After the Tall Timber (60 page)

Apparently not.

Forty confusing lines later, the juror tries again.

The jurors keep trying to find out why Ms. Tripp was constantly eliciting and making tapes of Ms. Lewinsky’s confidences. None of Ms. Tripp’s explanations of why she taped make any sense. To “arm myself with a record” so that she could testify about Monica Lewinsky, truthfully, under oath in the Jones case, without fear of being defamed, she says, by the President’s lawyers or destroyed by others in the White House. She was “scared,” she says many times, but her “integrity” required her to tell the truth. There was, however, no reason whatever, during the months when Ms. Tripp was taping, to imagine that she could possibly be subpoenaed in the Paula Jones case. All her testimony would have been inadmissable, as hearsay and on other grounds. It took a great deal of work, on Ms. Tripp’s part and the Special Counsel’s, to enable her to intrude herself in the case at all.

In March 1997, Michael Isikoff, a reporter from
Newsweek
, came to Ms. Tripp’s desk in the Pentagon. He told her that Kathleen Willey claimed that the President had once subjected her to sexual harassment. Mr. Isikoff said Ms. Willey had given him Ms. Tripp’s name as a confirming witness. Ms. Tripp told Mr. Isikoff she recalled the incident in question, but that Ms. Willey had actually solicited, welcomed, and subsequently boasted about the President’s embrace. In August 1997,
Newsweek
published Mr. Isikoff’s story—citing Ms. Tripp as a source. A lot has since been said—by Ms. Tripp and in the press—about the matter. What has gradually become clear is this: Ms. Tripp tried to persuade Mr. Isikoff to write not about Ms. Willey but about a former White House intern, “M,” who was now working at the Pentagon. Ms. Tripp’s testimony varies about when, and by what means, she conveyed Ms. Lewinsky’s full name to Mr. Isikoff. She admits he knew it by October, the month when she began to tape.

And another chronology begins to emerge about Ms. Tripp. She describes herself to the grand jury as having once been a fairly “apolitical” member of the White House staff in the Bush administration, in the department of media affairs. (It was there, she says, that she first came to know Mr. Isikoff.) She stayed on until August 1994 in the Clinton White House. She believes that Hillary Clinton became “cold” to her—perhaps as a result, Ms. Tripp says, of a mistaken idea that Ms. Tripp had a romantic interest in the President—or that the President had a romantic interest in Ms. Tripp. Ms. Tripp was transferred to the office of White House Counsel Bernard W. Nussbaum, where she was, she says, as she had always been, “loyal” and “apolitical.” She worked on what she called “sensitive matters,” like “the appointment of the special prosecutor.” Odd.

As early as 1993, however, Ms. Tripp had been so appalled, she says, by the Clinton White House that a friend, Tony Snow (a right-wing journalist and occasional stand-in for Rush Limbaugh), urged her to write a book. Mr. Snow offered to put her in touch with a literary agent, Lucianne Goldberg. Ms. Tripp declined. In the summer of 1996—perhaps coincidentally after Ms. Lewinsky’s first months at the Pentagon—Ms. Tripp changed her mind. She took Mr. Snow up on his offer and met with Ms. Goldberg, who suggested a ghostwriter. Ms. Tripp ultimately abandoned the project. One character whom Ms. Tripp had intended to describe in her book, however, was none other than Kathleen Willey.

Ms. Tripp, it turns out, had known Kathleen Willey since 1993. As Ms. Tripp describes her, Ms. Willey was, at the time, an unpaid White House volunteer, infatuated with the President and determined to have an affair with him. According to Ms. Tripp, Ms. Willey dressed provocatively, would “position” herself in the President’s path, sent him notes, and contrived to bump into him. Ms. Tripp soon began to advise her on strategy and to help her edit cards and letters to the President. Ms. Tripp listened to Ms. Willey’s confidences and received her frequent phone calls at home. In short, not an altogether unfamiliar story. As Ms. Tripp tells it, however, she harbors at least one trace of bitterness if not of envy. “I was annoyed,” she says, because when Ms. Tripp left the White House, Ms. Willey was hired “essentially in my stead.”

