[3] In 2001, Starr joined CNN as the lead Pentagon correspondent, covering national security issues including the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria.

"[4][5] In June 2013, MSNBC reporter Chris Hayes ran a segment, in which he argued that Starr's publication of leaked information was at least as potentially harmful to national security as those published by Glenn Greenwald of The Guardian.

In July 2015, Starr received criticism from Kenyans through a Twitter hashtag that trended for several hours on the Internet when she called Kenya a "terror hotbed" as President Obama headed to the East African nation.

[6] In May 2021, it was revealed that the Trump administration had secretly fought a legal battle with CNN for over a year in an effort to obtain Starr's phone and email records from 2017 as part of a leak probe.

The Justice Department, under the leadership of Attorney General William Barr, petitioned a magistrate court in Virginia to send a secret order to CNN compelling it to produce records of Starr's emails kept on company servers.