewhere in the world there is a young soldier, sailor, airman or Marine standing watch or going on patrol in a very difficult part of the world,” Starr told TVNewser in 2016. “We all might be at work, out to dinner, or the shopping mall, but they are out there on duty all the time.”
Starr’s journalism has come under scrutiny. She was informed by the Justice Department last year that federal prosecutors in the Trump administration secretly sought and obtained her phone and email records covering two months, between June 1, 2017 to July 31, 2017.
According to a report from Starr’s CNN colleagues Jeremy Herb and Jessica Schneider, the legal process to obtain Starr’s records was given a thumbs-up in 2020, toward the end of the Trump presidency.
Herb and Schneider said that it was unclear when the investigation into Starr was opened, whether it happened under Attorney General Jeff Sessions or Attorney General Bill Barr, and what the Trump administration was looking for in Starr’s records. The Justice Department confirmed the records were sought through the courts last year but provided no further explanation or context and no further action was taken as far as we know.