There is at least one other, rather hidden, element of Ms. Tripp’s story. When she began to tape, Ms. Tripp tells the grand jurors in answer to a question, “I had never even thought about the Independent Counsel in my wildest dreams.” This is a statement that the prosecutors—if not Ms. Tripp herself—had every obligation to amplify. Because Ms. Tripp had not only thought or dreamed of the Office of the Independent Counsel, she had appeared before it at least twice before—first under Robert Fiske, and then under Kenneth W. Starr.

According to an FBI report—whose very existence is not acknowledged anywhere in the Starr documents—Ms. Tripp appeared on April 12, 1994, at the Office of the Independent Counsel. Among her concerns was the death of Deputy White House Counsel Vincent Foster. She had suspicions about that death. One source of her suspicion, the FBI report says, was Mr. Foster’s conduct when Ms. Tripp brought him what turned out to be his last lunch, a hamburger:

Whatever her beliefs—or thoughts or dreams—the fact that neither Ms. Tripp in her testimony nor the prosecutors before the grand jury nor the Independent Counsel anywhere in his Report mentions these contacts at least three years previously between Ms. Tripp and the Office of the Independent Counsel suggests that the real reason Ms. Tripp was taping, from the first, was this: The Office of the Independent Counsel asked her to.

During the year or so—November 1996 to October 1997—when Ms. Lewinsky was still haranguing, plotting, and threatening, in her campaign to return to a White House job, Ms. Tripp had encouraged her to believe that this was a simple matter, and that failure to get such a job would appear to confirm her undeserved reputation as a stalker. Ms. Tripp professed to be outraged on Ms. Lewinsky’s behalf that a job had not been found. Ms. Lewinsky became increasingly immoderate in her demands and her behavior. She had been “yelling,” at the President, and at Ms. Currie. When she could not reach him on September 12, 1997, she had stood for an hour and a half at an entrance to the White House, “screaming.”

On October 6, 1997, Ms. Tripp changed her advice to Ms. Lewinsky. She said that, according to “Kate,” a friend of Ms. Tripp’s at the National Security Council, Ms. Lewinsky would never work at the White House again, that she was, in fact, known and disliked there as a stalker, and that the best thing for her to do would be to get out of town. This had the not unpredictable effect of setting Ms. Lewinsky off on another frenzy of phone calls to the White House—this time, however, to arrange for a job in another city. Ms. Tripp suggested to Ms. Lewinsky that she ask for a job in New York. According to an FBI report, Ms. Tripp also advised Ms. Lewinsky “to find some way to ask for help from Vernon Jordan.”

By this time, it seemed the White House was eager to get Ms. Lewinsky a job in New York, encouraging her not to be silent in any legal matter but merely to go away. In early November, Ms. Lewinsky was offered a job at the UN working for Ambassador Bill Richardson. Ms. Tripp found in this offer a new source of outrage. The offer came “too fast,” “so they won’t have to—so they will consider it settled.” It had Ms. Lewinsky “railroaded,” “backed into a corner” as to whether she wanted to take it or not. Ms. Lewinsky turned the job down. At this point, no matter what the President or Ms. Currie said or did, it became—for Ms. Tripp and then for Ms. Lewinsky—a fresh source of grievance and invective. Ms. Tripp encouraged Ms. Lewinsky to believe the White House did not appreciate how little trouble Ms. Lewinsky had been.

In December 1997, Ms. Tripp says, she became aware that in her home state of Maryland, surreptitiously taping phone conversations was illegal and that, far from being protected by this “insurance policy,” this evidence of her truthfulness and integrity, she might actually go to jail. She contacted Ms. Goldberg, who began calling lawyers she knew, at the Chicago branch of Kirkland & Ellis, where Mr. Starr still worked at the time, sensing apparently no conflict of interest between his private practice and his work as Special Prosecutor. Ms. Goldberg also called lawyers at other firms, in Chicago, New York, Washington, and Los Angeles, about making contact on Ms. Tripp’s behalf with the Office of the Independent Counsel to obtain immunity for the illegal taping.

It is not clear why Ms. Tripp needed an intermediary to make contact with Mr. Starr’s office, since—as we know, but the grand jury and readers of Mr. Starr’s Report do not—Ms. Tripp had been in touch with the Independent Counsel for at least three years.

Ms. Tripp and the Independent Counsel’s office claim that she came to them for the first time on Monday, January 12, 1998, the day before their agents and the FBI equipped her with a body wire for a last conversation with Ms. Lewinsky. To make such use of Ms. Tripp, the Independent Counsel needed authorization, on an “emergency basis,” from Attorney General Janet Reno or the three-judge special division of the U.S. Court of Appeals. They needed a legal basis for drawing Monica Lewinsky into their investigation. This presented some difficulty: The Independent Counsel was explicitly barred from joining his investigation with the work of the attorneys for Paula Jones. If Ms. Tripp could elicit from Ms. Lewinsky some evidence of a conspiracy to break the law—some evidence, for example, that the President had authorized Vernon Jordan to find a job for Ms. Lewinsky as a bribe for her to commit perjury—Mr. Starr would have some sort of argument for the expansion of his jurisdiction. He could make Ms. Lewinsky herself an agent for the Independent Counsel’s office. But the deadlines were tight. The President was due to testify in the Jones case on January 17, 1998. So Starr wired Ms. Tripp, two days earlier, before he had any authorization from the attorney general or the appellate court to do so. He had to hope that the evidence Ms. Tripp would elicit, and tape with her body wire, would override this procedural concern.

Here was the situation in the Independent Counsel’s office by the time they came to Ms. Lewinsky. Mr. Starr had recruited lawyers with experience prosecuting organized crime. Since at least the days of Robert Kennedy, the custom in organized-crime cases has been to get the suspects, violate their rights, and if you cannot convict them of one crime then somehow indict them for another. From the day in 1994 when Judge Starr offered to write an amicus brief in the Paula Jones case—moreover, through the years when, as Special Counsel, he maintained his lucrative private practice at Kirkland & Ellis—it was clear that he was by no means remarkable for scruple and in no sense averse to conflicts of interest of the most glaring kind. Nothing could be more obvious than his emotional, ideological, even social and professional links to the old case of Paula Jones. He became Special Counsel in 1994. By the 1996 election, he must have been frustrated and humiliated. None of his expensive lines of inquiry had worked out—not the suicide of Vincent Foster, not Travelgate or Filegate, certainly not Whitewater. Susan McDougal, after more than a year in jail for contempt, was still of no use to him. Webster Hubbell, whom he had sent to jail but given a limited grant of immunity in exchange for his testimony, had not really helped him, either. Vernon Jordan, who found money and jobs for Hubbell, was thriving alongside the newly reelected President. The prosecutor had spent millions so far, and he had failed. He would obviously like to find the constellation—a crime committed on the President’s behalf by a subordinate, preferably a bribe by Vernon Jordan—somewhere, before the expiration of the President’s term. The love life of Monica Lewinsky seems an odd place to look for that configuration. Yet, with a little prosecutorial zeal and creativity, it might be found. Mr. Starr’s documents have vestiges of an attempt to show that it is there.

Another case of the jurors pursuing a line of inquiry in spite of the best efforts of the prosecutors occurs near the end of the testimony of Monica Lewinsky. The jurors want to know about her first encounter with the prosecutors from the Office of the Independent Counsel, on January 16, 1998, when Linda Tripp lured her into the midst of the prosecutors and FBI agents, who would detain her for most of the day and night.